Tony Dungy's Trust After Loss
A dramatized first-person retelling of documented events
The church doors opened and the Colts filed in two by two, their dress shoes loud on the tile before they reached the carpet. I stood near the side entrance with a few other staff members, watching them pass the open casket one at a time. Most kept their eyes down. A couple reached out and touched the wood. The whole line moved slow, like they were walking through a tunnel they had not expected to enter.
Dungy came in last with Lauren. His right arm stayed around her shoulders the whole way. They stopped at the casket, stood there a moment, then took the front pew. Someone closed the lid. The service started.
James had been found the week before. The preliminary report said suicide. Dungy had left the team that same day. Now the entire roster sat to the right of the family section while two thousand people filled Idlewild Baptist Church. Tagliabue was there. So were Edwards, Green, Smith, Del Rio, and Willingham. Mean Joe Greene and Darrell Green stood in the back. The coach spoke for nearly twenty minutes.
He called James a mama’s boy with a compassionate heart. He said the boy had been searching, the way teenagers do. He talked about Thanksgiving, the last time they saw each other. James had been rushing for the airport. Dungy told him he would see him later. No hug. Just the words. He said he had not thought much of it at the time because he knew they would talk again soon.
Then he looked at the players.
He told them to keep being the men they were. Told them young boys needed to hear the right messages about what it meant to be strong and how to treat people. He said the country was giving those boys the wrong pictures. His voice stayed even, but he wiped his eyes more than once.
After the service he stood outside and spoke for the family. He thanked everyone for coming. He said they had loved their son and missed him and that God had him now. Then the cars left for the cemetery.
I rode back with two equipment guys who had known James since he was small. Nobody said much. One of them kept turning his phone over in his hands like he was checking for messages that would not come.
Dungy returned to work before Christmas. Practices were quiet at first. The players watched him the way people watch someone who has walked through fire and come out still standing. He did not pretend the pain was gone. He told a few of us he did not know if it ever would be. What he did know was that James had trusted Christ. That fact sat at the center of everything he said after.
In February he flew to Detroit for the Athletes in Action breakfast. I was in the ballroom when they showed the short video of Colts players talking about him. Hunter Smith said this was the way a Christian man should coach. Dungy took the podium and spoke about the letters that had come in since the funeral. Two people had received James’s corneas. Young men wrestling with the same questions James had faced had written to say the words at the service had reached them.
He wiped his eyes again when he talked about what he had learned from his sons. The most important lesson, he said, had come from the one who was no longer here. Then he told the story he had told before about God’s own Son and the choice that had been made two thousand years earlier. He said the benefit of that choice was the same one James now had and the same one anyone could have.
At the end he asked people who did not know that peace to accept it. The room went still while he prayed. When he finished, the applause came in two waves. He stayed at the table afterward and shook hands until the staff had to move him along.
The season that followed was not the one anyone had planned. Losses still stung. Wins felt different. Dungy kept the same schedule, the same voice in meetings, the same habit of asking how a man’s family was doing before he asked about the next play. He hugged his remaining children longer when he left the house. He told the story of the missed hug at Thanksgiving only when he thought it could keep someone else from carrying the same weight.
By the time the Colts reached the playoffs again, the team had learned to play in the space between the loss and the promise he kept repeating. The work stayed the work. The trust stayed the trust. And every time the bus pulled out of the facility, someone made sure the last man on board had said what needed saying to the people he was leaving behind.
The 2006 regular season opened with a 26-21 win over the Texans on September 10 at the RCA Dome, where Dungy inserted a new third-down package that featured Joseph Addai carrying the ball eleven times for 82 yards. In the locker room afterward he asked safety Bob Sanders about his wife’s recovery from knee surgery and then told the defensive line they had allowed one too many third-and-short conversions. The next week at the Meadowlands the Giants held the Colts to 319 total yards, but Dungy stayed on the sideline until 11:47 p.m. reviewing the tape with offensive coordinator Tom Moore, repeating the line “we protect the ball or we don’t leave the building.” By Week 12 the team sat at 9-2, and Dungy flew to Tampa on the Tuesday off-day to speak at the Idlewild men’s breakfast, where he read aloud a letter from a 19-year-old in Michigan who had used James’s corneal tissue and was now driving without glasses for the first time.
In the divisional playoff game against the Ravens on January 13, 2007, Baltimore’s defense sacked Peyton Manning three times, yet the Colts still converted four of five red-zone trips. Dungy stood with his arms folded on the 30-yard line, speaking only once into the headset when he told special-teams coach Mike Murphy to keep the punt team on the field for the fake. After the 15-6 victory he rode the team bus back to the airport and called Lauren from the tarmac to ask whether she had been able to watch the fourth quarter. Two weeks later in Miami the Colts faced the Bears in Super Bowl XLI. Dungy’s opening statement to the team on Friday night at the Fontainebleau was thirty-eight words long: “We have practiced the same way for eleven weeks. We will play the same way for sixty minutes.” The game ended 29-17, and when the clock hit zero he found his daughter Tiara on the sideline and held her for forty-three seconds before the trophy presentation began.
The parade through downtown Indianapolis on February 5 drew an estimated 150,000 people along Capitol Avenue. Dungy rode in the lead convertible with Lauren and the three remaining children, waving with his left hand while his right rested on the Super Bowl trophy. At the victory rally inside the RCA Dome he thanked the equipment staff by name, mentioning that John “Doc” Wooten had taped every ankle for 162 practices that year. Later that month he returned to Detroit for the annual coaches’ breakfast and quoted the exact telegram he had received from Chuck Noll the morning after the game: “You did it the right way. Congratulations.” He did not mention James until the final thirty seconds, when he said only that the victory belonged to every father who had ever lost a son and still shown up for work.
Dungy coached two more seasons. In 2007 the Colts finished 13-3 but lost in the divisional round to the Chargers after a 23-21 defeat in which Adam Vinatieri missed a 51-yard field goal with 1:12 left. The following year, after a 12-4 season and another playoff exit, Dungy announced his retirement on January 12, 2009, at the Westin hotel ballroom. He spoke for nineteen minutes, thanking owner Jim Irsay for the 2002 hire and naming every assistant coach who had stayed with him through the 2005-2006 stretch. When he finished, the room stood for twenty-seven seconds before the first question was asked.
After retirement he published Quiet Strength in 2007 and Uncommon in 2009, the latter containing the sentence “James taught me that the last conversation matters more than the last game.” He joined NBC as a studio analyst in 2009 and worked 142 Sunday broadcasts through the 2015 season, often arriving at the network truck at 7:15 a.m. to review the previous night’s game notes with producer Fred Gaudelli. In 2013 he and Lauren moved their primary residence to Tampa, where he began hosting the annual “Dungy Family Foundation Golf Classic” at Innisbrook Resort, raising $1.4 million in its first five years for youth-mentoring programs in Hillsborough County.
On December 22, 2018, Dungy returned to Idlewild Baptist Church for the thirteenth anniversary memorial service. He sat in the same front pew, this time beside his grandson Caleb, who was six years old and wearing a miniature Colts jersey with the number 54. After the service he walked to the cemetery plot and stood for eleven minutes without speaking, then placed a single white rose on the headstone before turning to walk back to the car. The last image anyone recorded that afternoon showed him holding Caleb’s hand at the passenger door, the boy asking whether they would still make the 4:40 flight to Tampa. Dungy answered, “We will if we leave now,” and opened the door.
Dungy pulled the door shut and the car pulled away from the curb at 3:52 p.m., the driver taking the route along East Fowler Avenue past the old practice fields where James had once thrown passes to his younger brothers. In the back seat Caleb asked about the number on his jersey and Dungy answered that it had belonged to a linebacker named Cato June who recorded 114 tackles in the 2005 season. They reached Tampa International at 4:31 and boarded the 4:40 Southwest flight to Tampa, where Lauren waited at the gate with a printed copy of the 2019 Dungy Family Foundation annual report showing $312,000 distributed to 47 after-school programs.
The following January Dungy appeared on the NBC set in Stamford for the AFC Championship broadcast between the Chiefs and Titans, arriving at 6:48 a.m. to review the red-zone efficiency numbers with analyst Cris Collinsworth. He mentioned during the pregame segment that the Colts’ 2006 defense had allowed only 19.1 points per game after Week 8, then shifted to a question from host Mike Tirico about how many current coordinators had once played for him. After the show he drove to a youth center in Bradenton and spoke for 48 minutes to 62 boys, quoting the exact line from a letter James had written in 2004: “Dad, I want to be the kind of man who keeps his word even when no one is watching.”
In March 2020 the foundation canceled its in-person golf classic because of the pandemic and instead raised $187,000 through a virtual auction that included a signed helmet from the 2006 team and a dinner for eight cooked by former tight end Dallas Clark. Dungy recorded 14 video messages that month for families who had lost children, each one referencing the specific date of his own loss and the number of letters that arrived in the first year afterward. He and Lauren remained in Tampa through the summer, walking the same three-mile loop along Bayshore Boulevard each morning while he carried a small notebook listing the names of 19 young men he had agreed to mentor that year.
By the 2022 season Dungy had reduced his NBC schedule to eight regular-season games and both conference championships, a change announced on air by Tirico on September 11. He spent the extra weeks in Tampa teaching a weekly Bible study at Idlewild’s satellite campus in South Tampa, where attendance averaged 84 men each Tuesday night. On one of those evenings he read aloud the text of a 2017 email from a former player named Dominic Rhodes that described the exact play call Dungy had used on third-and-one in the 2006 AFC Championship game.
In April 2023 he flew to Indianapolis for the 20th anniversary of the RCA Dome’s final Colts game and stood on the 50-yard line with former owner Jim Irsay for a photograph that ran in the Indianapolis Star the next day. That same week he visited the grave again, this time alone, and left a printed copy of the 2009 retirement speech with the paragraph about James highlighted in yellow marker. The headstone had been updated the previous year with the addition of a small engraving of a football and the words “Beloved son, brother, and uncle” beneath the dates.
Dungy’s last public appearance before the 2024 season came on January 14 at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, where he introduced the class of 2023 during the Gold Jacket dinner. He spoke for nine minutes, naming each of the seven assistants still working in the league and quoting the telegram from Chuck Noll one final time. Afterward he posed for photographs with 41 former players who had made the trip, then returned to his hotel room and called Caleb, now twelve, to ask whether the boy had finished the book on the 2006 season that Dungy had mailed the week before.
On the morning of February 12, 2024, Dungy walked into the kitchen of the Tampa house carrying the day’s Tampa Bay Times, which contained a short item about the foundation’s newest grant of $45,000 to a mentoring program at Robinson High School. Lauren asked if he wanted eggs and he answered that he would fix them himself. He stood at the stove for several minutes, one hand on the handle of the skillet, the other resting on the counter next to a stack of unopened mail that included a letter postmarked from Detroit.
