Gold Jacket Spotlight: Tony Gonzalez conquered fear, flipped ‘anger switch’

In his book, “The Blood and Guts, How Tight Ends Save Football,” author Tyler Dunne writes that TONY GONZALEZ was “scared of everything; the dark, ghost, bullies,” during his childhood in Huntington Beach, California. Tony often shared the stories of those fears.

The focus of this week’s Gold Jacket Spotlight is Tony’s transition from fearful youth to feared tight end to enshrinement into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

In junior high, Tony experienced, as he described to Dunne, “mind bullying” by a ninth-grader.

“When I was in the eighth grade,” Tony told Dennis Miller on an episode of the “Larry King Now” talk show, “I had this bully come down from the high school, and he wanted to beat me up. I don’t know why. I hid from him.”

“This went on for months. It got even worse, all the way up until my (junior high) graduation. He shows up to my graduation. I get scared, and I go and hide after graduation is over,” Tony continued.

“I was hiding behind a wall, and my family came up. They had the most disappointed look on their face(s) that I’ve ever seen. My mom looked at me and just didn’t say a word. She was just giving me that look like … just disappointed look.”

“I said to myself in that moment that I’ll never see that look on their face again. That’s never going to happen. It was an instant moment in my life where that ‘innocent little Tony’ is gone forever. Meaning (where) I was going to let fear control me.”

Moving past the fear of the bully and into the ninth grade, Tony decided to try out for the high school team.

“First day of pads,” Tony told Miller, “I play against one of the best guys on the team, and we hit each other like little bulls and that fear popped up, and I said, ‘Not this time,’ and I went through it and it changed my life. I got this.”

Tony professed to Dunne, “I found that anger switch. You have to take your mind to a place in order to be competitive, really competitive. I never had that attitude; I had to build to that.”

Along the path to developing that competitive space in his mind, Tony was a two-sport athlete and letterwinner at the University of California-Berkeley.

His Cal Athletics Hall of Fame biography offers the statistics of his 82-game college basketball career, during which Tony averaged 6.4 points per game and 4.3 rebounds per game.

On the football field, Tony earned All-PAC-10 accolades and first-team All-America recognition by Football News and The Sporting News following his junior season.

Tony opted for the NFL following that season and was selected in the first round by the Kansas City Chiefs.

Dunne described that upon Tony’s arrival at the Chiefs he was viewed as a basketball player and that he would, once again, have to conquer a bout of fear to become successful.

Taking his dedication to “a new level,” Tony expanded his knowledge of the tight end position.

That knowledge led Tony to a 17-season NFL career that included six AP first-team All-Pro selections and 14 Pro Bowl trips.

That new level?

According to Dunne, former NFL linebacker and current FOX NFL Analyst Jonathan Vilma once described Tony’s game as, “Like watching art. There were faster tight ends, more explosive tight ends, but nobody lulled defenders to sleep quite like Gonzalez.”

NFL writer Aaron Schatz told NFL Films, “He is so much farther ahead of other tight ends in his career numbers, and he is so transcendent receiving-wise and for such a ridiculously long period of time. He is the best ever. Period.”