To get where Kathy Holmgren is going, it takes three days of navigating narrow roads and wading through streams. And that’s after flying 22 hours from Seattle to Africa.
The wife of the Seattle Seahawks head coach finally will arrive sometime next weekend in an underdeveloped region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo where the term Super Bowl is more likely to be used describing something that holds rice for a hungry child.
In that remote setting, Kathy Holmgren will hope for a clear phone line to Ford Field in Detroit.
That way she can receive updates from next Sunday’s Super Bowl XL and either congratulate or console her husband as soon as his game against the Steelers ends. She will be at the big game in spirit only.
“The Covenant Church, which has its headquarters in Chicago, has given us a `world phone’ which we can turn on around game time, so we might get a call [and] we will have radios and can turn on Voice of America to hear the results,” Kathy Holmgren said.
Sunday at 5:25 p.m.–just after midnight in the Congo–as Mike Holmgren realizes his dream of taking a second NFL team to the Super Bowl, his wife will be fulfilling hers a world away in Africa.
In 1970, Kathy Holmgren was a young nurse and recent graduate of North Park College (now University) in Chicago who shelved her goal of becoming a medical missionary to get married and start a family. Kathy loved the year of missionary work she spent in the former Belgian Congo healing the sick but loved even more the young man she’d met at a church camp in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California when both were 13.
“A summer romance,” Kathy Holmgren called it in an e-mail.
The Holmgrens married in 1971. They raised four daughters who followed their mother’s route through North Park and hopped around the country as Mike’s Hall of Fame-caliber career traveled from Salt Lake City to San Francisco to Green Bay and then Seattle.
It even touched Chicago, and not just on the Sundays Holmgren’s Packers were dominating the Bears during a period in the 1990s. At North Park University, which awarded Holmgren an honorary degree in 1997, the $4 million Holmgren Athletic Complex he largely funded sits just off the bank of the North Channel of the Chicago River along Foster Avenue.
“It’s a part of him,” North Park athletic director Jack Surridge said. “And a part of who they are as a family.”
But of all the places that have helped define the lives of this coaching family, there was always one more stop Mike Holmgren vowed his wife would make.
So last October for Kathy’s 58th birthday, he presented her with a 17-day trip to the Congo as part of a medical mission with Northwest Medical Teams so she could return to the place and the cause she left behind for him years ago.
Kathy will accompany daughter Calla, an obstetrician, and six other physicians and former missionaries in training a hospital staff in Karawa that treats 2,500 patients a month. They are scheduled to leave Thursday.
In the midst of the Seahawks’ storybook season, as the Holmgrens realized the mission coincided with the date of the Super Bowl, Kathy offered to change plans. Mike made a call much easier than any decision on fourth-and-1.
“Mike said, `Go, our work is important,”‘ Kathy Holmgren said. “And Mike needs to concentrate on the game, so he won’t miss us all that much.”
He may miss waving to his wife before the game and seeing her afterward but not during it. Kathy Holmgren usually leaves the stadium before kickoff, anyway, going for a walk with one of her daughters rather than endure three hours of nerve-wracking football. A breast cancer survivor, Kathy sometimes listens to church sermons on tape on those walks. During Seahawks home games she has been known to take ferry rides to escape the intensity.
But Africa?
“I said to Kathy, I know you don’t like to go to these games, but you could have gone to the movies, you didn’t have to go to the Congo to get away,” kidded Sue Gost, a close friend and director of public events at North Park. “The timing of it just worked out that way, and they’re committed to living that kind of life.”
North Side favorites
Gost has heard from a few people asking why in the name of George Halas an electronic sign flashes well wishes for any NFC team other than the Bears in the middle of the Albany Park neighborhood.
Congratulations
North Park Friend and Head Coach
Mike Holmgren
And his team
The Seattle Seahawks
The answer is easy for Gost.
“He supports us, we support him,” said Gost, who lives in one of two buildings Holmgren owns in the neighborhood. “I think the Bears-Seahawks in the NFC championship would have been a little tricky. People were asking me who I was going to root for and I was like, I have to go for my landlord on this one.”
In other words, if the NFL coach-of-the-year voting were conducted in Albany Park, Lovie Smith might have finished a distant second.
“People here root for the ‘Hawks–you have to,” Surridge said.
The ties that bind the Holmgrens to the area have been knotted for generations.
Kathy Holmgren grew up in San Jose, Calif., but her grandparents and parents, raised in Chicago, both attended North Park, the only Covenant Church college in the country. Naturally, Mike and Kathy Holmgren encouraged their four daughters, while growing up in Green Bay, to take a look at the nearby school in Chicago.
Today, they all are proud alumni who followed their parents in the family’s northwestward ho.
Jenny Holmgren Cobbley, the former director of communications at North Park, is a mom who lives in Woodinville, Wash. Her twin sister Calla, who is joining her mother on the African trip, is completing a fellowship in perinatology at the University of Utah.
Emily Holmgren Amadon, who formerly taught at East Prairie School in Skokie, married a minister, James, who graduated from North Park’s seminary, and settled in Salem, Ore. The youngest, Gretchen, is a third-year law student at the University of Washington.
Putting four girls through the same college made Mike Holmgren a familiar, welcome face around the North Side campus. He has spoken to Vikings student-athletes, sang duets in church with one of his daughters, raised money for the school at an annual golf tournament in conjunction with the Bears and developed relationships that have spanned time and distance.
When Surridge returned to his hometown of Bellevue, Wash., for his father’s funeral, he popped in unexpectedly on Holmgren one afternoon during the football season. Visiting an NFL head coach at that time of day is like asking a surgeon in the middle of an appendectomy if he wants to have coffee. But Holmgren stopped what he was doing, spent time with Surridge to offer condolences and arranged for a private tour of the inner sanctum of the Seahawks’ facility.
“That’s the type of guy he is,” Surridge said. “He always has time for his friends and his causes.”
A worthy cause
Most of the Holmgrens’ causes involve the Evangelical Covenant Church, a denomination that stresses the similarities over the differences in a religion Swedish immigrants founded in 1885 that now includes more than 750 congregations in North America. The church, with headquarters in Chicago, owns North Park University.
The Holmgrens, both of whom are of Swedish descent, discovered they shared common religious ground when they met at church camp as teens. Their faith connected them when Kathy ventured off to the Midwest for college while Mike stayed much closer to his San Francisco hometown to play football at USC. Kathy wrote letters to Mike at college that he later called the inspiration for placing God and family ahead of football on his priority list.
In an article he wrote for a church publication, Holmgren, 57, acknowledged passing up NFL head-coaching opportunities before the Green Bay Packers called in 1992 because “it seemed obvious to us that the needs of our daughters must take precedence over my career.”
With that career at Detroit this week for Super Bowl XL, Mike Holmgren is putting his family first again. He’s doing it by putting his wife on a plane to Africa to go to a godforsaken place to which she feels she has been called.
“We will miss being there [at the Super Bowl],” Kathy said, “but believe in the work that we are doing.”
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dhaugh@tribune.com
