The sparkling numbers on the football resume that got Tony Dungy into the Hall of Fame are his 148 victories, his 66.8% regular-season winning percentage and his 11 playoff trips in 13 seasons as an NFL head coach. The obvious peak in all of that winning was Super Bowl XLI, which his Indianapolis Colts took over the Chicago Bears at the end of the 2006 season, making Dungy the first African-American head coach to raise the Lombardi Trophy.
That '06 campaign is not the only one that Dungy holds particularly close to his heart, however. In the process of working on the speech he will deliver at his August 6 enshrinement in Canton, the former Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach has had occasion to relive his more than three decades as an NFL player and coach, and one of the years that he remembers particularly warmly is 1997.