My mother’s side of the family also gave me plenty of godly heritage. Her parents were God-fearing people of high integrity who died before I was ten. My mother was a phenomenal storyteller, and from her I learned the importance of illustrating a lesson with a word picture. She taught Sunday school every week, and usually, as with her Jackson High lessons, she practiced her Sunday school lessons on us Thursday or Friday night. I knew a ton of Bible stories before I could even read a Bible—a rich heritage.
As far back as I can remember, I understood who Jesus was, that He died because of the things I had done wrong, and that I could go to heaven if I asked Him into my life. I’m guessing I was about five when I first learned that. Despite the Christian lifestyle my parents modeled for me, a real understanding of what it means to make Jesus the Lord of my life—number one in my life—wouldn’t hit home until many years later, when I was in the NFL in Pittsburgh.
I can’t place a value on the lessons I learned and on the faith my parents imparted day after day after day.
Actually, I can; the value is eternal.
Chapter Three: A Black Quarterback
The LORD doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.
—1 Samuel 16:7
I WANTED TO BE A SPARTAN. My dad may have been a Wolverine when he was an undergrad, but after my parents finished earning their graduate degrees in East Lansing, I returned to Jackson as a huge Michigan State fan.
Both as a sophomore and as a junior, I started at quarterback on the Parkside High School varsity football team, and I had very good seasons both years. As a team, we were fairly good, although when I was in tenth grade, we lost our last game of the year to Jackson High School, my mom’s school. We remedied that loss by beating them my junior year.
Although basketball was my favorite sport and I hadn’t given much thought to playing football in college, it wasn’t out of the question. And if I ever did play in college, I knew it would be for Duffy Daugherty at Michigan State.
But then, following our win against Jackson at the end of my junior season, I quit the high school football team. I was seventeen years old and pretty sure I knew more than my high school football coach, and I was prepared to take a stand.
Quitting wasn’t a devastating blow for me. After all, basketball was my primary sport, and we were having a great season. Besides, sometimes making a statement means personal sacrifice, and I was prepared to make mine by quitting the football team.
Today I have a tremendous relationship with Dave Driscoll, my high school football coach. But it wasn’t always that way. And if it weren’t for an assistant principal who took an interest in me, I’m sure my life would have unfolded quite differently.
Leroy Rocquemore was an African American administrator at our predominately white junior high school. Although he took a personal interest in all the kids, he seemed to pay special attention to the African American boys. He wanted to make sure that we grew as people, not just as athletes. He often took us to basketball games and to movies, or sometimes he simply had lunch with us. Many times he brought us into his office to talk about things other than school. In short, he cared. For two years at Frost Junior High School, I got to know Mr. Rocquemore as more than just an administrator. He was a friend, and when I moved up to Parkside High, he continued to keep tabs on my friends and me.
One of my closest buddies was Bobby Burton, a receiver. The two of us had been starters on the varsity team since our sophomore season and were the leading offensive players on the team. We had just finished the football season of our junior year at Parkside, and it had been a pretty good year, all in all.
Coach Driscoll’s policy was for the team to vote for the following year’s captains at the end of the season. The winners would be announced at the fall sports banquet in November. That year, I was elected as a team captain. Bobby wasn’t.
I just couldn’t understand this. It seemed obvious to me that both of us should have been the captains.I could only think of one explanation: for some reason the school didn’t want two black captains. It seems impossible now, but at the time it didn’t. Parkside’s football team had never had two black captains, and no one could convince me that those votes had been counted correctly.
I was hurt and felt certain that a race-based injustice had been done. Reacting to the hurt I felt for Bobby—as well as for myself and for all of the black players—I quit the team. I told Coach Driscoll that I was just going to play basketball my senior year. Basketball was my favorite sport anyway.
Of course, I was a fairly good player, a popular student, a newly elected captain, and the quarterback, so the other African American players decided they were going to quit the football team too. I hadn’t really thought about that possibility when I decided I wasn’t going to play, but it didn’t bother me at the time. I figured everybody had to make his own decision.
My dad, of course, said I had to do what I thought was best. But, as he always did, he wanted to know what I was going to do to improve the situation. He wanted to know what I could do to make things better, rather than just reacting. But I was seventeen, and I didn’t care if the situation got better or not. My feelings were hurt. Bobby’s feelings were hurt. And I was so focused on playing basketball in college that I didn’t think I would miss football in the least.
The player walkout began after the postseason banquet in November and continued through the rest of the school year. At the end of the summer, when the team was preparing to go back to practice, Mr. Rocquemore invited me to his house. He had already talked to me a couple of times about my decision to quit football, but I think he wanted to give me one more chance to reconsider.
“Tony, you enjoy playing football, and these other guys enjoy playing football. You should have your senior year to play, and so should they. At the end of the day, what are you really upset about, anyway?”
I began to answer, but he continued, talking over me without waiting for a response. I hadn’t realized his question was rhetorical. “Even if the issues are that important, should they spoil the fun that all of you should be having playing football as seniors? Thirty years from now, you don’t want to look back and say that you missed out on something you really loved doing.” Then he asked the question he really wanted me to answer. “Why would you let anything stop you from doing what you have the ability to do?”
Although by then I was convinced he was right, I had always had quite a temper, and my pride just wouldn’t allow me to back down. Practically speaking, I could understand Mr. Rocquemore’s point, but from a moral standpoint, I was still pretty sure I was in the right. Plus, at seventeen (and even at fifty-one) pride and hurt feelings can be pretty overwhelming emotions.
Mr. Rocquemore knew I would have trouble asking Coach Driscoll if I could return, so he said he would talk with him and do his best to smooth everything over. “I’ll tell him you want to play and make everything all right. Don’t worry about it.”
After he spoke with Coach Driscoll, Mr. Rocquemore arranged for the three of us to meet. Coach was a very principled guy, and he set the tone for the meeting.
“Tony, you can come back, but you’ve missed winter conditioning, and you’ve missed our summer workouts. So you guys”—he knew if I came back, the others would also come back—“are going to have to do some extra stuff to earn your way back.” He mentioned extra running, washing the dishes at camp, and so forth, as his requirements “if I’m going to let you back.”
When he had finished, I think the only thing I had heard was, “if I’m going to let you back.” I was getting mad, thinking, If he’s going to let me back? I started to get visibly upset, and Mr. Rocquemore gave me a look—it was the same look I would later give John Lynch during a press conference before the 1999 NFC Championship Game in St. Louis—that kept me quiet and in my seat. But all the while, even Mr. Rocquemore was thinking, Now why did Coach have to go there?
After the meeting,
he took me aside and said, “Coach is the coach, and you’re the player, and there are times in life when you’re going to have to do certain things. That’s just how it goes. That’s a lesson you’re going to have to learn to get through life.”
In the end, we all went back and worked our way back onto the team. It was a great year—we only lost one game, the de facto state championship game (they didn’t have playoffs in those days). Even more important, today I have a great relationship with Coach Driscoll. In fact, he came to Super Bowl XLI to see me, and we shared an emotional hug at our Saturday practice before the game.
I see now what I couldn’t as a strong-willed teenager, thanks to the firm hand of Coach Driscoll and the gentle guidance of Mr. Rocquemore. If Mr. Rocquemore hadn’t taken that interest in me—not merely as an athlete and a student but as a friend—everything would have been different for me.
When my friends and I left him and went to high school, he didn’t stop caring about us. If he had, I wouldn’t have played football my senior year, and many doors never would have opened for me later in life. He took a step he didn’t have to take, and I listened to him based largely on the relationship he had worked to develop with me. I use this principle all the time now that I’m coaching.
That experience also taught me about the downside of making quick decisions. To this day, I’m very deliberate—probably too deliberate at times—when I can afford to take the time to sort through a decision-making process.
* * *
Something got in the way of my vision of playing football for Duffy Daugherty at Michigan State: he retired. But his 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.
* * *
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 coaches do the coaching.
Coach Stoll held a meeting with the freshmen every year. During the course of our meeting, he asked, “Every one of you thinks you are going to play in the NFL, right?” Every head in the room nodded. He pulled out a photograph of the freshman team from five years prior. The guys who made it to the NFL were circled.
“Him. And him,” he said, pointing to the picture. “Two of them made it. Out of thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-five, whatever we’ve got this year, one of you will go on to play in the NFL. Or if you’re lucky, two. You’re going to have to outwork everybody in this room and then catch a break in order to make your living in the NFL.”
Of course, we each thought we were going to be that one, but I must admit, this did make an impression. Coach Stoll went on to talk about our education and preparing for the rest of our lives—lives without football. Since I was just days removed from my parents’ home, that message resonated with me.
He continued, “Success is uncommon and not to be enjoyed by the common man. I’m looking for uncommon people because we want to be successful, not average.”
Listening to Coach Stoll, I knew I had a greater chance of becoming uncommon by my efforts than I did by my natural gifts. Some players are uncommon because of their God-given natural abilities, like being blessed with the height of Yao Ming or the vertical jump of Michael Jordan. Others have to work to become uncommon. Steve Kerr of the Chicago Bulls shot five hundred free throws a day to make himself uncommon.
The truth is that most people have a better chance to be uncommon by effort than by natural gifts. Anyone could give that effort in his or her chosen endeavor, but the typical person doesn’t, choosing to do only enough to get by.
That lesson was still fresh in my mind a few weeks later when we took the field in Columbus for Minnesota’s season opener against Ohio State. As we warmed up, Coach Stoll assured us that we could win even though we were heavy underdogs. After a few minutes, the Ohio State players emerged to a big roar from the crowd. I turned to Larry Powell, a highly touted freshman running back, and proclaimed, “Powell, we can get these guys. Look at ’em. They’re not as big as I thought they’d be.”
Five minutes later, Ohio State’s offensive and defensive linemen came out of the tunnel to join the rest of the team, and I realized that those initial fifty guys were only their skill-position players.
Larry turned to me and spoke slowly, drawing out every word. “Tony . . . I don’t know how we’re going to do today.”
The halftime score was 35–7, on the way to a final of 56–7, Ohio State. Coach Stoll calmly confessed after the game that he didn’t have a speech for that situation.
So much for
my spectacular introduction to college football. I did get in the game for a few plays toward the end, but most people were watching an Ohio State sophomore running back who started making history that day. Archie Griffin began his thirty-one-game streak with at least one hundred yards rushing in each game. Incidentally, his last game in that streak also came against us, in 1975—my junior year.
I got hurt late in my sophomore year of football, and that caused me to give up basketball after only one season. It was actually a good decision; the demands of playing both sports at a high level while keeping up academically were really more than I could handle.
Although most of my college football memories are positive, some of the clearest include close losses in games that we had a chance to win—later games against Ohio State and Michigan immediately come to mind. In addition, it was during these years that I realized I needed to make some decisions about my own personal values.
Like most underclassmen, I wanted to fit in. Many of the guys I played football with went out for a few beers at night or went to campus parties, which always included drugs and alcohol. Throughout high school I had never known anyone—anyone, that is, who was an athlete or serious about taking care of his body—who drank, smoked, or took drugs. No one I respected, anyway.
That changed at the University of Minnesota. There, guys who were performing at very high levels athletically also drank, smoked, and used various illegal drugs. Some coaches from other sports knew about it and even encouraged players to take their recruits to area bars.