Tony Dungy: Living Every Parent's Worst Nightmare

Tony Dungy


Today, Tony Dungy is not the coach of the Indianapolis Colts, chasing a Super Bowl dream. He is not the former quarterback at the University of Minnesota. He is not the hard-working assistant who learned how to coach football players under Chuck Noll at Pittsburgh. He is not the man who took the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from the dregs of the league and molded them into Super Bowl contenders.

Today, Tony Dungy is not any of those things. Today, he is a father. He is a husband. He is a grief-stricken man living every parent's worst nightmare.

For those of us with kids, especially, Dungy's tragedy -- his 18 year-old son dead of an apparent suicide -- hits close to home. We have a 12 year-old daughter, and I can assure you that it is impossible not to think of the worst when you bring kids up in today's world. The thought of burying my child scares me senseless.

Dungy's misery resonates even more with me because just last month, my wife's best friend lost her 25 year-old son, a bright, handsome kid, finding him dead on the couch the morning of November 17. Autopsy results are still pending. There is absolutely nothing you can say to a person -- best friend or casual acquaintance -- whose life will forever be altered. I can't imagine going to bed, my son sleeping on the sofa, and awakening to find him not breathing and cold. But that's what happened to my wife's friend. How do you console that?

Tony Dungy's life, like my wife's friend's, will never, ever be the same. It can't be. His football coaching career will continue, I'm sure, probably for many more years. He will, perhaps, one day get some gratification from this season, which was shaping up to be
potentially the most special of seasons. Maybe years down the line. Maybe never.

But this isn't the time to think about football, clearly. I hear people saying, with good intentions, "And around the holidays, tooo," as if there is ever a better time to lose a child. But every parent will tell you -- whether it's Christmas Day or May 16 or August 22, the death of a child is a two-ton kick to the stomach that leaves an imprint on the outside and damage on the inside from which you never truly recover. That kind of grief is similar to battling alcoholism. Time will make it better, and it is a step-by-step process. But just as an alcoholic is always an alcoholic -- the recovering kind, eventually, so is a grieving parent always just that. The pain never dissolves entirely.

When I heard about James Dungy's death, I was sick. To have this happen to Tony Dungy and his family just when it appeared they were riding the crest of a wave with their football team, was perhaps the cruelest reminder that pro football has absolutely nothing on real life.

Sparky Anderson had a sign in his office that said, "Every day the world turns upside down on someone sitting on top of it."

Please include the Dungys in your Christmas prayers.