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Real Answers™
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Copyright: © 2007 Tom Flannery
700 words

LOVIE AND TONY A "SUPER" PAIR

By: Tom Flannery

For the first time ever, a black head coach will be leading his football team to the Super Bowl when Lovie Smith takes the field with his NFC champion Chicago Bears in Miami on Feb. 4.  On the opposing sideline will be his mentor and close friend Tony Dungy, another black head coach, leading his AFC champion Indianapolis Colts. 

It's a truly historic moment in sports, as well as for society at large.  Still, the leading storyline of this Super Bowl goes well beyond race, as both head coaches have acknowledged. 

You see, Smith and Dungy are Christians whose coaching styles are very similar in that they don't yell, curse, rant or rave at players.  They are teachers, not drill sergeants.  They instruct their players in the fundamentals of the game, make sound decisions, and somehow manage to consistently field winning teams wherever they go without the benefit of screaming in players' faces until spit is flying out of their mouths. 

For many years, Dungy has been criticized as being too mild-mannered to ever make it to the big game, much less win it.  In a recent interview, he noted that reporters would often ask him how he expected to motivate players without screaming and cursing at them. 

During his years as head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and since taking over the Colts, his teams have regularly made it to the playoffs and won some big games.  But he hadn't made it to the Super Bowl, so the questions persisted. 

Smith, who worked as an assistant for Dungy in Tampa Bay, has a similarly subdued personality and takes the same approach to coaching as his mentor.  So it's no wonder that the two were rooting for each other to make it to Super Bowl XLI. 

As Dungy put it:  "I'm so happy Lovie got there, because he does things the right way...with a lot of class, no profanity, no intimidation, but just helping his guys play the best they can.  That's the way I try to do it, and I think it's great that we're able to show the world not only that African-American coaches can do it, but Christian coaches can do it in a way that, you know, we can still win." 

And while both Smith and Dungy are proud of their heritage, they do not view everything in life through that narrow prism.  They never used race as an excuse during the difficult times, realizing that would only create a victim mentality that would end up hurting them in the long run. 

Instead, they simply persevered.  They faced the trials, overcame the obstacles, dismissed the stereotypes that some people tried to attach to them and excelled on their own terms — on the basis of their strength of character, hard work and dedication to their craft. 

In the case of Dungy, he has routinely been criticized for not hiring strictly by skin color.  Some black leaders have argued that because it took Dungy so long to become a head coach — due to passive if not overt racism — he was obligated to hire only black assistants to try to "level the playing field."  But Dungy refused, insisting on hiring the best people regardless of their race. 

By doing so, he demonstrated the way to end racial strife.  It won't happen by continually emphasizing and exacerbating racial tensions, but only when whites and blacks do the very opposite — when we begin treating each other simply as human beings, not according to racial classifications; when, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once dreamed, we begin judging people not by the color of their skin but rather by the content of their character. 

This is a Christian principle, as the Baptist minister Dr. King understood, for the Bible tells us that "man looks at [judges by] outward appearances, but the Lord looks at the heart" (I Sam. 16:7).  In other words, it's the inner and true man that matters, not the hue of one's skin or other superficial characteristics. 

The historic success of men of such sterling character as Smith and Dungy shows that we are continuing to move ever closer, however slowly, toward Dr. King's lofty ideal.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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