Is a Foul Mouth Fair Play in Sports?

My favorite coach in all of sports - Tony Dungy - was recently invited to visit my favorite team in all of football - the New York Jets. I would have considered this a fantastic event in the course of my sports fanaticism, if not for the auspicious circumstances that created this rendezvous. Rather than having two football "institutions" uniting to discuss game strategies or share thoughts on personnel decisions, the purpose for this meeting was a bit more unusual. Apparently it was to debate the appropriateness of using F-bombs and other profanity within the context of motivating professional football players.

The Jets have been my team since the early Joe Namath years. My entire family loved Broadway Joe, albeit for different reasons. My mom loved his bright blue eyes, my dad loved his ability to throw the bomb to Maynard, and my older teenage brothers loved the rebelliousness of Namath's long hair, Fu Manchu moustache and unconventional white cleats. I loved everything about Namath, including his zeal to win. And I've been loyal to the Jets since I was 8 years old; even before Joe Willy delivered on his brash prediction to win the '69 Super Bowl.

My admiration for Tony Dungy, the retired head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, has a more recent origin. As Dungy achieved mounting success as a head coach for Tampa Bay, and later led the Colts to their Super Bowl championship in 2006, his growing fame exposed his unique brand of "Nice Guy" coaching which was clearly the exception to the nasty, hard-nosed styles that were so typical of the gridiron culture. Dungy broke the mold, and single handedly became the most literal example of why Nice Guys Finish First, and in doing so defied the conventional wisdom which assumed that such an approach could never succeed in the tough-guy world of football.

For those of you who missed the news blurb behind this Dungy-Jets get-together, it all stemmed from the airing of HBO's "Hard Knocks" episode which featured the Jets training camp, and captured 2nd-year Jets head coach Rex Ryan dropping more than a few F-bombs during one of his team meetings. In a radio interview, Coach Dungy - now an NFL broadcast analyst - publicly criticized Ryan for his liberal use of profanity. Ryan later defended himself and reached out to Coach Dungy to plead his case and invite Dungy to his training camp to see "what we're all about." Dungy accepted.

The hard part for me as a Jet fan is that while I have the utmost admiration and respect for Tony Dungy, I really like Rex Ryan too. And it's not just because Coach Ryan brought an unbeatable defensive scheme to the Jets to improve their Super Bowl chances. It's because he also brought an irrepressibly upbeat attitude to the team and an unwavering support for his players. The bond between Ryan and his players is obvious; he relates to them, makes it fun for them and they respond with respect and mutual support for their coach. In that regard - and with no shortage of irony - it's why I think that Coach Dungy and Coach Ryan actually have a lot in common. On the surface, this contention clearly seems preposterous. The much easier task would be to argue that Coach Dungy and Coach Ryan are two of the most antithetical figures in coaching.

Perhaps Not So Different

Coach Dungy is reserved, dignified and emotionally composed. He personifies the notion of "calm coaching," regardless of the stressful circumstances of the game. He's the son of parents who were both educators, an influence that - along with his devout Evangelical Christian beliefs - clearly helped shape his coaching philosophy and his emphasis on high ethical standards of behavior. Oh, and at age 55 he still looks fit as a fiddle.

Rex Ryan was cut from football cloth, the son of coaching legend Buddy Ryan. You could say that Rex is a typical "man's man," and a big one at that (he recently underwent gastric surgery to help combat his obesity). He keeps things loose and tells it like it is. He's spontaneous and not emotionally composed. And the concept of "dignified" doesn't seem to be high on his list of personal priorities. For example, he started last season challenging an opposing player to a fight, and later unabashedly exposed his belly on national TV while changing his shirt in the middle of a hockey game, and then happily flipped the bird to a bunch of taunting Dolphin fans at a martial arts event (which, of course, was caught on camera). He's brash and almost arrogant in the amount of confidence he exudes during press conferences on behalf of his team. On the surface, he's everything that Tony Dungy is not, and vice versa. So where's that ironic common ground between the two?

Well for one thing, they are universally admired and respected by their players. And they both achieve this admiration through the concept of reciprocity; in other words, their players feel that they are treated in a way that they want and deserve, and so they respond in kind to their coaches. Their methods are obviously packaged quite differently, but what's delivered to their players is not all that different. Coach Ryan professes his "K.I.L.L." philosophy; a quintessential Ryanesque acronym that simply stands for Keep It Likeable and Learnable. Coach Dungy believes that coaching is really an educational calling, and that family and faith should always come before football. That sounds pretty close to "likable and learnable" to me. It's just that Ryan serves it up with bravado, back-slapping and cussing, while Dungy delivers it with dignity and maturity. But in neither case is the focus on coercing and humiliating players into performing.

To know anything about Coach Dungy is to understand why he would speak out against the use of profanity in football. He's spent a lifetime trying to discredit the stereotypes of the abusive, foul-mouthed militaristic coaches, and would see no point in changing that consistent course in his retirement. And while Ryan's players defended their coach's language as par for the course, and something they've heard since their childhood days in Pop Warner football, that merely reinforced Dungy's point: shouldn't we be setting a better example for our kids in athletics? My guess is that Dungy and Ryan will come to a meeting of the minds on this matter. After all, they have more in common than meets the eye.