Suicide

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript

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Victories in the Midst of Tragedy

Day 3 o 3

Guest: Tony Dungy

From the series: Quiet Strength

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Bob: Tony Dungy, the coach of the Indianapolis Colts, has known tremendous success and joy as a football coach. He has also known profound loss and suffering as a dad.

Tony: My pastor in Pittsburgh had a great lesson on that when we were a young married couple. He said, "You know, James and Peter were in prison, and the church prayed for both, and James got beheaded, and Peter got released." Both of them were God's will, and we can feel badly for James, and I'm sure they all did, but God had a plan for that, and so that's how I've kind of looked at it – as painful, you never want it to happen, but how can you move on, how can you make the situation better?

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Friday, January 18th. Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. We will hear today how Coach Tony Dungy has dealt with the tragedy of the loss of his son to suicide. Stay tuned.

And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us on the Friday edition. This is a real treat, isn't it?

Dennis: It is a real treat. Coach Tony Dungy joins us again – welcome back, Coach.

Tony: Thank you very much. It's great to be with you.

Dennis: Congratulations, again, on your Super Bowl victory of a year ago, and …

Bob: I've got my fingers cross for this year, all right? I don't know if that does any good, but …

Tony: We'll take it.

Dennis: We're getting in trouble with listeners because this broadcast is heard in every state across the land.

Bob: I know, and I grew up …

Dennis: There are some other people who are fans for other teams, you know.

Bob: I grew up in St. Louis, so I really don't have anything to cheer for this year, so I'm [inaudible] Colts fans.

[laughter]

Tony: Well, we appreciate it. We'll take them all.

Dennis: Yeah. Well, Coach, there is an event that you're a part of and have been a part of for a number of years called the "Super Bowl Breakfast." My friend, Bill Pugh, and yours as well, along with Athletes in Action, host this on the day before the Super Bowl. It's a gathering of, I don't know, 1,500, a couple of thousand people, in a magnificent setting, to honor football players who have character, and they give an award called "The Bart Starr Award," which is just a – it's a great event. I've attended it a couple of times, and a couple of years ago you found yourself on that stage speaking in a situation that you didn't think you would find yourself in whatsoever. You had helped start a ministry called "All Pro Dad," you were helping dads be better parents, and yet your own son, Jamie, had taken his life.

I want you to listen a clip that we have from that breakfast and what you said, and then I want to ask you to take us to what you were thinking and feeling as you made those statements a couple of years ago.

Tony: [from audiotape.] But I think the most important lesson that I've learned about the Lord, I learned from my oldest son, James. As you heard, James would have been 19, but he died right before Christmas. James was a Christian, and he was, by far, the most sensitive, the most compassionate, of all our boys. As most teenage boys today, James was getting a lot of messages from the world that maybe that's not the way to be, and he was struggling very much with how you should respond to the world, and he ended up taking his life right before Christmas, and it was tough. It was very, very painful.

But as painful as it was, there were some good things that came out of it. When I was at the funeral, I talked about one of my biggest regrets. James was home for Thanksgiving and was leaving and going back to school and going back to work, and just the normal process. You don't think about it. I said, "Hey, I'll see you later." My daughter took him to the airport, we just exchanged, "See you later," and that was the last time I saw him.

I talked to him on the phone a lot, but never saw him again, and I shared at the funeral that my biggest regret was that I didn't give him a big hug the very last time I saw him.

I met a guy the next day after the funeral, and he said, "You know, I was there, I heard you talking, I took off work today, I called my son, and I said, 'I'm going to take you to the movies, and we're going to spend some time and go to dinner.'" That was a real, real blessing to me.

We were able to donate some of James' organs to Organ Donors program. We got a letter back about two weeks ago that two people had received his corneas and now can see. We got a letter from a girl in our church who had grown up with James, and she said, "We've been going to the same church in Tampa for all these years. I sat there in church every Sunday but never really knowing if there was a God or not. I came to the funeral because I knew James. When I saw what happened at the funeral, and your family and how it was handled, that was the first time I realized there has to be a God, and I accepted Christ into my life, and my life's been different since that day."

[applause]

And that was an awesome blessing. So all those things have kind of made me realize what God's love is all about. But here is the biggest part of that – if God had had a conversation with me and said, "I can help some peo...