Longtime Vikings equipment manager Dennis Ryan retires after 47 years with the team

Former Vikings tight end Stu Voigt gave Dennis Ryan his first nickname 40-some years ago. The moniker, naturally, was based on Ryan's tireless devotion to serving the Purple's every need when it came to the equipment side of football.

"When I started working with Stubby in 1975, we were over at old Midway Stadium in St. Paul," said Ryan, referring to the team's first equipment manager, Jimmy "Stubby" Eason. "When the Twins season ended, we'd move to Met Stadium and practice there. But we had no storage, so we kept everything at Midway, including one washer and one dryer.

"Stu nicknamed me 'Midway' because every time he asked, 'Where's Dennis?' someone said, 'He's at Midway.' "

The Vikings have had only two equipment managers in their 62-year history. Stubby did it from 1961 to 1980. When he died of cancer in 1981, Ryan, 21 at the time, was promoted and held the job until he retired last Friday, a little shy of his 64^th birthday.

"It's kind of a strange feeling, but it's time," he said Tuesday. "It's a young person's job. I feel young, but I know I'm not."

Ryan's first order of business is rewarding his wife, Laura, with a three-week vacation through Europe. It's but a small down payment for all those long hours, weekends and holidays when the dream job with the Vikings came first.

When he was 16, Ryan was a hard-working 98-pound sophomore wrestler at St. Paul Humboldt High School. It was 1975, and he was living about two miles from where he lives now when he got a job with the city of St. Paul working on the grounds crew at Midway Stadium.

Little did he know it was the job that would lead to a lifetime of taking care of every Vikings player from Jim Marshall to Danielle Hunter, and every coach from Bud Grant to Kevin O'Connell.

Eason needed help each year getting the Vikings' equipment to and from Mankato for training camp. He turned to the Midway crew, hired Ryan as a part-timer and took a liking to him. So did Grant, the stoic, steely-eyed town marshal-looking head coach.

Grant was known behind the scenes for pulling off a great prank now and again. He got the teenage Ryan pretty good when it came time to pack up and leave Mankato in 1975.

"I'm going to Bud Grant's dorm room to pick up his box of playbooks and dumping it all over the floor while he stood over me and I stared up at him," Ryan said.

Grant had purposely not taped the bottom of the box.

"I realized a few years later, when I got to know him better, that he set that up on purpose," Ryan laughed. "No doubt. 'Just watch this kid scramble. What will he do with all those playbooks?' "

Ryan did what Ryan would do for the next 47 years: He put his head down, went to work and, of course, took care of it.

Over the years, Ryan has studied and learned the idiosyncratic needs and wants of hundreds of players and coaches. And he's had to change with the times and technologies in ways Eason never could have imagined.

"Stubby used to have a sign up over his desk at Midway Stadium that said, 'If we don't have it, you don't need it,' " Ryan said. "Now, I think if I had a sign to put over the desk [at TCO Performance Center], it would say, 'If we don't have it, FedEx will have it here tomorrow.' It's a different expectation now, and they're gonna get what they want."

Asked if any player request sticks out to him, Ryan hesitated before telling a story about Warren Moon arriving from the Oilers in 1994.

"The equipment guy in Houston called me and said, 'Hey, he likes three slices of Juicy Fruit and three slices of Doublemint' or something like that in his locker."

Moon was impressed. So, naturally, that was a tiny detail Ryan repeated before every game during Moon's three-year stint.

Ryan also designed the first eye shield worn by a player, Mark Mullaney in 1984. And he won the Whitey Zimmerman Award as the NFL's Equipment Manager of the Year in 1996 and 2007.

"When you think about what makes a team great, it's people who put others ahead of themselves,"Vikings owner/president Mark Wilf said. "For nearly 50 years, Dennis Ryan did that for the Vikings."

Ryan was at 705 consecutive regular-season and playoff games from 1979 to 2021 when he missed a game because of COVID-19. He also missed only one preseason game when his mother, Rita, died.

"Being an equipment manager isn't easy," said Jerry Reichow, an original Vikings player and former longtime personnel man with the team. "When [Norm] Van Brocklin was the coach, he'd get mad and fire Stubby three or four times every road trip. The next morning, Van Brocklin would be yelling, 'Stubby, where's my coffee?'

"Stubby would say, 'But you fired me last night.' Van Brocklin would say, 'Ah, get over here.' Stubby was a special person. And he trained [Ryan] pretty well, too."

The team is interviewing for its third equipment manager ever. The new person certainly has some large cleats to fill.