John Froschauer, Associated Press Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren won Super Bowl XXXI with the Packers in 1997. Click photo for larger image.

KIRKLAND, Wash. -- The commitment was made four months ago. There is no reneging, no turning back. Not now, regardless of this week bringing the most trumpeted Sabbath of the year. How could they compromise their faith and family, their obligations and beliefs?

So Mike Holmgren, in something of a last-minute change in travel plans, is flying today to Detroit for weeklong Super Bowl XL festivities with his Seattle Seahawks.

And Kathy Holmgren, at the urging and the expense of her husband, is leaving Thursday with one of their four daughters, Calla, a perinatal specialist, to begin a medical mission in Africa's Democratic Republic of Congo, half a world away, aiding the afflicted, comforting the neglected.

It is the first time in his five such midwinter Sundays -- two as a San Francisco assistant, two as the Green Bay head coach, now one with the Seahawks -- that they will miss a Holmgren family Super Bowl. And the husband and father couldn't be happier. The jowly face and walrus-like moustache of the Seattle coach/executive vice president curled into a smile at the mere thought.

"I get great joy from this," Holmgren said.

	One Coach Two Super Bowl Teams

It isn't that he's summarily sending them away. Rather, they are emissaries for him, for the family, for the Covenant Church, for the Northwest Medical Team on whose board Kathy sits, for goodwill. What's an indoor football game compared with lending a hand to mankind?

Even more, there is a symmetry to this trip to Africa. Once Calla signed up to go, Holmgren took this Congo mission as a sign. For Kathy ventured to the same country known then as Zaire, on the same type of medical mission, nearly 40 years ago.

It was during this journey when she authored words that altered the life path of a failed quarterback, a California scholastic star who never got to play much at Southern California, then bottomed out in stints as an NFL backup in St. Louis and to Joe Namath with the New York Jets. As he wrote recently for a church publication: Her inspiring letters helped me to realize how much I needed to trust in the Lord in the midst of my disillusionment. They were engaged soon after she returned to San Francisco. They were wed in 1971.

The disillusioned former quarterback went from selling cars to selling real estate to teaching and coaching in Bay Area high schools to ... singing in a band called Big Bop and the Choppers, a San Jose, high-school faculty group that still performs for charity today.

He went from coaching high school boys to coaching future pro quarterbacks Steve Young and Robbie Bosco at Mormon-run Brigham Young, to coaching Joe Montana in two-time Super Bowl-winning San Francisco, to steering Green Bay back to the glory of two Super Bowls, winning one with Brett Favre.

Coaches talk about sacrifice. This one hardly blinks at being 6,800 air miles from a wife, 58, and daughter, 32, who will be in a West African nation where three drivers for the Norwegian Refugee Council were taken hostage and later released in the past week. Holmgren, as is his wont, defuses that situation with humor.

"I said to Kathy, 'You get so nervous when you're at games; somebody will tell you the score when you come back,' " Holmgren, 57, said the other day at the Seahawks' training facility. "Honestly, it came up four months ago. Calla was going, and I said, 'As a present to Kathy, I'm going to send her.'

"This is a dream come true for her, to go back to the same place where she was.

"And here we are in the Super Bowl. She's leaving Thursday for Africa; I'm leaving for Detroit Sunday."

His is no small task, at least on the sporting scale.

He is about to direct a franchise -- one without a playoff victory for 21 previous years, one with only a single conference title-game appearance heretofore (a 1983 loss) -- onto its biggest stage yet.

He is about to become only the fifth NFL coach to steer two different teams to a Super Bowl, joining the company of Bill Parcells, Dan Reeves, Don Shula and Dick Vermeil, none of whom won in both conferences, as Holmgren is attempting after winning Super Bowl XXXI with Green Bay.

He is about to spend a week explaining to prying media hordes that, sure, he considered chucking it all after last season, his sixth in Seattle, with him having to yield the general-manager duties that, in part, lured him to the Pacific Northwest from the Green Bay, where a street bears his name. With him locking horns with former team president Bob Whitsitt, who was fired, whose replacement, general manager Bob Ferguson, then resigned. With star running back Shaun Alexander whining because Holmgren wouldn't keep him in the 2004 season finale so he could win the league rushing title. With records of 9-7, 6-10, 9-7, 7-9, 10-6, 9-7 and 0-3 in the postseason. ... Until now.

With a new football-operations director in Tim Ruskell, a new vice president in former Houston Oilers cornerback and Steelers nemesis Mike Reinfeldt, a roster with 14 new free-agents, seven new defensive starters and an infusion of character players into the locker room -- no more Koren Robinson, et al. -- Holmgren was able to go back to his past strengths for a 15-3 season and a berth in the big bowl. He cajoled. He coaxed. He kidded. He focused on the details. He pushed the right buttons. He got an MVP season and NFC championship game star performance from Alexander. He monitored the team's pulse, giving it off the entire open week and several post-victory Mondays.

Mostly, the old Oak Grove and Sacred Heart High instructor returned to teaching.

And here he is in the Super Bowl, teaching a lesson again: Faith and family have as much as a place, if not more than, football.

Coach as teacher

He has been portrayed as a Harley-riding son of gun, which he is (attention Ben Roethlisberger critics: Holmgren reportedly wears a helmet). He has been portrayed as a big, old bear of a man with a self-deprecating sense of humor, which he is. He has been portrayed as a West Coast offensive genius, though he spits out self-deprecating jokes about that as well. He has been portrayed as a tactician, befitting the grandson of U.S. Army Col. Jens Bugge, who authored a book on the advantages of rushes and was eulogized by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. "I love Mike Holmgren to death," Favre was quoted as saying before the Packers played, and beat, their old coach in the regular-season finale.

Yet perhaps the unseen piece to Holmgren is his inner peace. The wit and the two-wheeled vehicle and the walrus moustache and jowls conceal what lies beneath. He is a man of religious conviction borne from his Bay Area beginning. It doesn't define him. It refines him.

Holmgren grew up in San Francisco working in his Swedish family's bakery, playing quarterback on flag-football teams and attending Covenant Church on nearby Dolores Street every Sunday. Billy Graham held a three-week crusade at the Cow Palace, and the Holmgrens attended nearly every night. He attended a church camp in the Santa Cruz Mountains, at Mission Springs, Calif., and there at age 13 met his future wife. Not long afterward the two lovebirds wrote their names on the water tower.

Football came easy to the quarterback who was always bigger than his peers. At Lincoln High School, Holmgren threw quick, short passes and acted, teammate and friend John Jamison said, like a coach on the field. He was such a standout that in the San Francisco's North-South all-star game, coaches started him at quarterback and moved a future Heisman Trophy- and Super Bowl MVP-winning quarterback named Jim Plunkett to defensive end. Alas, he was enamored of the University of Southern California, where the drop-back passer languished on John McKay's bench.

"I think if he had gone to Cal or somewhere else he might have been a big-time player," said Jamison, now his special-teams assistant with the Seahawks.

His career fizzling first at USC, then in the pros with the Cardinals, who drafted him in the eighth round in 1970, or the Jets, Holmgren went into real estate, the business his father ventured into before dying at age 48. Then he sold cars. Would you buy a vehicle from this man? "As a matter of fact, he sold one to my mom, a Ford Mach 1," Jamison said. "It was too fast for my mom, too. He also sold a small car with a stick shift to his grandfather, who had never driven a stick shift."

Coaching and football beckoned, and Holmgren got his teaching license to qualify. A mutual acquaintance sent him to Steve Ellison, the coach at parochial Sacred Heart High in San Jose, Calif.

"In those days, there weren't too many coaches. It was him and I, actually. He coached the backs, I coached the lines. And he called all the offensive plays," Ellison said.

"He was a great teacher, too. I watched him teach with awe. He taught a class in mechanical drawing ... it was like an introduction to architecture. You do all these blueprint-type drawings.

"Whatever he taught, the kids had a lot of fun in his class."

Holmgren moved from Sacred Heart to Oak Grove, where the team met with success and where he became a stage star. Coach Phil Stearns formed a charity band, Big Bop and the Choppers, so named because they used Harleys in their act. Manifold Mike, who could play a little trombone, mostly sang in his church-choir tenor.

"Mike invited me down, and I went one night,' said Ellison, whom Holmgren convinced to strike out on his own, at Petaluma High School, where he remains 29 years later. "There must have been 2,000, 3,000 people. Mike has a lot of ham in him. He sang 'One Summer Night.' I was crying, I was laughing so hard. You see this big guy up there, hitting the high notes."

Added Jamison: "He had a growing family, and high school didn't pay. At one point, he thought of getting out of it and doing something that paid some bucks." Instead, Holmgren took his show on the college road, first working for San Francisco State and famed coach Vic Rowen in 1981, then the next four years at Brigham Young, a Mormon school in Utah. "God blessed our motives," he wrote of that job change.

From there, he went back to San Francisco, where he grew up in the shadows of old Kezar Stadium. He went to his beloved 49ers, where he would help to realize his childhood dream of glory with two Super Bowl titles as a quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator.

"I'm watching him up there coaching Joe Montana, with Bill Walsh the quarterback guru -- I thought, 'Man, you got to watch what you say there,' " Ellison said.

Then came Green Bay starting in 1992, an 84-42 record and back-to-back Super Bowl trips in XXXI, a victory against New England, and XXXII, a one-touchdown loss to Denver.

"It took me awhile" to recover from the Broncos' defeat, Holmgren said last week. "I made a joke of it actually at the owners' meetings. About a month after the game, I was on the treadmill listening to 'The Today Show,' and they listed the five warning signs of depression. 'No sleep. Sex life is bad.' All those things. And I said [to media there], 'That's me, and I didn't know it.' I had every doctor write me a letter.

"Honestly, it took me a long time to get over that one. It was a weird deal. Coaches lose ballgames. But I thought I'd lost that team."

He gained a new opportunity closer to home.

Next came Seattle.

West Coast roots

"He's a West Coast guy. The Northwest suits him well," said Jack Surridge, an athletic director of a 3,200-student Chicago college. He and the school are on intimate terms with the Holmgren family.

October before last, the entire clan traipsed to the campus of North Park University for the christening of the football field and sports facility known as the Holmgren Athletic Complex. They donated money and summertime golf tournaments toward the $4 million facility. The Holmgrens moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1999, after the coach had accomplished the pinnacle with the Packers, after he had done everything but also become the general manager of a franchise ... something Seattle offered. It further provided a chance to be closer to their Bay Area roots, though the Holmgrens never stray far from their church and their university.

Kathy is a 1969 graduate of North Park and serves on its Board of Trustees. All four of their daughters -- Jenny and twin sister Calla; Emily, 29; and Gretchen, 25 -- along with the husbands of two of them graduated from the school owned by the Evangelical Covenant Church. Jenny worked as the university's communications director until moving west to Seattle in July with her two daughters and husband.

Here, amid the evergreen-lined suburbs tucked around Lake Washington and Puget Sound yet between the Cascades and Olympic Mountains, the Holmgrens have reunited. Besides Jenny, Emily -- the mother of one daughter -- is a teacher in the area. Gretchen is finishing law school at the University of Washington. Calla, with a daughter of her own, has a fellowship at the University of Utah, when she isn't embarking on a medical mission.

So, after he leaves behind his 53 football fellows, he goes home to be surrounded by four daughters, four granddaughters and a wife of 35 years. In fact, when it was time to celebrate the 34-14 NFC championship triumph a week ago against Carolina, he went out with the girls.

"Quite honestly, he considers himself to be quite a lucky man," Sue Gost, the event coordinator at North Park and a close friend, said of the female-dominated Holmgren household, which isn't so different from the three-daughter brood of Kaye and Bill Cowher. "They're a strong support system as a family. I don't know how much you see that ... in that crazy business. But it's for real."

Holmgren maintains that the weeklong medical mission for Kathy and Calla is a pleasure rather than a missed opportunity. The rest of the clan will be in Detroit, supporting the dad and granddad. As his players do already.

"He's been teaching more the past couple of years," said former Seahawks and current Cleveland quarterback Trent Dilfer, who is covering the playoffs for the NFL Network. "And he's a great teacher. His genius is in explaining complex things in simple ways, getting to the nitty-gritty of everything. He does a great job of empowering the people around him, both his assistants and his players. Really, in the last few years, you've seen the genius come out."

"You get the same thing out of our team every week," Alexander said of the Seahawks' ascension. "We know just like he knows, he won't get the credit until we get it done."

Meaning a Seahawks Super Bowl XL victory.

What then? A trip to Disney World? A medical mission? More coaching or retirement?

"I'd think home in his heart of hearts is in that Mission Springs area of California," North Park's Surridge said.

From where his family and renewed faith all began to flow.