E-mail a friendTony Dungy
airdate March 13, 2009
Known for his coaching genius and calm style, Tony Dungy is widely respected both on and off the field. He recently retired after seven years as head coach of the NFL's Indianapolis Colts and becoming the first African American to lead his team to a Super Bowl victory. He joined two others as the only individuals to win the big game as a player and head coach. Dungy is also a best-selling author, with Quiet Strength—the first NFL-related book ever ranked No.1—a children's picture book and, his latest, Uncommon.
History-making former NFL coach reflects on his goal of impacting his players. (1:54)
Full interview. (12:21)
Tony Dungy
Tavis: In 2007, Coach Tony Dungy became the first African American head coach in history to win the Super Bowl when he led my hometown Indianapolis Colts to their first champion. In addition to his standout coaching career, he is, of course, a very popular public speaker and a "New York Times" best-selling author whose latest is called "Uncommon: Finding Your Path to Significance." He joins us tonight from Tampa. Coach Dungy, nice to have you on the program again, sir.
Tony Dungy: Well, thank you, Tavis. It's always great being on with you and I appreciate that hometown pull there for the Colts. We appreciate it.
Tavis: (Laughter) No, I appreciate what you did with the Colts, so congratulations again on that. What are you doing with yourself these days?
Dungy: Well, my wife and I are really just trying to find out which direction we want to go. We're in Tampa. We're gonna be back and forth between Tampa and Indianapolis working with a number of groups that kind of help young people. That's our focus right now, really looking into the education piece. That seems to be so important. But just trying to figure out what's the best way to proceed right now.
Tavis: How did your passion - of all the things that you are passionate about, of all the folk who would love to be connected and co-branded with you - how did your passion pull you in this direction, young people?
Dungy: Well, young people and decision-making is so important in as many things as I've been involved with. You're looking at teen pregnancy centers and incarceration and, you know, prison visits that I've done. It just seems like everything leads back to those decisions of young people and getting that education. So I think that's probably the primary piece, the spiritual side, but also, you know, getting young people on track, give yourself a chance in life.
So many times, we meet these people at 20, 21, 22 and they've made a bad decision that they're trying to recover from. I just feel like if there's some way we can get to our young people and help them with their decision-making, it's gonna make for a better country.
Tavis: You mentioned spirituality. There are actually two things you've just mentioned that I want to go back and pick up right quick. The first, spirituality. It is impossible to read your work, your best-selling books; it's impossible to see you on the lecture circuit; it's impossible to watch you at any conversation and not understand how important, how vital, your faith is to you.
One, let me ask you why your faith is so important to you, and number two, about your decision-making process to be so public about your faith.
Dungy: Well, it has been important to me ever since I was a young person. I was raised in a Christian home and that was my value system. Like many young boys, I kind of got hooked on sports and sports became important to me. That became what I chased for a number of years.
But I saw throughout college, through the NFL, people that put everything into their job, their career or whatever and really only when it was finished came to realize that, "Boy, if I don't have the Lord in my life, if I don't have Christ, I'm really, you know, just swimming uphill and doing things that really don't make a difference in the long run."
So I've just been fortunate and then, once I started coaching, I just felt like I had a platform and I was gonna use that to express my faith. That was something that was really important to me.
Tavis: Do the players you've coached over the years, when they obviously get to know what kind of coach they're playing for, how do they respect that?
Dungy: You know, I tried to approach it when I was coaching in that, "Hey, here's who I am as a person. You don't have to buy into everything that I believe, but I'm gonna treat you with respect. I'm going to have an open door. If you ever want to talk to me about my faith, if you want to talk to me about what makes me tick, you know, my door's gonna be open, but I'm not gonna push it on you. I'm just gonna try to live my life so that you'll see something that looks attractive."
I had a number of players over the years say, "Hey, Coach, I would like to talk to you about that because you seem to have this peace of mind that maybe I don't have right now."
Tavis: You talked earlier, Coach, about grabbing hold to this abiding faith when you were a kid raised in a Christian home. In the troubled society that we live in, not every kid gets to be raised in a home where those kinds of values are instilled in them and, by the time you get them, they're past being a kid. They're out of college; they're in their early 20's, into their 30's, playing for you.
There's a fascinating piece of the book where you talk about, as a coach, the way you all drafted players and, for that matter, why and how you didn't draft certain players based upon their character. Talk about that.
Dungy: Well, character was very important to us. I think it's a talent that you can measure just like height, weight and speed and it's something that we did look at when I was with the Colts, when I was with the Buccaneers.
We'd go back and talk to the junior high teachers, coaches, high school coaches, try to get a feel for players if they were gonna be a good teammate, they were gonna be a person that was gonna be good in our locker room, they were gonna be good in our community because that was important to all of us at the Colts. We wanted to win, but we also wanted to represent the city the right way.
As you say, so many young men now don't grow up with their dad in the home. So many of them look at our players as kind of their role models and we wanted to have the right type of young men be those role models. So that was important to us.
Tavis: I don't mean to cast aspersion on the players by using this word, but how much of coaching in the NFL these days is about babysitting?
Dungy: It's not babysitting so much, Tavis, as it is direction. I used to talk sometimes in our team meetings and I'd kind of branch off and talk about life and decision-making and going to nightclubs and being careful, you know, the things that, you know, my dad told me when I was 16 or 17.
It didn't take me long to realize that a lot of these guys hadn't heard that. So when I think I'm maybe reviewing stuff, some of it they're just hearing for the first time. They'd come up and ask questions, "Hey, Coach, why do you say that? Tell me about your thought process and why it's dangerous to be out this way and what to be on the lookout for."
You realize that some of the things that I took for granted that I got from my father and my uncles, you know, when I was 13 or 14, these guys didn't always have. So I don't think it's necessarily, as I say, babysitting, but as coaches, we shouldn't be afraid to give direction in life. I think that was part of our job.
Tavis: Can you count the number of times, can you count the number of times, that you've been in sessions with players, counseling or in the locker room or on the field, for that matter, and you said to yourself, although you may not have said it to the player, "If I had gotten this kid when he was 13 or 14, I could've straightened that behavior out then?"
Dungy: Well, you know, I tell people that all the time. I speak at a lot of clinics and things where you talk to high school coaches. They say, "Man, I wish I had your job. If I could just get in the NFL."
I often think to myself, "I wish I had your job. I would love to have these guys at 12, 13, 14, 15, like my junior high coaches that directed me, like my dad had me," and you would feel like you could really make an impact. Sometimes we could make an impact, but many times our guys, their lifestyle was set already.
Tavis: I want to turn the corner in just a second and talk about these African American coaches or the lack thereof, to be more exact about it. But back to the book, "Uncommon." The book starts out in a very powerful way.
I'll let you tell it in short here. You start the book by talking about two young men. One went one way, one went the other way. Actually, they both ended up in trouble. I'll let you tell the story.
Dungy: Yeah, two really, really good friends of mine both made mistakes in their teen years. One of them was a young, white boy who was raised in rural Indiana, two parents, everything going for him, kind of the way you would hope to be raised, got involved with alcohol, experimented with marijuana, had a DUI and killed some people in a traffic accident, ended up being sent to prison when he was 18.
Another young man was an African American young man raised by his mom in the city of Indianapolis, went to our church and was just very gifted, gifted pianist, composing music, playing classical music, on scholarship in college and had a gambling situation, needed to get some money back quickly and made a decision to rob somebody to pay this gambling debt back. Both of these young men end up in prison before they're 20 years old.
They're both super-talented kids that you would want to have as sons-in-law, but they're both convicted felons now and trying to find their way through our court system and our prison system. Too many times, that has become the standard. That's become the norm in our country and, in some way, we've got to reverse that trend.
Tavis: Let me close our conversation, Coach, by sharing a full-screen graphic here of a piece of an editorial that you wrote for "The New York Times." It got a whole lot of folk in the country talking, given the role that you've played as an African American head coach and Super Bowl champion in the NFL. Let me read to this quote to our audience here.
"You wouldn't think that in 2009 it would be more likely for an African American to become President of the United States than to be hired as head coach of a top-20 football program, but that seems to be the case." What do you make of that? Again, you got a Black man in the White House and you can't find Black coaches in college football.
Dungy: Well, I think it's a shame really. I've been focused for so long on the National Football League and we had that issue for years. You know, when are we gonna get Black head coaches? We seemed to kind of leap over that and do a pretty good job of getting that going, but I'm just amazed when I look at the college level now, at the top programs in the country where the colleges are supposed to take the lead in social affairs.
They're supposed to be out front and they're lagging behind the NFL in terms of minority hiring. I think our young student athletes should have an opportunity to see minority leadership on the sidelines and it's just a shame that we don't have that right now and, hopefully, we can go to work on that.
Tavis: In the State of Oregon, as you well know, they either have just passed a law or about to sign into law a new rule that says you have to interview college coaches who happen to be African American when there's a vacancy similar, I guess, to the Rooney Rule in the NFL. Is that the answer here or is there another answer you think we need to be looking at?
Dungy: Well, I said at the end of that piece that I don't think we need special procedures. I think the colleges just have to step up and do what's right. There's a lot of pressure and, from talking to athletic directors and presidents who've had to make those decisions, they've got pressure, they've got boosters, they've got alumni.
But just look for the best people and say, "You know what? Our whole university deserves this, our whole college atmosphere and, if we go out and hire the best person, we're gonna get our share of minorities." It's not a problem finding them. It's not a problem uncovering this talent. These guys are out there.
Tavis: It must make you feel good, though, that three of the guys who used to coach for you who all happen to be African Americans are now head coaches in the NFL and one of them, of course, having just won the Super Bowl.
Dungy: Well, that's the discouraging thing about the college process. Lovie Smith, Mike Tomlin, these were guys too that I've recommended to college athletic directors when they were working for me. "Hey, you're looking for a head coach in college? These guys are tremendous."
They've been hired in the NFL. They've shown what they can do, but they weren't able to get that opportunity in college, which is the disappointing thing. But it does make me feel good that, once these guys have gotten the opportunity to show what they can do, they've been phenomenal.
Tavis: I'm gonna let you run, Coach. I'm not sure that I'll ever see you on a sideline again as a head coach. We'll see what the years and what the future brings. But it may be more likely, as I think about this conversation, to see you coaching on a high school or junior high sideline than in the NFL maybe (laughter).
Dungy: There's probably a better chance of that, Tavis. There probably is.
Tavis: I'll leave it at that. Tony Dungy, Super Bowl-winning head coach of my hometown Indianapolis Colts. The new book is called "Uncommon: Finding Your Path to Significance." Great subtitle, great book. Coach, as always, honored to have you on. Take care of yourself, man.
Dungy: Thank you very much, Tavis. Great being with you.
Tavis: Appreciate you coming on.
Back to March 13, 2009