“I wasn’t born a leader,” Mike Singletary says. “I became one.”
He became one on the field. As a middle linebacker for the Chicago Bears, he led that team in 1985 to one of the most dominant seasons in the history of the National Football League, including a Super Bowl win. He was named NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1985 and 1988. A standout at Baylor University in the early 1980s, Singletary was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995 and to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1998. And in 1999, Sporting News magazine ranked him among the 100 greatest football players of all-time.
Then, after his playing career ended in 1992, Mike Singletary became a leader on the sidelines, joining the Baltimore Ravens as linebacker coach in 2003. In 2005, he was hired as assistant head coach and linebacker coach for the San Francisco 49ers. At the end of the 2007 NFL season, his name began to surface as a possible candidate for several open head coaching jobs.
But Singletary took on his most important leadership role when he decided to make his family a priority. He and his wife, Kim, have seven children. And leading his family as a father, he says, is one of the biggest challenges he’s ever faced. “You can’t replace anybody,” he says, noting the difference between his home “team” and a football team. “They’re who you’ve been given. They’re always going to be there, and it’s constantly changing. As the kids change, the parents have to change as well. To me, it’s much easier to go out in the corporate world — or even to lead a football team to victory — than [to lead] my family.”
It wasn’t until later in his career that the distinction even became that important to him. As revealed in his book, Daddy’s Home at Last, Singletary wasn’t always a full-time family man. He spent several years as a self-absorbed athlete before his transformation into a devoted husband and father. “It’s a matter of choice,” he says. “It’s a matter of being intentional.” As a player, he saw the escalating divorce rate in the NFL and knew he had to change before becoming another statistic. “You can become your environment or you can resist your environment. I resisted it, and it made me make a choice. I wanted to have a great family. I wanted to be a great dad. I wanted to look in the eyes of my wife and know that she loved me, and for her to know that I loved her.”
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