Holmgren’s fire still burns bright

PITTSBURGH _ When Mike Holmgren got his first coaching job as an assistant at San Francisco’s Lincoln High School in 1971, Mike Tomlin didn’t even exist.

When Holmgren got his first job in the NFL as the San Francisco 49ers’ quarterbacks coach in 1986, Tomlin was in junior high school.

When Holmgren got his first head coaching job in Green Bay in 1992, Tomlin was a starting wide receiver at The College of William &Mary.

And when Holmgren arrived in Seattle in 1999, Tomlin was still two years away from joining an NFL staff as a defensive backs coach.

Now the two men are on the same level … sort of.

Both of them are head coaches in the NFL, although Pittsburgh’s Tomlin is a 35-year-old upstart and the 59-year-old Holmgren is, in Tomlin’s own words, a “walking, talking, breathing legend.”

Holmgren has 159 more career victories than Tomlin. But Tomlin has one more myspace.com page than Holmgren (yes, it’s true: Tomlin’s personal page went into cyberspace two days after he was hired in January).

Tomlin spent most of his time as a defensive assistant, while Holmgren prefers the offensive side of the ball.

Holmgren calls guys like Mike Shanahan and Tony Dungy his contemporaries, while Tomlin joins the New York Jets’ Eric Mangini and Oakland’s Lane Kiffin in an ever-growing number of NFL thirty-somethings.

The last time the Seahawks played the Steelers, Holmgren was facing off against someone of similar experience. Then-Steelers coach Bill Cowher, like Holmgren, had taken his first head coaching job in 1992 and was trying to beat the Seahawks for his first Super Bowl title.

Cowher did that, then coached one more year before riding off into the sunset. Holmgren joked last week that Cowher’s new life sounded rather tempting.

“I did talk to Bill before the season started; I just happened to catch him,” Holmgren said. “It was late in the morning, he was drinking a cup of coffee, the sun was shining. He said he was going to play golf in about an hour. He was rubbing it in pretty good.”

Holmgren has been pretty open about his past overtures with retirement. The Seahawks’ coach has given serious consideration to life after football but continues to keep coming back.

“I really enjoy the players, for the most part,” he said Friday when asked what motivates him to return each season. “I like the camaraderie with my coaches. It’s something I’ve done for a long time, either as a player or a coach. I enjoy the chess game, the mental preparation.

“I’m lucky. I’m very lucky to have a job that I enjoy coming to work.”

With Bill Parcells taking a third shot at retirement, and Marty Schottenheimer having been sent out to pasture by the San Diego Chargers, Holmgren has taken over as the active coach with the most victories in regular season games, with 150. He is No. 2 in total victories, including playoff games, behind Washington coach Joe Gibbs’s league-leading mark of 164.

Last week, Holmgren passed Cowher by winning his 162nd career game, putting the Seahawks’ coach at 13th on the all-time list for coaching victories. He’s six wins behind Minnesota’s Bud Grant for 11th, and two behind Gibbs for No. 12.

Perhaps most amazing of all is the fact that only two other NFL coaches — Denver’s Mike Shanahan and Tennessee’s Jeff Fisher — have longer-running tenures with their current teams. Holmgren is in his ninth year with the Seahawks, as hard as that seems to believe. With just five more wins, he would match Chuck Knox’s franchise record of 83 victories with Seattle.

It wasn’t that long ago when Holmgren was a young Mike looking to make it as an NFL head coach. Now that title belongs to the Steelers’ Tomlin.

These days, Holmgren’s future probably includes a few more victories, and, eventually, a path like that of Bill Cowher.

But the Seahawks’ “legend” is not in any hurry to ride off into the sunset.

“When that fire, whatever you want to label it, diminishes just a little bit,” Holmgren said, “then you know it’s time to step aside. But I still like it a lot.”