Super Bowl return just part of the story for Holmgrens

	With a win Sunday against the Steelers, Mike Holmgren will become the first coach to win a Super Bowl with two different teams. John Biever/SI

DETROIT -- Much will be written this week about Mike Holmgren's long road back to the Super Bowl, given that it took the Seattle head coach seven frustrating years to get his Seahawks to this game for the first time, and he's gone eight years between appearances in this biggest of football settings.

But the length of one's journeys is always relative, and the inconsequential nature of what's really at stake next Sunday at Ford Field has been cast in perfect perspective by the sojourn being undertaken this week by Holmgren's wife, Kathy, and one of their four daughters, Calla.

While Mike Holmgren works the Super Bowl XL sidelines against Pittsburgh, his wife and daughter will be 6,800 air miles away, taking part in a 17-day medical training humanitarian mission to the West African nation of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

After leaving Thursday on a 22-hour flight from Seattle to Africa, it'll still take three days for the eight-person Northwest Medical mission team to reach the remote area of Karawa, and they'll have to navigate the crudest of roads and bridges and even ford some streams on foot to do so.

Kind of makes 4th-and-1 not so scary, doesn't it?

Shocking as it might be to some, Super Bowl Sunday isn't the end-all and be-all of Holmgren's family. Kathy, a trained nurse, and Calla, an obstetrician, wouldn't miss this trip for the world. A Super Bowl trip? Well, that's nice, too, but they'll hear about the doings in Detroit when they can. It wasn't worth staying home for.

Even the coach in the family knows that.

"I think it's a lot more important, frankly, than what I'm doing this week,'' Mike Holmgren said of Kathy and Calla's trip, which was planned four months ago, with nary a thought of a potential conflict with the weightiest game in the Seahawks' 30-year history. "I'm very proud of [Kathy] and she works very hard at a lot of things that are a lot more important than coaching a football game. She has her life.''

The back story to this saga is the real story. Calla, 32, decided last fall to make this trip in part because her mom, fresh out of college as a nurse, went to this exact part of Congo (then called Zaire) on a 10-month medical missionary in 1970, the year before Kathy married Mike Holmgren.

When the Seahawks head coach discovered the symmetry involved, he decided to pay for his wife to make the trip as well, giving her an early birthday gift. The date of the Super Bowl was not a consideration.

"We didn't know when she signed up for this thing four months ago that we would be in the Super Bowl,'' said Holmgren, apparently taking a typical one-game-a-time coaching approach to the rest of his life as well. "We didn't even think about the dates being a problem. But it was the best present I could ever give her.''