My dinner with Mike

I’ve been pretty lucky in life to have a lot of experiences visiting interesting places and meeting interesting people. Tuesday night was one of those experiences that will always be high on my list.

Ironically, I really didn’t expect that to be the case.

Let me start with a bit of background. I’m a Minnesota Vikings fan, a big Minnesota Vikings fan. I hate the Chicago Bears, especially the 1985 Chicago Bears. That was the Bears team that won the Super Bowl. The Bears team that was filled with cocky, arrogant players and coaches. I hated the quarterback, head coach, defensive head coach, the fat defensive lineman they called the Fridge and even the punter they called Butthead.

But there were two players on that team that I couldn’t hate. Two players I had to respect. The two players that really weren’t a part of all the childishness that was the image of that team. Both of them are now Hall of Famers and deserved that honor as much for what they did on the field as for their character off of it.

One was running back Walter Payton, “Sweetness,” and the other was that middle linebacker with the incredibly intense eyes, Mike Singletary.

As fate would have it, Singletary, now the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, was the speaker Tuesday night in my work’s distinguished speakers series. It was my job to meet him at his hotel and guide him through the evening’s activities, making sure he stayed on schedule.

While I looked forward to meeting him and appreciated that opportunity, I can’t say that I was excited about it. Little did I know when I first shook his hand that I would later be having dinner with him and will forever remember it as an honor.

But I get ahead of myself.

When I first met him I was surprised at his size. I’m six feet tall and Singletary is the same height, possibly even a smidge shorter. It’s also been more than a decade since his playing days so, while he’s not average build, he certainly isn’t the muscle bound behemoth you imagine a middle linebacker to be.

The second thing you notice is how mild mannered he is. I guess I shouldn’t expect that he would be tearing down doors but it is a bit hard to reconcile his on-field image with this very business like person I met.

He won me over during his speech that evening. His parents divorced early and the brother he looked up to was killed by a drunk driver. Instead of giving up, at the age of 12 Singletary created his vision list for life. At the age of 12 he set his goal of playing in the NFL, being All-Pro, playing in a Super Bowl and all of the other things that he has accomplished in life.

I am a huge believer in goal setting. I began teaching my daughter goal setting when she was 10 years old and it was a practice we carried on until she graduated from high school. You can’t get anywhere, either on the road or in life, without a map. A set of goals is a life map.

Singletary spoke about his love for his mother, the need for leaders in this country, letting others know that you believe in them… It all hit home for me.

A local restaurant, Duck City, had passed word to me that they would like to provide dinner for Singletary following his appearance. I assumed that he would want to return to his hotel but mentioned it to him anyway. To my surprise he said yes and asked me to join him.

We sat a table in the back and I had an exclusive conversation with him for the hour or more that we ate our dinner. As I said earlier, in conversation he is very mild mannered. There were times I actually had to lean closer to hear what he is saying.

On the other hand, there’s no doubting his focus on things, whether it’s his family, life, work, football, whatever it is. And during his speech earlier that evening his intensity was quite apparent. There’s no doubt that there is an incredible intensity switch inside of him that flips to “on” when the time is right.

You can talk about a lot of things in an hour but a few of the highlights:

He didn’t coach after he retired as a player and really didn’t intend to get back into it. After 10 years away it was his wife who told him it was time to return. They prayed on it and she was the one who really said it was time.

He has seven children who were one of the main reasons he didn’t go back into coaching. He wanted that time to “lay the foundation” for their lives.

He’s not the typical head coach in more than a couple of ways. First, he doesn’t sleep in his office and won’t allow his assistants to do so either. He has set hours that, while longer than most of us, are not at all extreme. He said coaches are terrible time managers and because it’s such a small fraternity that they waste far too much time on the phone talking to each other. He tells his assistants to hang up the phone unless it’s a necessary conversation. Probably advice we could all learn from.

The second, quite apparent, difference between him and other coaches is that he kicked his starting tight end out of the first game he served in as head coach. Long-story-short, the player had an attitude problem that he demonstrated to the officials in that game and Singletary straightened his attitude out for him.

That’s the part of the story we all know. The part we don’t know is that that player is now one of the coach’s biggest allies, almost like a son to him. If other players aren’t paying attention when coach is talking, that player is the first to tell them to knock it off. After he was kicked out of the game, the player told Singletary that no one had ever told him what he was doing was wrong. He respected Singletary for calling him on it and now is committed to the coach. There’s a lesson that most coaches, and even parents, could learn.

During the 10 years he was out of football he started a business and read, a lot. He got deeply into history, reading nearly 250 books. He was particularly interested in our country’s leaders and their leadership styles. He especially studied how they pulled together their teams and how they led those teams.

Not coincidentally, that was what his business was about as well. He and his partner were in leadership consulting. Unlike many consultants he believes in starting at the top. Where many consultants spend their time training employees, he believes to improve a business you have to start with the CEO. That’s a hard sell because most CEOs believe they already know everything. But frankly, Singletary’s right. The best companies are those with a dynamic leader who knows how to pull a team together and how to lead that team.

The folks at Duck City will be pleased to know that he loved the food. He commented that, who would have know you can get food this good in Davenport? That’s not a knock on Davenport, only a reference that we’re still a relatively small community compared to Chicago, San Francisco and the many other major cities he’s accustomed to. It’s a compliment to Davenport and, especially, to Duck City that we have such a fine restaurant in this size of a community.

(And for my two cents, he’s right. Duck City is one of the two best restaurants in the area.)

In the end it was a tremendous evening. I've never been one to be afraid to try something new and this was a great example of why. If I had the chance to meet Mike Singletary again, sign me up.