As the first African-American head coaches in a Super Bowl, the Bears’ Lovie Smith and the Indianapolis Colts’ Tony Dungy are celebrating a milestone they have planned since 1996, and dreamed about long before that.
Friends since Dungy was named head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and hired Smith as one of his assistants in 1996, the two men saw their goals converge when their teams won the two NFL conference championship games on Sunday, setting them on the path to one of the last breakthroughs in major American sports: a black-coached Super Bowl champion.
Baseball and basketball teams have won titles with a black manager or coach, but Smith and Dungy became the first to get into the final game in the 17 years since the then-Los Angeles Raiders made Art Shell the first black head coach of the modern era.
“My generation of kids who watched Super Bowls never saw African-American coaches,” Dungy said. “You could be a player. You couldn’t necessarily be the quarterback. Then you saw Doug Williams play and win. Hopefully, kids now will say, `Maybe I can be the coach one day.’ So that’s special.”
Doug Williams became the first black quarterback to play in and win a Super Bowl with the 1987 Washington Redskins.
There have been nine black head coaches in the NFL’s modern era. The 32 teams currently employ six, including 34-year-old Mike Tomlin, named Monday as coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Like Smith, Tomlin was first hired by Dungy in Tampa. Dungy, a former player for the Steelers and the San Francisco 49ers, got his first NFL assistant coaching job with the Steelers in 1981 and called the timing of Tomlin’s hiring “kind of an unbelievable thing.”
In 1981, Dungy recalls only 14 black assistant coaches on the 28 teams.
“The only way it would change was people who had the opportunity to change it were going to have to,” Dungy said.
Smith, 48, and Dungy, 51, agreed the day will arrive when their story is unremarkable.
“That day is coming,” Smith said. “But of course we’re talking about it now, so it’s not here now. But each year we’ve taken a step, and that’s all you’re looking for. . . . We’ve taken a step in that direction by having Tony and I have our teams in the Super Bowl. In years to come it won’t be talked about, and I’ll look forward to that day.”
At a Chicago news conference where he endorsed Mayor Richard Daley for re-election on Monday, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama said Smith and Dungy present “a good lesson for all of us.”
“To see two African-American coaches go to the Super Bowl when it has been historically difficult for black coaches to break into the NFL is terrific,” Obama said. “But what makes it even better is that they are both men of humility, they are both men of God. They never trash talk. They are not yellers and screamers on the sidelines. They are a couple of class individuals.”
To Dungy and Smith, their story is as much about coaching style as color.
“I know the type of person Lovie is,” Dungy said. “He has the same Christian convictions I have. He runs his team the same way. I know how those guys are treated in Chicago and how they play–tough, disciplined football without a lot of profanity from coaches or a win-at-all-costs atmosphere.”
For years Dungy couldn’t get a coaching job, not only because there were so few blacks in the NFL but also because conventional football wisdom considered him too nice, too polite, too “laid-back” to be successful in a cutthroat, demanding business. Dungy said he shares more similarities than differences with Smith, adding, “Lovie’s probably a little smarter than I am.”
Said Smith: “I would not use `laid-back.’ I think our styles are similar. We try to treat our players as men and we expect them to behave that way. We have certain standards.
“As you look at young coaches coming through the ranks, a lot of them have a [mental] picture of how a coach is supposed to act, and I think what Tony Dungy showed me was that you didn’t have to act that way. Be yourself and just believe in what you know and stay with that through the storms and you can get the job accomplished.”
Tomlin joins Smith, Kansas City’s Herm Edwards and Detroit’s Rod Marinelli as the latest head coach originally brought into the league by Dungy as an assistant.
“Your thought is not just hiring black coaches, but getting good coaches . . . but in my heart of hearts, bringing good African-American coaches into the league,” Dungy said.
Dungy was a highly regarded assistant for 15 years before Tampa Bay named him head coach. Dungy remembers interviewers inquiring about the color of potential assistants or flat out asking, “How many black coaches are you going to hire?” One general manager told him he needed to shave a beard.
“It startled you a little bit,” Dungy said.
He believed the Green Bay Packers once used him as no more than a token minority interview because they told him they were looking for an offensive guy with head-coaching experience. Dungy is a defensive specialist. “I kind of scratched my head,” he said.
Dungy hopes major college football programs will become more proactive in minority hiring. He believes the Super Bowl spotlight will help. He nearly made it here before, losing the 1999 NFC title game as the Tampa Bay coach and the 2003 AFC title game with the Colts.
Others, too, have come close. Shell’s Raiders lost the AFC title game in 1990, the year after he became the first black to coach an NFL team since 1921, when Fritz Pollard of Chicago led the Akron Pros as a player-coach. And Dennis Green, a former Northwestern head coach, took the 1998 and 2000 Minnesota Vikings to the brink of the Super Bowl but lost in NFC title games.
“I think we’ll probably talk this subject to death in the next two weeks, so it will get to the point where we’ll feel we’ve heard it for 100 years,” Dungy said. “Hopefully it will get to the point where we hire the best person.”
Dungy said he had seen four-time Super Bowl champion coach Chuck Noll thrive in Pittsburgh with a much quieter demeanor than the bombastic Vince Lombardi prototype, so Dungy knew his reserved personality should not have been a barrier.
“One guy did ask me, `If you get this job, is this going to be the most important thing in your life? Are you going to treat my team as the most important thing?’ “No, I’m not,” Dungy said. “I didn’t think I was going to get that job and I didn’t.
“But for faith to be more important than your job, for family to be more important, we all know that’s the way it should be, but we’re all afraid to say that sometimes. Lovie isn’t afraid to say it, and I’m not afraid to say it.”
Dungy wasn’t afraid to say Monday that beating Smith in the Super Bowl isn’t the most important thing in life either.
“When you get to this level, it’s going to be a win-win situation,” Dungy said. “We have to battle, and both he and I are going to do everything we can to win. And we’ll feel the other guy had a great year anyway.”
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dpierson@tribune.com
