Bible lessons from childhood still motivate Tony Dungy

Tony Dungy is highly acclaimed as a Super Bowl-winning coach, broadcaster, author and former assistant coach for the Kansas City Chiefs. Despite his success, however, he has never forgotten the life lessons he learned from his mother.

Her favorite Bible verse was Matthew 16:26, “What would it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” From the time he was a young child, he was taught faith and family over everything else. His mother taught Sunday school class and would practice her lessons on Dungy and his siblings. When he had questions, his mother would listen and show him what the Bible said.

“The Bible became my focal point, and I wanted to grow and learn from it,” he said on the Influencers Podcast. “Even through coaching, I would tell Bible stories and parables to our team.”

Dungy recalls a time when his team was coaching a game in Tampa and was missing many key players, so to encourage them he shared about Gideon’s army. He told his team how Gideon didn’t have many men for battle but still went out and fought the Midianites despite being were outnumbered. At the end of his motivating words, one of the players raised his hand and asked, “So what happened in the story?”

“It never even occurred to me that they may not have known the story,” Dungy said. “So, I said they slaughtered them with just 300 people. They responded to the Bible.”

Through the years, Dungy has coached talented players within a diverse range of individuals. The challenge is pulling them together, teaching them to set aside their individual ways and performance, and focus as a team. This is what makes a championship team.

For Dungy, the fine art of bringing unity to a diverse team is to not lose individual goals, but to filter them through the team goal so everyone goes farther together. He believes a strong team leader can do this in sports, business  and family — put personal goals behind the good of the group.

“A leader has to try to channel everybody’s drive into that,” he said. “I saw it work, and it was awesome.”

–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice