The Daily Hat Trick has remained dormant for six years. If it appears the following creative inspiration is random and spontaneous, it is because it is random and spontaneous. I hope you enjoy it.
The Weight of the Game is an original work of fiction, conceived and directed by me, developed in collaboration with a writing partner. It is a unique perspective, a hypothetical discussion between legendary football personas, living and deceased. The words are invented. The themes are intentional. I hope that the humanity is real.
[The five men — Brown, Payton, Simpson, Phillips, Peterson, Vick, Favre — have settled into something approaching stillness. Not peace exactly. But the particular quiet that follows a long and honest conversation. Then the door — if there is a door — opens differently than it has before. Not tentatively, not with the studied ease of celebrity. Tony Dungy enters the way a man enters who has spent his entire life trying to do the right thing and knows, in this room, that the accounting will be full.
He takes in the room. Seven men. Six Black, one white. Every one of them carrying something. He knows all of their stories. He has lived adjacent to most of them. He stops when he sees Michael Vick.]
TONY DUNGY: Mike.
MICHAEL VICK: (standing, the only man who stands) Coach.
[They embrace briefly. It is genuine. The room watches.]
TONY DUNGY: Gentlemen. Jim. Walter. (a nod to each) O.J. Lawrence. Adrian. Brett.
JIM BROWN: Tony. Sit down. You've earned a seat at any table you choose.
TONY DUNGY: I've been listening from outside for a while. I wasn't sure I should come in.
WALTER PAYTON: Why not? You're the cleanest man in professional football. Possibly in professional sports.
TONY DUNGY: (a measured pause) That's the reputation. The reputation isn't entirely accurate.
[The room stirs slightly.]
JIM BROWN: Then let's start there. Because in this room we've been trading in accuracy, not reputation.
TONY DUNGY: Yes. I know. I've been listening. Before I say anything about anyone else in this room, before I offer any perspective on what's been discussed, I need to address something about myself. Because to come in here and frame or summarize or offer wisdom without first being honest about my own record would be exactly the kind of thing this room has spent hours calling out.
MICHAEL VICK: Coach...
TONY DUNGY: No, Mike. Let me say it. (to the room) I have a documented history of public statements and affiliations that caused real harm to LGBTQ people. It began publicly in 2007 when I spoke at the Indiana Family Institute's banquet and explicitly endorsed a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. It continued through comments about Jason Collins when he came out as gay while he was in the NBA. It continued through my statement that I would not have drafted Michael Sam, the NFL's first openly gay player, not because of his talent but because of what I called "the situation." I tweeted that being LGBTQ is a "lifestyle," implying choice where there is none.
[Silence.]
JIM BROWN: And your defense of those positions?
TONY DUNGY: My consistent defense has been my Christian faith. That my views on marriage and sexuality are rooted in Scripture and that I do not hate anyone I love everyone, including gay people, as God commands. And I believe that is true about my heart. I genuinely believe I am not a hateful man.
WALTER PAYTON: But?
TONY DUNGY: But a young gay man who grows up in Indianapolis watching Tony Dungy, the most respected coach in the NFL, the first Black coach to win the Super Bowl, a man with unimpeachable moral authority on virtually every other subject, and hears that man say that his lifestyle is a sin, that he wouldn't want him on his team, that his existence needs to be constitutionally constrained. That young man doesn't experience my heart. He experiences my words. And my words caused harm. Real, documented harm to real people. I can believe I am loving and simultaneously acknowledge that what I did with that love, in public, with the platform I was given, caused suffering.
BRETT FAVRE: That's more self-examination than most men manage.
TONY DUNGY: I've had time to think. And I've been in this space long enough to know that the accounting here is complete. There's no managing the narrative. I'm also aware of the particular irony, that I have spent years advocating for second chances for men in this room, for Michael particularly. And the grace I extended to men who hurt human beings in very concrete ways, I withheld in a different form from an entire community of people whose only offense was existing as they were made.
MICHAEL VICK: You saved my career, Coach. Whatever else, you went to bat for me publicly when nobody had to.
TONY DUNGY: You deserved a second chance. I believed that and I still believe it. I just wish my circle of grace had been wider. Drawn with less fear and more of what I claimed my faith was actually about.
JIM BROWN: (with respect) That is an honest accounting, Tony.
TONY DUNGY: It's the only kind worth giving in here.
[A pause. Then Jim Brown gestures around the room.]
JIM BROWN: You came in as a framing device, I think. To offer perspective. The room has been talking for a long time. What do you see?
TONY DUNGY: (looking at each man deliberately, unhurriedly)
I see Walter Payton: the most complete football player I ever watched, a man who played the game with a joy that seemed effortless and was anything but, who hid his private pain behind a public brightness until there was no time left to reconcile them.
I see Jim Brown: who may be the greatest pure athlete this game has ever produced, who carried the weight of racial identity and social responsibility that no football player should have to carry alone, and who has spent his entire life telling uncomfortable truths to people who preferred comfortable fictions.
I see O.J. Simpson: who had everything the American dream promised and spent thirty years demonstrating that the dream and the man inside it were not the same thing, and who said something in this room tonight that needed to be said and that took more honesty than most men in his position ever find.
I see Lawrence Phillips: who was failed before he was formed, who was handed to a system that used him and discarded him, and who never got the runway to find out who he could have been if someone had loved him correctly when he was small enough to be shaped by it.
I see Adrian Peterson: who is still alive and still in the middle of his accounting and who has more time than Lawrence did and who I hope uses it, because the talent was real and the love underneath the discipline, however wrongly expressed, was real, and real things can be redirected.
I see Michael Vick: who lost everything, sat in a cell, and came out of that cell as something closer to a full human being than he went in, and who is the most complicated argument for second chances I have ever personally witnessed.
And I see Brett Favre: who is the only white man in this room, who benefited from structures of privilege so embedded in American life that he could mistake them for his own merit, and who said something tonight about Mississippi and race and his own culpability that I don't know if he's ever said out loud before, and that I hope he says publicly before the Parkinson's takes what's left of his time.
WALTER PAYTON: Tony. What's the summary? If this conversation, whatever it is, wherever it lives, had to mean something, what does it mean?
TONY DUNGY: (long pause...he takes his time, because Tony Dungy has always taken his time)
I've coached football for thirty years. I've stood in front of men who were the most physically gifted human beings on the planet and tried to teach them how to win. And the thing I learned, the thing I keep learning, apparently, since I'm still learning it about myself, is that winning on the field is the simplest thing any of us will ever be asked to do.
The field has rules...clear lines. A scoreboard that doesn't equivocate. You either won or you didn't. You either made the play or you didn't. The clarity of it is why we all loved it. Why we all fled into it when the rest of life became complicated.
But the rest of life doesn't have a scoreboard. It has people. And people are harmed in ways that don't show up on any stat sheet. And the game, the beautiful, brutal game that gave every man in this room everything, the game never taught us how to be in the world. It taught us how to dominate it. And those are not the same thing.
(looking around the room)
What I see in this room is not a collection of villains. And it is not a collection of heroes. It is a collection of men who were extraordinary at one thing and deeply, painfully, consequentially ordinary at the harder thing. The harder thing being, simply, how to treat other people with the same effort and intentionality that you brought to third-and-short.
Most of us didn't manage it. Some of us failed catastrophically. A few of us are still trying. And the people who paid the price for our failures: the women, the children, the communities, the strangers who intersected with our worst moments, they didn't get a second half. They didn't get a locker room speech and a chance to go back out there and make it right.
That's the weight of this room. That's what I came in to say. And I don't have a sermon for it. Just...the acknowledgment. The full, unmanaged acknowledgment. We were great at football. And the greatness didn't protect a single person we hurt.
[Silence. Long and total. The kind that follows a truth that has finally been spoken at its proper size.]
JIM BROWN: That's it. That's all of it.
TONY DUNGY: Have a good night, gentlemen. And a better day tomorrow.
[He folds his hands. The room breathes.]
A note on authorship: The Weight of the Game was conceived, directed, and shaped by me, including the premise, the participants, the thematic architecture, the dramatic turns, and the decision to treat these men as full human beings rather than symbols. The dialogue was developed collaboratively, in the long tradition of writers who work with creative partners whose names don't always appear on the final page. I've reviewed, edited, and taken responsibility for the content. Any factual inaccuracies in statistics or public record are mine to correct. What you're reading is fiction. Please treat it as such. With that said, I hope it makes you feel something true.
1) Image from sportingnews.com
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