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Crain’s Chicago Business has a fascinating profile of Leo Kiely, the feisty chief executive of Chicago-based MillerCoors. Kiely has an extremely interesting job: taking on Anheuser-Busch in the U.S.

Reporter David Sterrett gets us up to speed on Kiely, the motorcycle-riding former athlete who is inordinately fond of blue sweaters:

[Kiely] describes himself not as the boss but as the “head coach” at MillerCoors, the new brewing conglomerate that opened its Chicago headquarters in June.

“I get to pick the team and set the game plan,” says Mr. Kiely, 62, who played offensive tackle for Harvard University and whose grandfather Joe Graves played for the Chicago Cubs in 1926. “But then I get off the floor and let them play.”

Mr. Kiely’s team at MillerCoors LLC, the brewer formed last year in a unique joint venture aimed at bringing together the second- and third-biggest players in the U.S., is poised to make a run at market leader Anheuser-Busch, which has been weakened by a takeover. …

But even as Anheuser struggles with new ownership and heavy debt following its acquisition by Belgium-based InBev last year, Mr. Kiely faces an uphill battle. To gain ground, he must coax strong growth from both Miller Lite and Coors Light simultaneously, which hasn’t happened in the last decade.

The numbers bear out the challenge: In the first six and half months of 2009, case sales of Coors Light were up 2.6 percent, but Miller Lite was down 7 percent, according to Information Resources Inc.

Kiely has insisted for a long time that Miller and Coors can grow together. Almost two years ago, he told the Post-Dispatch that Miller Lite and Coors Light - two of the largest beer brands in the U.S. - are not in direct competition. The two brands “have very distinct equities,” he said.

In the pages of the profile, Kiely comes across as supremely confident. (For that matter, so do numerous other MillerCoors execs who have been quoted in the trade press about the company’s prospects for competing against Anheuser-Busch. But that’s another story.)

“We are writing beer history, and this is a trip,” Kiely told Sterrett. “This is a game that will play out over the next 25 years in the beer business, and I will be watching this from my rocking chair.”