Sione Umufuke

Vernon Davis says Mike Singletary called him out in front of the entire NFL, and says years later he thanked him for it “At the moment, I’d say I was selfish and not selfless because I was young. In my young mind, I’m thinking, ‘Who does this guy think he is? They brought me here to make plays and help this team win. I’m Vernon Davis. Why are you sending me to the locker room? I can help this team win. I don’t need to go to the locker room. Who do you think you are?’ That’s what I’m saying in my mind as a young guy coming into the league.” “But now, as I look back and assess the situation, Coach did me a solid. He did me a favor. Him being there was a blessing in disguise because I needed that. I needed to have that moment of being benched and going to the locker room. I made a boneheaded mistake. I got a penalty. I hit a guy, I believe I hit him under his chin, and Coach benched me. Coach knew me. He’d been there since I got drafted, so he knew how I was. He watched me, and he was just tired of my foolishness, wasting time getting penalized.” “So I go to the locker room. I do exactly what he tells me to do. I didn’t say anything. He came to me and said, ‘Come see me tomorrow.’ I didn’t know he was going to do what he did on television. I was at home lying in bed with my kid’s mom watching TV, and this pops up. I’m like, ‘Wow.’ At the moment, I felt like he threw me under the bus. I was thinking, ‘Why would he do this? Why would he do that? This guy’s crazy.’” “I knew right away that when I walked into that facility tomorrow, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was furious, but I was also afraid of Coach Mike Singletary because I knew he wasn’t a pushover. He stood up in practice one day and said, ‘I’ll fight all of y’all until I win. You might beat me, but I’m going to get back up. I’m going to keep on fighting.’ Such an old-school guy. But I love that dude. I love that dude, man.” “We had a heart-to-heart, man, and from that day, from that moment, I got it. I knew exactly what he wanted me to do, and I knew what I needed to do for myself. If I wanted to stay on this team and if I wanted to be a leader for my teammates, I had to change my ways. I had to change my attitude. Thankfully, because I had him, I was able to be the player that we saw for the next 11 or 12 years. Because of him and what he did for me. Tough love. Nothing but respect.” “I don’t know verbatim exactly what he said, but it was somewhere along the lines of, ‘Son, you have to change. You can do better. What you did out there, we can’t have that on this team. Son, I know what you can be. You can be great. You can be the best tight end in the NFL, but you’ve got to change.’ From that moment, I started crying. I shook his hand. I said, ‘Okay, Coach. I got you.’” “I love him. He’s like a father figure, a brother. He’s all of that, man. I reached out to him when I was writing this book. I was like, ‘Coach, I’d love to have you do the foreword for this book.’ He said, ‘It’d be an honor.’ I was like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’”

Tyrann Mathieu says Patrick Peterson helped him pay his rent one month while in college together at LSU, but with a condition, he would work so hard he would never have to ask for help again “I remember I called you. It was like a month before we went to camp. I said, ‘Big bro, I don’t know how I’m going to pay the rent this year.’ “That’s a common story with young players. They think they’ve got money that they don’t necessarily have, so they spend a certain way. It was just a hard lesson. “I remember you came down, you had the Chase envelope in your hand, and you gave me more than what I needed. But I remember what you told me before you walked back inside. You looked me in my eye and said, ‘Bro, this is the last time.’ “That stuck with me like 12 years later. Even though you were hard on me, you made me accountable. You knew what I needed.” Patrick Peterson: “And I’m hard on you, right? But I wanted so much of you, and I knew what it was going to take to get that out of you so you could see it. Because I used to tell you this, when I was growing up, I saw so many guys with crazy athletic ability, but they wasted it. “I didn’t want you to waste what you got. You were special. So therefore, I’m going to give you everything that I can to make you the best player and person that you are. “Going back to when you say I was hard on you, to this day, that’s what my girls tell me. ‘Daddy, you’re so hard on us.’ But then when we have Thanksgiving or Father’s Day, they appreciate it. “That’s my job. I know it may be mundane or you don’t feel like listening to it right now, but that’s my job, to see around the corner before you get there. To guide you through certain things, help you make better decisions, or help you maybe think differently. That’s my job.”