Quiet Strength by Tony Dungy, Nathan Whitaker Read Free Book Online

retirement opened up a number of possibilities in my mind. I considered playing basketball at Duke or Arizona, where my friend Bob Elliott was headed. I also thought about the University of Southern California for football. I had gotten to know a number of players on different recruiting trips, including Gary Jeter, a high school All-American from Ohio. Wayne Fontes, who was then a USC assistant coach as well as their national recruiter, invited me—along with Gary Jeter and Marvin Powell, another future star—to spend a weekend at Southern Cal.
    Although I couldn’t make the trip to USC, the visit really impressed the other guys, who called me during the weekend. “Tony, you’ve gotta come here!” Gary said. “You won’t believe it—they’re gonna put us in the movies, in Hollywood! They took us over to the Sunset Strip. This place is really something!”
    The pitch worked for them. They ended up at USC but didn’t have time for the movies, since Gary and Marvin kept busy with football in college and then went on to play in the NFL for thirteen and eleven years, respectively.
    Meanwhile, another coach had warned me about Southern Cal. “You’ll never play quarterback,” he said. “Their quarterback lived with the coach. You can’t possibly beat him out.” I initially chalked this up to negative recruiting. But sure enough, when I did some research, I found that Pat Haden, USC’s sophomore quarterback, had lived with head coach John McKay’s family while he was in high school. I scratched USC off my list.
    Cal Stoll, the second-year head coach at the University of Minnesota, actually presented the most intriguing opportunity for me. Cal had coached the wide receivers at Michigan State under Coach Daugherty, and I saw joining his program at Minnesota as the closest thing to playing at Michigan State. Plus, two coaches I really liked—Woody Widenhofer and Tom Moore—were doggedly recruiting me to Minnesota.
    Minneapolis was closer to Jackson than Southern Cal—but not too close. And the city seemed to be home to a large number of Fortune 500 companies. Although I wasn’t sure what line of work I would end up in, I figured that an education, plus summers spent working for some of those companies, would yield lifelong dividends.
    At Minnesota, I could play both basketball and football, which wasn’t possible at most of the other schools I was looking at. Playing more than one sport was a fairly new thing at the time, although Quinn Buckner had done it at Indiana University during my senior year of high school. He had been named the Chicago High School Player of the Year in both football and basketball, and he continued in both sports at IU. I thought I would like to play both as well, and Minnesota was one of the few schools that was open to the idea of their quarterback also playing basketball.
    Woody Widenhofer was the best recruiter I had ever seen. He attended almost every one of my basketball games my senior year, and we became lifelong friends. But shortly after I signed with Minnesota, Coach Widenhofer resigned and joined the Pittsburgh Steelers. Tom Moore stayed at Minnesota as the quarterbacks coach, and it was from him that I learned the same offense we run together in Indianapolis today. It was a perfect fit for me and my skills because it allowed me to call much of the game and think while I was out on the field.
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    Coach Cal Stoll at Minnesota was one of the first CEO-type coaches. Most of the coaches I had seen previously, such as Coach Driscoll, coached either the offense or the defense in addition to performing the duties of a head coach. Coach Stoll did not. He wasn’t one of those tower-type coaches like Bear Bryant at Alabama, who was far removed from the field. Coach Stoll, like Coach Daugherty had done at Michigan State, hired great teachers as his assistants and then gave them the latitude to coach. He set the vision and direction, motivated the team, and then let the assistant