Editor’s Note: As we gear up to celebrate 60 years of this tradition with you, let’s take a moment to remember some of the best of our previous Distinguished Alumni with Hall of Fame: Rewind. We hope you’ll enjoy reading about our outstanding alumni honorees from the past who shape the ranks of honorees of the future. In this April 1986 Classic article, football legend Mike Singletary—a 2000 Distinguished Alumnus and 1991 Outstanding Young Alumnus—is remembered for his demeanor off the field. Click here to watch interviews and speeches from previous Hall of Fame events, or click here to learn more about his year’s event and honorees.
When Mike Singletary won NFL Defensive Player of the Year recognition last year, appeared as “Samurai Mike” in the Chicago Bears’ “Super Bowl Shuffle” video, and was featured in Sports Illustrated, Baylor alumni folded their arms smugly and grinned. They had known him when.
When, as a Baylor Bear, he was team captain, All Southwest Conference, consensus All American, and a Lombardi Award nominee—between 1978 and 1980.
When he broke eight supposedly unbreakable helmets one summer during two-a-day workouts.
When Grant Teaff called him “the best linebacker I’ve ever coached.”
I knew him first as a freshman, an intensely serious young man who distanced himself from the usual uproar of athletic study hall and lost himself in concentration. That fall Corky Nelson, defensive coordinator, was impressed with the determination and explosive strength Mike exhibited on the football field.
During his sophomore year Mike was so consistent in his tackling (he collected 232 that year) that Baylor Stadium announcer George Stokes quipped over the PA: “That was Mike Singletary on the tackle. This is a recording.”
That was the year he took New Testament, a course I tutored for the athletic department. I still did not know him well and found myself feeling intimidated by the intensity of his personality. Although he was not having trouble in New Testament—or in any of his other courses—and was no longer required to attend study hall, he came in almost every evening with his religion books, just in case he should have a question.
At Baylor he made sure his younger teammates stayed on top of all they academic work.
On one occasion when I was going over a list of things to be studied for an exam, Mike asked me pointedly, “Do we have to learn all of this?” My first impulse was to say, “No, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do” (the sort of thing that you would say to a charging elephant); but I somehow managed to say, “Yes, you do.” Mike’s answer was, “Well, I will then.” And he did.
One night a group of athletes gathered in Brooks Hall to study for a New Testament exam. As I had encouraged them to do, they called me with a list of questions. I gave them answers and hung up. In a couple of minutes, the phone rang again. When my roommate heard me giving the same information again, she said, “It must be Singletary, calling to make sure they got the information straight.” She was right.
The next year Mike took another course I tutored—business ethics. At the beginning of that successful season that led the Bears to the Peach Bowl, Mike came to me and confided a private worry: “I have a feeling that we are about to have a winning season, and I’m afraid the players—especially the freshmen—won’t be able to keep their minds on their studies.”
He took it upon himself to make sure that the younger teammates stayed on top of their academic work. If someone failed to appear at study sessions or showed low grades, all the tutor had to do was give Mike a call at Brooks and that player would be present for the remaining sessions.
He was even more demanding of himself. Several times that semester I saw him go without sleep, preparing for an exam. When I suggested that he was perhaps overdoing it, he always insisted that he would be fine. Apparently he was. After studying for three days and taking an exam on Friday, he invariably played an incredibly intense game on Saturday.
The reason that he studied so unceasingly, I concluded, was that he wanted to do more than memorize enough to pass the course or make the necessary grade. He wanted to learn the material and understand it, for his own mental growth. I remember that Dr. Gary Hull, professor of history, mentioned Mike as one of his most intellectually curious students. In later years I saw ethics books on Mike’s coffee table. Once I asked, “You’re reading this?” and he answered, “Well, of course I am. I can’t believe you asked me that. I have to keep reading it if I’m going to practice it.”
Marsha Martic, a former tutor, remembers Mike as a student: “He was quiet—very quiet. I remember his smile most. He was usually so serious that when he smiled it was special. I remember thinking, ‘How could anybody this gentle hit so hard on the field?'”
Jim Truscott Jones, a former academic adviser for Baylor athletes, says that his most vivid picture of Mike comes from a recruiting dinner a couple of years ago. “Coach Teaff had invited Mike to speak to the recruits. When Mike stood up, this huge person with a terrifying presence, he spoke in a soft measured voice, in convincing tones. Everyone—myself, the recruits, the coaches—was hanging on every word.
“And the message had very little to do with football. He said, ‘This is just one opportunity for you to use your God-given talents.’ It was so refreshing to hear something like that in the world of athletic recruitment. I’ll never forget it. If you ask me again in twenty years, that will still be the thing that I remember best about Mike.”
This is the Mike Singletary whom sports fans rarely see—the young man, flooded with laurels and publicity and prosperity, struggling to live responsibly with his resources. Even while he was a student, Mike spent summers creating recreational programs for children in his old Houston neighborhood. After college, he founded camps for underprivileged children.
From the beginning of his professional career, he has taken long, serious looks at where this career was going and what he wanted to accomplish. After his first year as a professional player, we had long talks about ethics and business practices, about multinational corporations and their relationship to Third World countries. He asked me at lunch one day if I thought he could own a corporation within a year. I told him that I thought he could do anything he set his mind to do. And he can.
