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Excerpt from story on Mike Singletary featured in Dad's Magazine premiere issue.
Former SuperBowl-winning Chicago Bear Mike Singletary is still an imposing figure, even thought he's been off the playing field for more than a decade.His gaze is equally as penetrating as the days when he was known as "Samauri" Singletary. His compact, hard-as-nails physique still seems poised for attack. Yet his mission now is not to crunch heads or disable opponents, but to send a strong message of the need for strong father images within the home and society.
Singletary knows all too well the importance of a father figure from his own painful childhood experience. Abandoned by his father at very early age, he watch as his mother struggled to raise 10 children. As the youngest and the smallest, it would have been easy for him to feel left out, but his mother, wisely, worked to help him overcome that feeling. "Even though I was the smallest, she made me feel that I could do anything," Singletary noted. |
"When I say everybody else in my family was big, I'm not exaggerating. My former teammate, William 'The Fridge' Perry, would have felt right at home in my family, because everybody, including my mother, looked more like him than like me. In fact, people used to even wonder if I was really my mothers' child."
Singletary also had the benefit of an older brother, who stepped in to provide the type of father and mentor role that he came to rely on during his hard, growing up years. That combination of a mentoring brother and a hardworking, supportive mother helped fill the void left by an absentee father. It also gave him a deep insight into himself that would fuel his desire to succeed through a championship-crowned football career and beyond.
"At 12 years old, my life really began," Singletary recalled of his childhood, "because someone sat me down to let me know that I was valued, that I was needed. You know, as I travel around, there's not a lot of people who feel that counseling, where it's very obvious that someone along the line didn't make them feel valued any more. They felt that they were just in something that they had to be in. They feel like they're in something, not because they love each other so much, but they're there because of the kids.They're there because of the house.
"There's very few relationships where people are together because they feel very necessary or very valued. And there's one thing I try to give my kids -- I've got seven of them; five girls and two boys -- the thing I try to convey every day of my life to them is that I need you and we are a team. "The neatest thing about playing in the NFL was being a part of the team. When people ask me what I miss, I always say it's the camaraderie.Once you leave, you don't miss the game that much, but you do miss those relationships."
Singletary says he's learned to take the lessons he learned in the field directly into his home life. "My challenge is to treat those around me like teammates, to make them feel needed, make them feel valued. I feel that by doing that with my children, just maybe their lives will begin. Just maybe I'll see something in them that I've never seen before."
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