Tony Dungy: Enough strength to share
Tony Dungy lived through a nightmare, and now works to help others do it, too.
By RICK STROUD, Times Staff Writer
Published October 7, 2007
TAMPA -- Tony Dungy finally got a ride on his players' shoulders last February after the Colts won Super Bowl XLI in Miami.
But he spends most of his time lifting others up.
"Where do you live?" Dungy asked. "Give me directions and I'll be there right away."
A grieving father poured his heart out through the telephone line only days before Dungy was scheduled to return from Tampa to Indianapolis to begin preparing for training camp.
Jerry Tomasello had just buried his 27-year-old son, Scotty, who was killed in a one-car accident July 14 near Longwood.
Although he was a complete stranger, the pain Tomasello felt was all too familiar to Dungy. Three days before Christmas in 2005, Dungy's 19-year-old son, James, hanged himself in his Tampa apartment.
Dungy has a wife, Lauren, five children and very little time to spend with them. He had just wrapped up a whirlwind book tour and returned from a fishing trip when he learned of Tomasello's fate through a family acquaintance.
Jerry, 63, is a hard-working man who operates his precision sharpening business out of his truck. Scotty was a big college football and NFL fan who loved the Bucs and hated when Dungy was fired and landed with the Colts.
But when Dungy came through the door that afternoon, Jerry didn't see him as a football coach.
"We believed in God and heaven, but we were scared," Jerry said. "I saw Tony as an angel sent to tell me my boy was all right."
The two fathers hugged and prayed together. Dungy spent about 90 minutes with Jerry, his wife, Dora, son Brandon, 36, and more than a dozen other family members.
Tomasello is not the only stranger Dungy has comforted. There's a high school coach in Texas whose son committed suicide, the Iowa truck driver whose son died in a motorcycle accident, an Indianapolis youth who lost his mother and brother in a car accident. Probably hundreds more. Nobody knows, because Dungy never talks about it.
"Really, what you're doing is you realize how much you got from other people, how much encouragement you got," Dungy said. "And when you hear about something like that, you just want to take five minutes and just encourage somebody and say, 'Hey, it's not the end of the world. Life goes on. It happened to us.'"
That's the first lesson Dungy learned after James died. He's not alone. Unfortunately, the Tomasello family had to be reminded of it again.
Scotty, who grew up in Tampa and attended Chamberlain High School, made friends easily and had just taken a promotion as a manager with Chase in their credit card department that forced him to move to the east coast of Florida. "Everybody loved him," Jerry said.
Scotty had been visiting a friend who was vacationing at Universal Studios. They stayed up late talking past 4 a.m., then another hour by the car in the parking lot. He stopped at a McDonald's at 5:15 a.m.
About 45 minutes later, Scotty must have fallen asleep at the wheel of his Honda Civic on I-4 near State Road 434 in Longwood. He woke up startled to see the vehicle running off the road and overcorrected.
The Civic overturned and Scotty -- who was not wearing a seat belt -- was thrown from the car and pronounced dead at the scene. The Florida Highway Patrol estimated his car was traveling at 85 to 90 miles per hour at the time of the accident.
The only thing crueler than what happened to the Tomasello family is that it has happened before.
In 1979, 6-year-old Jason Tomasello had a rare form of bone cancer. He battled ferociously through doses of chemotheraphy and doctors were hopeful it was under control. But Jason's heart just gave out.
"Right before he died, he said, 'Daddy, I'm scared,'" Jerry recalled. "I said, 'Jason, you know how much daddy loves you? Well, Jesus loves you a million, jillion times more than that.'"
Then, one month after Jason died, Dora became pregnant with Scotty. As a baby, he was the spittin' image of Jason.
"I told Tony that story," Jerry said. "I said after Jason died, if God came to me and said, 'I'm going to help you with your pain and give you another son, but you will only have him for 27 years. Do you still want him.' I would say, 'Of course I want him, give him to me.' Tony said he felt the same way about James."
Dungy spoke candidly about James' death with Jerry. He recounted his conversation a few years earlier with former Bucs quarterback Trent Dilfer, whose 5-year-old son, Trevin, died of an infection near his heart. Dungy remembers asking Dilfer, who is Christian, how he could go through something like that and maintain his faith? Dilfer told Dungy, "You would, too, if you ever had to go through it."
But what about the Tomasello family? Two sons lost. All those dreams passing with them.
"It's just unbelievable," Dungy said. "And that's another thing that helped me. You kind of think, 'Oh, nobody could have it as tough as you do.' And then you realize that people can and they somehow get through it.
"There's not much that you can do other than tell people that life does go on and it does get better."