In his senior year of high school, Mike Singletary was still very uncertain of his future in football. His considerable talent at linebacker had gone largely unnoticed by college scouts. They were infrequent visitors to all-black Worthing High School on Houston`s poor Southeast Side, where the football teams were consistently mediocre. Singletary, striving as always for excellence, could only pray for the Lord to give him some idea of what direction his life might be taking.
During the second game of the season, Singletary was chasing down a ballcarrier on a sweep when a blocker caught him from behind. Singletary`s knee bent backwards with a pop loud enough to be heard across the field.
As he lay on the ground, tearing out clumps of grass and screaming from the worst pain he had ever felt, he could hear Worthing coach Oliver Brown telling another linebacker to warm up. Singletary once again asked his Lord for help.
”Father, only You know what to do. But I`ve got to get up.”
Slowly, surely, he stood and felt the pain subsiding. Brown was getting the other linebacker ready to replace him. Singletary began to sprint up and down the sideline. He cried. He yelled. He begged the coach to let him back in the game.
The coach relented. Singletary had the sign he wanted. He was on the right track. There was no stopping this young man with the drive of a locomotive.
Sometimes, when her youngest of 10 children was a baby, Rudell Singletary would look at him and start crying, as if it were her fault that Mike was sickly. In the middle of the night, when bronchitis or pneumonia made him struggle to breathe, she would rush him to the hospital for a shot. He didn`t eat much, and he didn`t have the strength to play outdoors more than a few minutes at a time.
For the first eight years of his life, until he was no longer plagued by earaches and head colds, Mike`s companions were his mother, her Bible and his imagination. He would see himself as one of the superheroes, especially Batman, or picture himself playing with other kids. The walls couldn`t keep him from looking inward and outward, of thinking about doing unbelievable things–like Batman–once he got well.
Beyond his door existed, unchanging, the Houston neighborhood of Sunnyside. It would be a few years before Singletary learned that people who were born in Sunnyside existed, impassively, and also died there. He was imagining other cities, other countries, other worlds.
”I figured there had to be something better,” he says.
When he could go to downtown Houston, Mike would look at the tall buildings and say, ”One of these days I`m going to own one.” Men who were trying to scrape up enough money for another bottle of Thunderbird would laugh at him. It was like kids from Sunnyside didn`t even have the right to dream.
”I looked at things through very thick sunglasses,” he says. ”I always was thinking, `Nothing is impossible.` I dreamed of having communities like the Amish–I love the way the Amish live–and live the way the Bible really states. But if I told anyone else, they would think I was crazy.”
His childhood friend, Ron Williams, says, ”He`s the type that thinks, `I can change the world, and I will.` ”
What Singletary wanted more was to change his own family, so it might not once have been saddened by tragic death, split by divorce, embittered by emotional poverty and immobilized by self-pity. He wished he could have been the oldest, a position from which he might have imposed his will upon a leaderless family.
Even now, at age 27, when he has earned authority by the force of his achievements, Singletary is frustrated. When he bought his mother a new house in a middle class part of Houston, she wouldn`t move. When he decided to build her a new home, she insisted that it be on the same spot as the ramshackle house on Woodward Avenue in which she raised her family. There it is, almost completed, a substantial, three-bedroom brick house across the street from a vacant lot littered with rusting trucks. Two doors down is a liquor store. All around are homes that teeter past tumbledown.
As a visitor is guided around the site by Singletary`s father, Charles, a car pulls up in front, stops briefly, then rolls on. Another follows.
”It`s like a funeral procession going on, everyone coming to look,”
Charles Singletary says.
Divorced a second time, he has come back to live next door to the woman he left when Mike was 10. He and his ex-wife get along now, sharing in Mike`s achievements and financial well-being. Charles Singletary drives, at breakneck speeds, the Chevrolet Celebrity that once belonged to Mike`s wife, Kim. The senior Singletarys–as well as Kim`s parents–were flown to Hawaii last February for the Pro Bowl.
All eight of the living Singletary children work. There are bus drivers and a cab driver, a beautician and a registered nurse, a carpenter and a construction worker and a football player. Only Mike finished college. Only Mike left Houston.
”As the youngest, I had the chance to see the mistakes and the misfortunes,” Mike says. ”I feel I was the least talented of all 10, and I don`t think I`m the smartest. The others allowed themselves to fall into the trap of `Woe is me, the world owes me something.` It wasn`t just us. There were others suffering.”
He was the spoiled baby. He was the one who feigned illness to avoid church when there was football on television. He was the one in a million.
”I almost feel God chose him to be special,” Kim says, offering what may be the best explanation for her husband`s escape from Sunnyside.
Says Williams, ”Something was always driving Mike.”
When the Singletarys split up, son Grady became less a brother and more a father to Mike, who was 11 years younger. At 23, Grady was moving into a faster lane, one where the traffic included alcohol and drugs, but he was still able to preach effectively what he might not be practicing.
One evening, before he headed out in his blue Chevrolet Malibu–”It was sharp, and he was sharp,” Mike remembers–Grady called over his brother and gave him $2 to buy soft drinks.
”Mind your mom,” Grady said, ”and whatever you do, always make sure you do your best.”
A few hours later, a hospital called to say Grady Singletary was in a coma. He had been hit by a drunk driver in a six-car accident, and he would never recover.
”After he died, when I thought things over, I realized I never wanted to be in a situation where I wasn`t in control,” Mike Singletary says.
Baylor`s Mike Singletary was the Southwest Conference`s Player of the Year and a consensus All-America in 1979 and 1980. The doubts about his future in football had diminished by the time Bears` scout Jim Parmer went down to Texas to check out this hot prospect first-hand.
”His attitude was so different than 99 out of 100 college kids I see,”
Parmer recalls. ”He was dead serious, very businesslike. He looked right at me and said, `Mr. Parmer, if you draft me, I`m going to be the best linebacker in the National Football League.` That`s a big statement.”
Singletary assumed he would be a first-round pick. The problem was, at barely 6 feet tall, he was considered too small for such elevated status, even if Parmer said, ”I didn`t see how another 2 inches could make him a better football player.” But it was out of Singletary`s hands.
The Bears, needing someone to block for Walter Payton, selected offensive tackle Keith Van Horne in the first round, then made a trade to ensure getting Singletary in the second round. Both choices can be judged correct: Over the past three years, the 6-foot-7-inch Van Horne has started every game for which he was healthy, and an angry Singletary became more determined that no one ever again would sell him short.
”I have no doubt whatsoever that Mike is now the best linebacker in the league,” says Bears` general manager Jerry Vainisi.
”What I like about him,” says ex-Bear Dick Butkus, arguably the best middle linebacker ever, ”is Mike never seems to be satisfied.”
That is why, after a holdout last year that cost him $20,250 in fines, Singletary got a reworked contract filled with incentives. Until the contract expires after next season, his base salary will be barely one-third that of the ballyhooed New York Giants` linebacker, Lawrence Taylor.
Singletary, voted the league`s defensive Most Valuable Player the past two years, plans to close that gap by making money the old-fashioned way:
earning it. He hopes that also will enrich his place in history.
”I want to be the greatest linebacker of all time,” Singletary says.
That, Jim Parmer would say, is a big statement.
”I`ve never heard anybody set that goal,” says Kim Singletary. ”It`s one thing to reach for the top, but Mike reaches past it.”
Says Ron Rivera, Singletary`s back-up at middle linebacker last season:
”He wants it to be so when people say Butkus, they also say Singletary.”
Comparing the two is difficult. Butkus was most often the standout on weak teams; Singletary is among many Bear stars. Butkus set a standard and kept it up for several seasons; Singletary is still passing the test of time. Butkus played in an era when the ability to stop the run was paramount for middle linebackers; Singletary is playing in an era when speed has changed the game, forcing a middle linebacker to be as agile as he is hostile.
Perhaps the best measure of Singletary`s greatness is that Butkus–who watches his successor from a close vantage point in the WGN broadcast booth
–doesn`t mind the comparisons.
”You always want to be singled out as the best, but being linked with a guy like Mike is fine with me,” Butkus says. ”He works at it and he deserves it.”
Singletary, who is frustrated when Kim fails to follow the workout schedule she asks him to devise, cannot understand how some people succeed in this business without really trying. He and quarterback Jim McMahon, the Bears` offensive and defensive leaders, could not be more different.
”One time I thought `Why do I have to work so hard and he doesn`t?`
” Singletary says. ” `Maybe if he worked as hard as I do . . .` Then I figured, maybe if he did what I do, he wouldn`t be worth a crap.”
It is suggested to Singletary that you can`t knock McMahon`s results.
”Unless,” he says emphatically, ”they could be better.”
To Singletary, perfection is attainable but only through ceaseless effort. When he wants something, he works at a way to get it. He knew greatness would be denied a linebacker who was removed when passing situations called for a nickel defense, with an extra defensive back. So he lost 20 pounds, thereby gaining speed to cover tight ends and running backs, and he begged former defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan to let him play every down.
”He asked me what he had to do to be on the field, and then he did it,” says head coach Mike Ditka. ”It was probably the best move we made. If we lost something in coverage, we gained more in leadership.”
”Mike always wanted to be the boss man,” says his mother.
Leading calls for planning, and Mike Singletary cannot imagine a life without plans. He often has memorized the team`s weekly game plan before the rest of the players begin reading it. It is more than just wanting to be better prepared to call the defensive signals, which will be different this season with Ryan gone to Philadelphia. Knowledge is power, the power to be in control. Thus the title of his recently published autobiography: ”Calling The Shots.”
”Mike has no concept that other people don`t write 5-year plans, weekly plans, daily plans,” Kim says. ”In his mind, everything is 1-2-3-4-5, never 1-3-2-5-4.”
It is no minor irony that a moment of chaos was necessary before he even got the chance to play organized football. Until then, he was forbidden by the rules of the strict fundamentalist religion that his father preached and made his children practice.
