The guard had been hacked all night, but the refs just weren’t calling the fouls. Oh, he had made plenty of appeals to the men in stripes, all right. Now the ninth-grader was thoroughly hacked off. As he huddled with his teammates, he told them he’d had enough. After the next non-call, he took a swing at his defender and sent him sprawling across the court.
It’s not a moment he’s proud of, and it was the only fight of his long athletic career. But would you believe that young basketball player was Tony Dungy?
Yes, that Tony Dungy. The NFL coach who defines composure. The man the Tampa Bay Buccaneers fired in 2002, despite his winning record, because team owners wanted a more fiery coach. The guy many people had criticized for being too nice to be able to win the big one. The first black head coach to win an NFL championship when he led the Indianapolis Colts to a Super Bowl victory last February.
You undoubtedly heard him during the nationally televised awards ceremony tell millions of Americans, “I’m very proud to represent African-American coaches. More than anything, Lovie Smith [the opposing coach of the Chicago Bears and a fellow African-American] and I, we’re Christian coaches. And this shows you can win doing it the Lord’s way.”
For Tony, “the Lord’s way” means putting God and his family above football, not using profanity or yelling at players or referees and teaching his players with respect and integrity. He doesn’t fit the “tough guy” image of many coaches. Tony’s calm, cool demeanor has stood out in the NFL.
“I wasn’t always like that,” he says.
Controlled Heat
Tony had quite a temper as a young athlete and would often lose his cool during games. His father always challenged him, asking if Tony’s verbal outbursts made the situation any better. But learning to control his emotions was a growth process.
“It clicked for me after I got to professional football and I [began] to understand everything I was doing was for the Lord,” Tony says.
It’s easy to watch Tony on the sidelines and think that patience comes naturally. But he’s quick to point out that he’s only human—with supernatural help.
“That’s the only thing I worry about: when people look at me and say, ‘Oh, it’s easy [for him], but I can’t do it that way,’ ” Tony says. “What you see on the outside is not always what’s on the inside. My first response a lot of times is I want to blow up at this ref; I want to get mad at this player. I have to work at it. It’s not ever something you say, ‘OK, the Lord wants me to do it this way, so that’s the way it’s going to be.’ It’s a growth process all the time.”
Tony has grown a great deal in the 40 years since his only on-court altercation. And though he rarely slips up, he now knows how to seek forgiveness and make amends. In 1999, Tony uncharacteristically and publicly criticized a ref after a game—enough that he received a $10,000 fine from the NFL commissioner.
“It was something I knew I shouldn’t have done,” Tony says. “I wrote the commissioner back and said, ‘You’re absolutely right.’ I told him that as a Christian that’s the wrong way for me to respond, and I hope that it will never happen again. And the next time we had this official, I told him, ‘I said some things out of frustration, and I apologize for it.’ I didn’t feel right until that happened.”
So how does he keep his emotions in check so well most of the time, especially in the pressurized world of pro football? “I found that the way for me really to think about it is, What would God want me to do in this situation?“ Tony says. “What does God want you to show the rest of the world about how Christians handle adversity? How do we handle losing? How do we handle a bad call? We’ve got to be different. It’s not easy, and it’s not something that comes from me.”
Growth of a Gamer
Growing up in Jackson, Mich., Tony was always looking for a game. Basketball was his favorite. And though he received a football scholarship to the University of Minnesota, he also played varsity basketball his freshman year.
“When I was in high school and college most of my friends would have said, ‘He’s a good guy,’ ” Tony says. “But they wouldn’t have known anything about Christ or the fact that I was a Christian.”
Tony’s Christian parents raised their children in the church, but he admits that his main focus was on being the best athlete and student he could be.
“I didn’t understand that God would want me really to be part of His team and do things for Him all the time,” he says.
It took struggling to make the Pittsburgh Steelers during his second year in the NFL while suffering from mononucleosis in training camp to surrender every part of his life completely to the Lord.
“I had a teammate [Donnie Shell] who told me, ‘You have to understand that everything you do either serves the Lord or hinders God’s plan,’ ” Tony says. “I finally began to realize that being a Christian was more than just going to heaven. It was really how you live and why you live and what you do and who you do it for.”
Tony has a clear vision today of his life’s purpose. “I have come to the understanding that athletics have been a big part of my life,” he says. “It’s fun, and it’s what I do for a living. But my purpose for a long time now has been to glorify the Lord and use the talent that he’s given me in football to do that.”
As his remarks after the Super Bowl victory demonstrate, he takes every opportunity to point to Christ through his actions and words—even in life’s hardest times.
In 2005, Tony’s oldest son, James, took his own life unexpectedly.
“It’s a pain that you’ll never totally get over,” Tony says. Yet even at his son’s memorial service, Tony took the opportunity to explain the hope he and his family have in Jesus in the midst of their deepest heartache.
Such a consistent witness has been far-reaching within football and beyond. All-Pro defensive tackle Warren Sapp, who played for Tony in Tampa Bay, called him “the greatest man I’ve ever met in my life,” in a USA Today article. Tony has also built relationships with many other parents across the nation who have lost children.
Set Your Sights
It wasn’t until college that Tony began to entertain career plans in professional sports. Yet despite graduating as fourth all-time in total offense in the Big Ten, a two-time Most Valuable Player and two-time Academic All-Big Ten, the quarterback was not drafted by a single NFL team.
Tony eventually made the Pittsburgh Steelers as a free agent safety. He played two seasons there, including the Super Bowl championship of 1978. (He is only one of three men to have won a Super Bowl as both player and coach. Mike Ditka and Tom Flores are the others.) After being traded to the San Francisco 49ers in 1979, he was released from the New York Giants training camp in 1980. Tony’s playing days were over. But in 1981 he became an assistant coach with the Steelers, making him the youngest coach in the NFL at 25.
When asked to give advice to young aspiring athletes, Tony passes along words of wisdom he received from Cal Stoll, his coach at Minnesota.
“Of the hundreds of thousands playing football, only five of you [from any given state] are going to be professional football players,” Tony says. “If you want to try [to make the NFL], you have to outwork those other guys. But you’d better prepare in case it doesn’t happen. You’d better prepare your mind and prepare yourself to be successful in some other venue. So put as much energy into school, into growing as a person, as you do in athletics. And if you’re not doing it the Lord’s way, it’s not going to hold up in the long run.”
Goals are great as a target to shoot for, but Tony believes we often confuse our goals and purpose. “If my goal is to be a 4.0 student, and I get one B, then I’m crushed if I think that’s my purpose,” Tony says. “If your purpose isn’t to serve the Lord, whatever you end up doing, you’re going to find disappointing. But if your purpose is to serve the Lord, even when you don’t reach every single goal, you can still have happiness and satisfaction.” 
