CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In June, just after a Carolina Panthers practice had wrapped up, head coach Dave Canales gave the longest locker room pep talk of his life.

It took five hours.

No one immediately won or lost after this speech, however. Canales was filming a commercial.

The NFL asked Canales, the NFL’s only head coach of Hispanic or Latino descent, if he would star in a public service “get out the vote” non-partisan advertisement for Latino voters.

“I was honored to do it,” Canales said in our interview. “It was pretty organic, because I’m the only (current) Latino head coach in the league. So I was kind of their guy.”

What became a 30-second ad that has been running on television and on social media took five hours of setup and filming, with Canales giving his short speech over and over again in the visitors’ locker room at Bank of America Stadium in front of actors who were portraying a locker-room audience of potential Latino voters.

The 43-year-old Canales gave his “voting is important” speech in a mixture of Spanish and English, trying to urge the audience — and, by extension, all Latino voters — to cast a vote in the November election. Sample line: “As fans, we know that football is a game of inches. Well, democracy is a game of voices.”

Canales is bilingual, and he grew up in a bilingual household in California with his parents and his two brothers. Chuckled Isaac Canales, Dave’s father, in a phone interview: “We pretty much spoke English about 80% of the time at our house. And then we’d revert into Spanish about 20% of the time, particularly when my wife and I were talking about secrets. So if they (the three Canales boys) wanted to know what was going on, they had to learn some Spanish.”

Dave Canales also spoke Spanish regularly at his grandparents’ house, where it was the predominant language. His grandfather Miguel immigrated from Mexico as a child, became a U.S. citizen and an Army veteran and established a Spanish-speaking church that figures prominently in the Canales family history.

“Basically, you could call me fluent,” the head coach said of his Spanish-speaking ability. “Like if I was in a Spanish-speaking community somewhere, I’d be able to speak Spanish to everyone and kind of gather whatever information I would need. ... When it gets more specific, like American football, there’s just terms I don’t know, particularly in a real formal way. To be a public speaker in Spanish — that’s not something I could do right now.”

His father, though? Isaac Canales has spoken in front of crowds of 75,000 people, which partly explains his son’s gift for communication. Since Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated from mid-September to mid-October in 2024, let’s take a closer look at Dave Canales’ background, with the help of both the coach and his father, Isaac.

A grandfather who came from Mexico

The Canales family journey to America began with Dave’s grandfather — Miguel Canales.

As Dave Canales described it to me: “So my grandpa and his brother got on a train, made their way through California and ended up with my great-grandmother (who had already moved to America and was getting remarried). But she died pretty young, like in her 30s, of an illness.

“So when that happened, they were kicked out of that house because (their stepfather) was a man they didn’t know, and they weren’t his kids. And so they kind of bounced around relatives and friends in the Bakersfield (Calif.) area, just trying to find a place to sleep. They were about 14 and 12 at the time. And they just worked in the fields, picking cotton, grapes, all types of produce. And that was probably the next 10-12 years.”

Miguel Canales eventually gained his American citizenship by serving in the military. “So in World War II, he actually was sworn in as a U.S. citizen in Africa,” Dave Canales said.

Miguel Canales would eventually meet and marry his wife, Lupe, and in 1959 they established The Mission Ebenezer Family church in Carson, Calif. It still exists today. Miguel was its first pastor, and then his son Isaac served as a pastor there for 44 years before his retirement. Now Josh Canales, Dave’s older brother and a former college baseball player at Florida and UCLA, is its senior pastor.

“Josh laid down his baseball glove and picked up his Bible,” as Isaac Canales put it.

‘All work is noble’

Dave — or Davey, as his father calls him — is the second of three brothers in the family of Isaac and Ritha Canales. The third is Coba Canales, who is now the dean of students at Azusa Pacific, a private Christian college in California that is also Dave Canales’ alma mater.

Dave remains close to his parents and said his entire family had the value of work instilled from an early age. “I think that there’s a lot of pride in the Mexican-American culture that kind of revolves around work,” the coach said, “and that was something my grandpa and dad taught us. My dad taught us that ‘all work is noble.’ If you get offered a job of any kind, that’s a chance to take ownership of something. And so our people really take pride in that. If there’s work, we’ll find it and we’ll do it. There’s no job too little. There’s no job too great. And that goes hand in hand (with Canales’ coaching career). Because I started as a quality-control coach, and there’s a lot of thankless jobs that you do early on.”

It is Isaac Canales, now 74, whom Dave and his wife Lizzy keep encouraging to write a book. As a child, Isaac Canales had both polio (contracting it before the polio vaccine existed) and gangrene. He had several surgeries and came close to dying. Because of polio, he never has had full use of his right arm. He was an indifferent student in high school and was able to graduate “only by the skin of my teeth,” he said.

Isaac Canales then tried community college in California for a while, but he kept getting in trouble. He said he was briefly thrown in jail several times for various minor offenses.

“I wasn’t evil,” he said. “I was just mischievous.”

Isaac Canales and Promise Keepers

At one point in his late teens, Isaac Canales said, he harbored suicidal thoughts. He contemplated taking his life most seriously, he said, after he and a friend found “a revolver we found inside of the glove compartment of a car we had stolen.”

But Canales instead found Jesus and the church. He would go on to college in California, and this time he excelled. He then was admitted into Harvard, where he graduated from the prestigious institution’s Divinity School. It was while at Harvard that he met his future wife, who was a nurse at the time. They would return to California, where Isaac Canales became one of the leaders of the church his father (and Dave’s grandfather) had established.

After a couple of attempts, Isaac Canales persuaded his dad to add an English service, and today the church conducts services in both Spanish and English each Sunday.

As a pastor, Canales caught the eye of the organizers of “Promise Keepers,” a conservative Christian organization founded by former Colorado football coach Bill McCartney that emphasizes ministering to men. He would sometimes speak at the Promise Keeper events, which in the early 1990s often filled football stadiums.

“Dad would travel with Promise Keepers as an emcee,” Dave Canales said, “and then sometimes they might have a scratch (in the speaking lineup). Someone was sick or couldn’t make it. My dad would always volunteer to speak. So I was able to see him speak in front of 75,000 people in Miami and watched him speak to about 80,000 people at the (Los Angeles) Coliseum.”

The Christian element of his upbringing certainly rubbed off on Dave Canales, who has co-written a faith-based book with his wife Lizzy called “This Marriage? The question that changed everything.”

The book was published in 2022 while Canales was with the Seattle Seahawks, and goes deep into his previous personal failings and how the couple has worked through those and other issues. Dave and Lizzy Canales have four children, who now all go to school in Charlotte. Although Canales is the only current Hispanic head coach in the NFL, he’s not the first the Panthers have employed. Ron Rivera, the winningest coach in Panthers history, directed the team from 2011-2019.

What Dave Canales learned from his dad

Something else that Canales got from his father, he said, was the idea of volunteering for more work and last-minute speaking gigs.

“I was never afraid to offer myself up for more responsibility and for bigger opportunities,” Canales said. “I never shied away from the big moments. ... Even though they were a bit scary at times. I would always volunteer and say, ‘I’ll do it’ and then figure it out, and grow that way by being vulnerable and taking risks. And I learned that from my dad.”

Canales was an assistant coach in Seattle, then the offensive coordinator with Tampa Bay (for only one year, in 2023) and now is in his first year as the Panthers’ new head coach. His team is struggling, with a 1-5 record so far in its first season. Canales’ most controversial decision came in September when he decided to change quarterbacks, benching former No. 1 draft pick Bryce Young and promoting 36-year-old veteran Andy Dalton after just two games.

Still, Canales is an eternal optimist and is convinced it will all work out with the Panthers eventually. And he is cognizant of the fact that this opportunity would never have worked out at all had his grandfather not taken that train from Mexico long ago.

Said the coach: “I take a lot of pride in the fact that my dad stands on the shoulders of my grandparents, and I stand on the shoulders of my dad.”

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