It has been a little more than a month since Tony Dungy received that tormenting 2 a.m. call from a Tampa, Fla.-area emergency room that his oldest son, James, was dead. It has been almost two weeks since his Super Bowl-favorite Colts were ousted from the playoffs.
It was Thursday that Dungy took his daughter Jade and son Jordan for swimming lessons in Indianapolis.
We talked via telephone while he watched.
He recalled the five or six days of sorting through funeral arrangement for James as “surreal” and his return to work soon after the funeral as knowing the routine, “trying not to think too much” and focusing on his Colts. His games are over now. The incomplete season is complete. His wife, Lauren, experiences inevitable ups and downs. His other four children are coping as best they can.
Everyone wonders how he did it. How he stood erect and spoke so graciously at the funeral. How he has been so resilient beyond it.
“One can never be prepared for that,” Dungy said. “The biggest thing for me is I realized that God was going to uphold us. We are not promised in this world that everything will go the way we think it should. There are a lot of things that come out of a situation that are not on the surface. It was tragic in one sense, but people transcended it into positives.
“The conversations, e-mails, cards I received, I could tell that people were reflecting on their careers and families. My players did that. It makes me grateful.”
Not angry, spiteful, disillusioned and ready to surrender. No doubt, at different points, Dungy probably felt some if not all of that, if at least for fleeting moments. No, the final feeling for Dungy is gratefulness.
Has there ever been more of a rock of a man in sports?
Doubt it.
He is from Jackson, Mich., and the hype for Super Bowl XL in Detroit begins to churn in a couple of days. What is the biggest surprise? That Seattle and Pittsburgh are in it? Or that the Colts are not?
His team was breezing, 13-0, national darlings dancing with visions of an undefeated season. A loss at home to San Diego, the apparent suicide death of James, 18, and the playoff loss at home to Pittsburgh stunned them.
He will not connect the loss of his son with the loss of an XL dream.
“People look at us not reaching our goal, not playing well in the playoffs and think that, but I don’t think that at all,” he said. “We had showed the ability to focus with great attention on us while winning the first 13. We have had guys in our football family go through tough times like mine that were not as published, and we handled it.”
No, it was a couple of bad plays on defense against Pittsburgh, a Steelers defense that handled his fiery offense early, and other miscues that ended their season, he said. Did his team shut it down too early in the regular season? No, he said, because Philadelphia did the same thing the year before and reached the Super Bowl. If you win it is great strategy; if you lose it is lousy, he said.
He insists his team will use it all as fuel for 2006.
“I thought fatigue would be a factor for Pittsburgh in Denver,” Dungy said of the AFC championship game. “Going on the road for the third time in the playoffs and playing in that altitude, that’s tough. Pittsburgh was mentally tough.
“Both coaches have been in the Super Bowl before, and that’s a plus. Both teams have long winning streaks. Both have quarterbacks who can make plays outside of the pocket. The team that gets out in front and is emotionally stable is going to win. Neither team can come from far behind on either one of those defenses.”
Dungy has watched the NFL moves that produced seven first-time head coaches, none of them minorities. Of the nine hires thus far, only Herman Edwards’ move from the New York Jets to the Kansas City Chiefs involved a minority hire. Dungy now has three coaches who were on his old Tampa Bay staff – Edwards, Lovie Smith in Chicago and Rod Marinelli in Detroit – who are head coaches. He expresses, however, my sentiments, exactly, on the new hiring results:
“I never get into saying that owners made wrong choices. But I am disappointed that minorities keep coming up on the short end. Not one single new minority hire in all of those hires? You look at Romeo Crennel, he coached on five Super Bowl-winning teams and spent X amount of years as an assistant, but he was never hired as a head coach for so long because they said Bill Belichick really ran the defense. Now Eric Mangini spends one year as a defensive coordinator under Belichick, he is not even allowed to speak to the media, and he gets to the point in the media and the organization that he is the guy for the Jets. How do people get anointed like that? What we see is some of the reasons owners have used for not hiring minority coaches is not the reason at all. Let’s be honest about that.
“These owners are taking the stance that they are going to hire who they feel like hiring. Some of them are not very strong at judging ability and who is best for their franchise. It’s not a knock, it’s a fact. It’s disappointing. We have made some progress, we have gotten a lot of minorities into the interview process. We’ve got the horse to the water. Now we’ve got to get the horse to drink.”
Dungy said that speculation when the Indy season ended that he might walk away from football for good was overblown. He had a life experience that was blunt and a first for him, he said, but not one that sapped his coaching vigor.
One day he will move on, he said, and likely will work in family and prison ministries.
He has already experienced joy and uplifted faces when he walks with troubled families and into prisons.
Dungy lifts others. He is grateful to have experienced the same.
Staff writer Thomas George can be reached at 303-820-1994 or tgeorge@denverpost.com.
