Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (15 page)

The Bucs held the explosive Rams to just 11 points, but Tampa managed only two field goals. It typified Dungy’s Tampa years: great defense, no offense. His offense lacked firepower and played not to lose. In the next two playoff seasons, Tampa’s offense produced
a total of four field goals, and the Bucs were outscored in back-to-back wild-card games in Philadelphia by a combined 52–12. There were rumors after that first loss to the Eagles that the Bucs were on the verge of being sold and the new owners wanted to replace Dungy with Bill Parcells. The team remained with the Glazer family, and Dungy remained the coach. But he was on the hot seat going into the 2001 season. Unfortunately, his team didn’t play as if it were motivated to save the coach. Dungy heard the Parcells rumors again and was angered by them. This was supposed to be a fraternity, and it was bad form to covet a job that wasn’t open. The Bucs went into the playoffs knowing Dungy’s job was at stake, but they lost again to the Eagles, and this time Dungy was indeed fired. Parcells was the first choice of the Glazer family. Tampa thought it had a deal with Parcells—he had stood up former Bucs owner Hugh Culverhouse at the last minute in 1992—but he backed out again. Parcells was so close to taking the job that he had Mike Tannenbaum, the Jets’ assistant general manager who had been Parcells’s right-hand man when he was with the Jets, fly to Tampa to meet with Bucs executive Rich McKay. If Parcells had closed the deal, Tannenbaum was his choice to be Tampa’s general manager. A long and winding search led the Glazers to Jon Gruden of the Raiders. He was under contract but at odds with Oakland owner Al Davis. When the Glazers offered the exorbitant price of two first-round picks and $8 million, Davis was happy to send Gruden to Florida.

It paid off immediately for the Bucs. Gruden won the Super Bowl in his first year in Tampa with the core of the team constructed by Dungy. It was made even sweeter for Gruden by the fact that the Super Bowl victory came against Davis and the Raiders. Gruden’s knowledge of the Raiders’ offense and quarterback Rich Gannon was instrumental in forcing the usually precise Oakland quarterback into a Super Bowl record five interceptions.

It had not taken Dungy long to find a job after the Bucs fired him. He had his choice of Carolina or Indianapolis, and who
wouldn’t want to coach Peyton Manning? It was an easy decision. His first season with the Colts, however, ended miserably when they lost to the Jets 41–0. The Jets were coached by Herm Edwards, a former assistant to Dungy with the Bucs and one of his best friends. A few weeks later, it got even worse. Dungy was back home in Tampa on the night the Bucs were winning the Super Bowl in San Diego. As he drove back to his house after watching the game on television with friends, it was an emotional thirty minutes in the car. Fans were celebrating in the streets of Tampa as Dungy sat in traffic. None of the fans recognized him. Gruden won with Dungy’s players, but the former coach was yesterday’s news. The Glazers had taken his team away from him, and now they had won it all without him.

He had put his heart into building the Bucs, made the community proud of the team, insisted that his players give back, but then missed out on the grand prize. “It was really bittersweet,” Dungy said. “Not to be there to see it to fruition; it was hard. It was disappointing for me, but I was happy for the city. I was happy for the guys because you remember the orange uniforms and 22,000 people in the stands, people saying you stink. There was a little bit of a hollow feeling; as proud as I was of those guys and what they had done, it was difficult not being there with them.”

Four years and nine days later, it was Dungy who was about to lift the Vince Lombardi Trophy proudly over his head with Manning, one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, by his side. Dungy was thinking about his junior high school coaches, his high school coaches, the different teachers he’d had. He thought about Grambling’s Eddie Robinson and Florida A&M’s Jake Gaither and others who had coached in the historically black colleges and never were given the opportunity to coach in the NFL. “Lovie and I have been able to take advantage of the opportunity,” Dungy said after the game. “But we’re certainly not the best, certainly not the most qualified, and I know there’s some
other guys who could have done it, given the chance. So I just feel good I was the first one to be able to do it and represent those guys that paved the way for me.”

He thought about the route he had taken to be a head coach in the NFL after fifteen years as an assistant with the Steelers, Chiefs, and Vikings. And he thought about failing to get a head coaching job after interviewing with the Eagles twice, the Packers, and the Jaguars and getting fired by Tampa.

Most of all, he was thinking about his father, Wilbur Dungy, who died in the summer of 2005. Wilbur was devoted to physical fitness and enjoyed bicycle riding and swimming but had been diagnosed with leukemia. He died at the age of seventy-eight. He missed by less than two years seeing his son reach the pinnacle of his profession. As he was standing on the podium with the massive amounts of confetti coming down along with all that rain, it turned out Wilbur Dungy was right after all.

“Don’t worry about what’s wrong; look at what’s right and make it better,” Wilbur had always told his son.

That was what Dungy thought to himself on the car ride home in Tampa the night the Bucs won the Super Bowl. It was how he kept calm after getting passed over for all those head coaching jobs. It was easy to doubt during those years that he would ever get his chance as a head coach or if that special moment hugging the trophy would ever come. But he didn’t let it consume him. He had his faith. He had his family. Everything else would fall into place. He had an inner peace and calmness that made the many teams that interviewed him wonder if his personality was strong enough to deal with so many diverse and powerful personalities in the locker room. He wasn’t a yeller or screamer. He didn’t curse. Like father, like son. “My dad was really just a quiet, quiet guy,” he said.

Tony Dungy was just a really nice guy, maybe too nice to handle the knuckleheads in the locker room. One time, Dungy was complaining to his father about the lack of playing time his high
school football coach was giving him, and his father told him about his days as a teacher in Arlington, Virginia. It was a lesson in the inequities in life. It was 1951, Wilbur Dungy’s first teaching job. This was four years before Tony was born, and Wilbur was at an all-black school because the schools were segregated and he wasn’t allowed to teach in the all-white school. Every day, Dungy and his students would walk past the all-white school on their way to class. “All I could do was make sure my kids knew as much as the students in the all-white school,” he told Tony. “Then, it was, what was I going to do to make the situation better?”

Make it better, he told him, and don’t complain. His father told him that when he graduated from high school, he wanted to go into the service. “They wouldn’t let us fly the planes, didn’t want us to fly the planes, so we taught ourselves,” Wilbur Dungy said.

He didn’t say it was because he was African American, but it was implied. “I knew the point he was making, but I never knew it until his funeral,” Dungy said. “One of his friends talked about my father being in the Tuskegee Airmen. It was an all-black kind of air force regiment. It was segregated. It was a very decorated group, but it was still segregated at the time. But I had no idea he was even involved in it. I just kind of got the message: Don’t complain. Make the situation better.”

Dungy always tried to make the situation better for his own children as he worked to survive in a competitive business. He never slept in his office. He drove his kids to school in the morning. He never bought into the idea that extra hours bring better results even though he was aware that his peers were picking up frequent-stay awards for sleeping in their offices. Beds pulled out from the wall. Air mattresses. Sleeper sofas. Dungy slept in his own bed every night. He encouraged his assistants to spend quality time with their families. He learned how to do it the right way playing and coaching for Pittsburgh’s Chuck Noll, the only coach
to win four Super Bowls. Gruden was well known for showing up at his desk hours before the sun came up.

“I felt that we could start work at 8:15 or 8:30 and get done what we needed to do,” Dungy said. “I was very fortunate I was ten years with Coach Noll: two as a player and eight working for him. I saw you can win and be very successful and still have outside interests. He was a tremendous family person. He had his nephew and son working in training camp, and that made a big impression on me. Then I worked the last four before I got a head coaching job working for Denny Green, and he was the same way.”

During the season, Tuesday was game plan night, and Dungy worked until 10 p.m. In other teams’ offices around the NFL, that was about when coaches were ordering in late-night dinners. He stayed until 9 p.m. on Wednesday and until dinnertime on Thursday, and then on Friday the head coach’s office was empty by 2 p.m. Compared with other head coaches, Dungy was working banker’s hours—and winning. Nobody questioned his work ethic or his priorities. He made the playoffs in four of his six seasons in Tampa and in each of his seven seasons in Indianapolis. He was a man of faith and strong devotion to his family. Wilbur never missed any of Tony’s games and attended many of his practices and still taught school, and Tony still doesn’t know how he did it. “It made a big impact on me, and I always knew that’s how I wanted to be,” he said. “If I had slept in the office, would we have won two Super Bowls or three instead of one? I don’t think so. I don’t think the trade-off would have been worth it for me.”

He won father-of-the-year awards. He was always there for his children. He and his wife, Lauren, had three of their own children and adopted four, the youngest in 2010. “It keeps you young,” Dungy said. “At least that’s what she tells me.”

James was the second oldest. When he was thirteen years old, he helped his father present a Bucs T-shirt to President Bill Clinton at Tampa’s training camp. James had moved with the family
to Indianapolis when Dungy was hired by the Colts, but now, three years later, he was back in Tampa and enrolled at Hillsborough Community College, interested in pursuing a degree in criminal justice technology. He was planning his nineteenth birthday party for January 6, 2006. There already were signs of trouble. A few months earlier, on October 21, he told a 911 dispatcher he had taken several pills, including four hydrocodones, an addictive narcotic painkiller, and possibly naproxen, which is used for mild to moderate pain and inflammation. He told the 911 operator he was being stupid and had taken about fifteen pills and that he had called his mother back in Indianapolis, who instructed him to call 911 and said to tell 911 he needed to have his stomach pumped. He told the operator his stomach and throat were burning and he felt like he was going to pass out. He was taken by ambulance to an area hospital. He reportedly told authorities he was depressed. He recovered from the episode with the pills.

James Dungy was six foot seven, much taller than his father. He was outgoing and courteous, just like his father. There is still no explanation why he took a twenty-eight-inch leather belt and secured it around his neck and hanged himself from a ceiling fan on December 22 in his apartment at the Campus Lodge in Lutz, Florida, a Tampa suburb. It was two months after the incident with the pills. His girlfriend had gone out for a ten-minute walk and came back to find him hanging at 1:30 a.m. She used a knife to cut him down. “I think my boyfriend’s dead,” Antoinette Anderson cried to an emergency dispatcher. “I think he tried to hang himself or something.”

The 911 operator talked her through administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation. A medical worker arrived and did CPR until a fire rescue crew pulled up and brought James Dungy to University Community Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. There was no trace of alcohol or drugs in his body. The only substances found were nicotine and caffeine. Emergency workers
had injected him with medication in a failed attempt to revive him. It was an unimaginable horror. James Dungy was now a statistic. Suicide is the third-leading cause of death for fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, after accidents and homicide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There are about 4,400 suicides every year in that age group.

It was now nearly five years after James’s death, and Tony Dungy was in New York City for an NBC sales meeting. He had left the Colts after the 2008 season, two years after he won the Super Bowl. He started a successful second career as an analyst on NBC’s
Football Night in America
studio show. He was sitting in the lobby of a fashionable hotel next to Central Park talking about his life in football and how the fraternity of coaches was an invaluable support system after James’s death, especially at the funeral in Florida.

“Like Herm Edwards,” Dungy said. “The Jets played on Monday night and the funeral was on Tuesday, and I knew he was going to be there. I still don’t know how he got there. Their game wasn’t over until one o’clock in the morning.

“It’s a neat fraternity, and you realize some of the things you go through no one else understands other than the thirty-one other guys. They know how hard you work, and they know what you put into things. When you get fired or you lose a playoff game or you had a great year and it doesn’t end up the way you wanted, there are guys that have been there; they know what it’s like, and they reach out to you.”

Dungy and Edwards are like brothers. They first worked together on Marty Schottenheimer’s staff in Kansas City in the early ’90s. James Dungy used to sit on Edwards’s lap when he was a little boy. When Dungy was hired by the Bucs, the first thing he did was bring Edwards with him as his assistant head coach. “Kind of puts everything in perspective when something like that happens,” Edwards said after getting the news that Dungy’s son
had died. “You get all hung up in football, winning and losing. When you lose a child, that’s tough. Pretty tough on everybody.”