Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  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.”

  A few days before James’s death, the Colts had suffered their first loss of the season after starting 13–0, ending their bid to be the first team to get through a regular season with a perfect 16–0 record. Dungy missed the next game in Seattle and then returned less than one week after the funeral for the final game of the regular season and then a crushing playoff loss to the Steelers.

  All these years later, Dungy is reluctant to say much about the agony he and Lauren went through after their son’s suicide. He had spoken quite eloquently for twenty minutes during a gut-wrenching two-hour funeral service less than one week after James died. There were two thousand mourners at the Idlewild Baptist Church in Lutz. The entire Colts team attended. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and four past and present NFL head coaches were there: Edwards, Lovie Smith, Jack Del Rio, and Dennis Green.

  “Parents, hug your kids every chance you get,” Dungy told the congregation. “Tell them you love them every chance you get because you don’t know when it’s going to be the last time.”

  The last time he saw James was when he dropped him off at the airport in Indianapolis around Thanksgiving. He didn’t have a chance to give him a hug, and that always bothered him. He figured there would be a next time. In one of their last phone conversations, James asked his father if he would get to be on the field in Detroit if the Colts made it to the Super Bowl. Tony assured him he would but cautioned that the Colts had to get there first.

  “We loved our son very much, he loved us, and we miss him terribly. James was a good young man with a compassionate heart, and we were glad to have him for eighteen years,” Dungy said at the funeral. “God has him now for the rest of eternity.”

  His faith and his family helped him get through it. His football team, too. During the service, he specifically addressed his players.

  “I want to urge you to continue being who you are because our young boys in this country, they need to hear from you,” he said. “If anything, be bolder in who you are. Because our boys are getting a lot of the wrong messages about what it means to be a man in this world. About how you should act, and how you should dress, and how you should talk, and how you should treat people. They don’t always get the right message, but you guys have the right messages.”

  During training camp the next summer, Dungy explained to USA Today how he was coping with his son’s death. “It’s human nature to grieve, and you’re going to have some pain,” he said. “But then the choice is how you handle the pain. You can choose to go on and fight through it, or you can choose to succumb to it. You can’t make the feeling go away. There’s no Novocain or anything that can just take it away. You begin to realize that you can still function, you can still move forward.”

  Dungy mourned the loss of James but did not make himself feel guilty
. He didn’t second-guess selecting the demanding occupation of being an NFL head coach. It didn’t change the way he approached his job after taking some time off. He was still an available father. His hours remained the same. Dungy always felt there was more he could do with his life than coach football, but he enjoyed the game, enjoyed influencing young lives. A few weeks after James’s death, the Colts’ dream of winning the Super Bowl ended in a surprising loss to the Steelers. “A couple of big disappointments,” Dungy said after the game. “Obviously, this one doesn’t rank anywhere close to the last one.”

  Just one year later, Dungy was standing in the rain in Miami. “I just have to say how sweet this is,” he said. “It’s tough to win. It’s tough to win the Super Bowl.”

  The coaching fraternity is small. The jobs are coveted. They are hard to get and harder to keep. Each year at the NFL owners meetings, a group picture is taken of the thirty-two head coaches. There are significant changes to the picture every year. Some years, there is a massive overhaul with ten new faces. In a year when the owners are not in the frame of mind to pay off existing contracts, maybe there are five new faces. That’s still a lot. At the league meeting in the spring of 2012 in Palm Beach, Florida, the only coach in the picture representing the same team he did in the 1999 photo was Philadelphia’s Andy Reid. That was Reid’s first year with the Eagles. He was a surprising hire from the talent-rich staff that Mike Holmgren put together in Green Bay. Reid worked for Holmgren for seven years, the entire time Holmgren stayed in Titletown, USA, until he left to become coach and general manager of the Seattle Seahawks.

  Reid was an unknown to Eagles fans. He had served Holmgren well as his quarterback coach and then assistant head coach, but while he worked closely with Brett Favre, he was never the offensive coordinator and Holmgren called the plays. Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie was taking a leap of faith that Holmgren had prepared Reid to be the head coach in one of the toughest sports towns in America.

  Reid got off to a bad start with the cynical and demanding Eagles fans by selecting Syracuse quarterback Donovan McNabb over Texas running back Ricky Williams with the second overall pick in the 1999 draft. A Philadelphia radio station rented a bus to transport fans to the draft in New York City to boo McNabb when he came onto the stage to accept congratulations and an Eagles cap from the commissioner, Paul Tagliabue. It wasn’t fair to McNabb, but he handled it well. It was just a preview of the inordinate amount of criticism he would encounter during his career with the Eagles.

  Reid, of course, made the right decision. McNabb and Reid were a team until McNabb was traded in the spring of 2010 to the Washington Redskins. In McNabb’s eleven years with the Eagles, they went to five NFC championship games but only one Super Bowl, and they lost that game to the Patriots. McNabb was never fully appreciated in Philadelphia. He never played his best in the biggest games.

  In the days before the Colts played the Bears in the Super Bowl, the lives of Dungy and Reid drew closer together. The unfortunate common denominator was heartache brought about by their children. Reid’s sons Garrett, twenty-three, and Britt, twenty-one, got themselves into big trouble in separate incidents on the same day in suburban Philadelphia while Reid and his wife, Tammy, were vacationing in California. The Reid boys were living at home at the time of their arrests.

  According to the authorities, Britt pointed a handgun at another motorist during a traffic altercation. He later was arraigned on nine counts, including making terroristic threats, possession of a controlled substance, and a felony charge of carrying a firearm without a license. Garrett was involved in a traffic accident, and police found a shotgun and ammunition in the vehicle. He told the police he had used heroin before the crash, and a blood test confirmed that he was under the influence of the drug. Garrett was arraigned on misdemeanor drug and traffic charges.

  Garrett Reid said he didn’t begin using drugs until he graduated from high school, but according to a probation report read in court, his involvement in drugs and dealing was steep. He started with marijuana and alcohol when he was eighteen and then got into the prescription painkillers Percocet and Oxycontin. He progressed to heroin and cocaine and was in drug rehab at age twenty.

  “I liked being the rich kid in that area and having my own high-status life,” Garrett Reid told a probation officer. “I could go anywhere in the ’hood. They all knew who I was. I enjoyed it. I liked being a drug dealer.”

  Andy Reid took a leave of absence from the Eagles on February 12, 2007. He was gone until March 23. Later that year, his sons were sentenced to prison. The judge said the Reid home, in Villanova, Pennsylvania, was a “drug emporium.”

  “There isn’t any structure there that this court can depend upon,” Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill said. He added, “I’m saying this is a family in crisis.”

  The judge said that Andy and Tammy Reid loved and supported their children and had tried to get them help. During Reid’s time away from football, he accompanied Garrett to a drug rehabilitation center.

  It is now more than five years since his sons’ arrests and Reid is running training camp, his fourteenth with the Eagles, in the summer of 2012. Britt had just gotten married and was working as a graduate assistant in Philadelphia with the Temple University football team. His youngest son, Spencer, was a redshirt freshman running back for Temple. Garrett, the oldest, was at training camp with his father, working with the Eagles strength and conditioning staff. That kept him close to Andy and around football. You never stop worrying about a recovering drug addict. Garrett was set to begin classes in sports management in the fall.

  On the morning of August 5, Garrett Reid was found dead in his dormitory room at Lehigh at 7:20 a.m. He was residing in Sayre Park, the campus housing the team uses during training camp. Police received a 911 call and efforts to revive Garrett were not successful.

  “Garrett’s road through life was not always an easy one,” the Reids said in a statement. “He faced tremendous personal challenges with bravery and spirit. As a family, we stood by him and were inspired as he worked to overcome those challenges. Even though he lost the battle that has been ongoing for the last eight years, we will always remember him as a fighter who had a huge, loving heart.”

  The funeral was held two days later. More than nine hundred people paid their respects, including commissioner Roger Goodell, Cleveland Browns president Mike Holmgren, who was Reid’s boss in Green Bay, the entire Eagles team, Ravens coach John Harbaugh and Saints defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, who were former Reid assistants, Colts general manager Ryan Grigson and Browns general manager Tom Heckert, who had worked for Reid in the Eagles front office.

  One day after the funeral, Reid was back at training camp. He had already spoken with Dungy. If there was a coach in the NFL who understood the heartache of Andy Reid, it was Tony Dungy. It was surprising that Reid elected to return to work so quickly, but he gave a simple explanation: “I’m a football coach, that’s what I do, and I know my son wouldn’t want it any other way. I can’t put it to you any more frank than that. He loved the Philadelphia Eagles. I know what he would want me to do.”

  Reid could relate to the emptiness felt by Dungy. Their jobs were high profile and paid extraordinarily well, but that didn’t make them immune to family tragedy. Dolphins coach Joe Philbin understood. In January of 2012, when Philbin was the offensive coordinator of the Packers, his twenty-one-year-old son fell through the ice on a Wisconsin river and drowned. He had marijuana and twice the legal limit of alcohol in his system. The fourteen-year-old son of Ray Sherman, the Packers receiver coach at the time, died of an accidental gunshot to the head in the family’s garage in 2003 as he played with a gun that had been a gift to his father.

  Reid’s players rallied around him. The Eagles fans, who have been tough on Reid for losing four NFL championship games and a Super Bowl, embraced him with chants of “Andy, Andy, Andy.”

  “I’ve watched Andy try so hard with his family over the years,” Eagles own
er Jeffrey Lurie said. “He cares so much about his family that it’s a hard one.”

  He had football to distract him. But none of that would make up for what he lost in Garrett. “Friendship,” he said. “You get these kids and they grow up. You get to the teens, the higher teens, and then the twenties and thirties. They become more than your son—they’re your friend. You’re going to miss that. But at the same time, you gain strength from it. He taught me a lot of lessons in life that I’ll use down the road. You’ll always remember his smile and the jokester that he was. Those help you get through the good and the bad times.”

  Reid is known to be part of the fraternity that works endlessly, spending long hours poring over tape and game plans and turning his office at the Eagles’ headquarters into a studio apartment several nights a week. His five children were born in five different states as he kept moving around to find better coaching jobs. In Philadelphia, he lives only twenty-three minutes from the Eagles’ offices off Broad Street but sleeps in his office four or five nights a week.

  When he worked for the Packers, Reid arrived at his office at Lambeau Field by 4:30 a.m. Gruden, another rising star on Holmgren’s staff, would be there with him. Holmgren felt they competed to see who could arrive first. Reid is a big man. He was twelve pounds when he was born. Between the 2008 and 2009 seasons, he lost eighty pounds and then gained half of it back. He said he was so “huge” that he had trouble walking from the dressing room to the sideline when the Eagles played the Cardinals in the 2008 NFC championship game in Glendale, Arizona. He then lost another twenty pounds. “I tell my wife there is something wrong here. You had the five kids, and it ruined my body,” Reid said.

  Every minute his eyes are open during the season, he’s working. “Do I think this is the healthiest business in the world? The way we go about it? No, I don’t,” Reid said. “You try to do the best you can. Some people do it better.”