His Way

After some remarkable years with the Bears, you had a difficult season in 1992 and you didn't leave on good terms. Afterward, you said you lost all enthusiasm for the game.. How does that sit with you now?

I still believe it was really unfair, and I was hurt. For what we had accomplished, to take one season as an example wasn't right. We could have turned it around. We would have rebuilt it. But then I realized the guy that owned the Bears at that time, he didn't hire me. So he wanted to have his own guy. I was being undermined. But there's nothing you can do about that. I loved it up until the last year and I really put everything I had into it.

You suffered a heart attack during the 1988 season. How did that affect your approach to coaching?

It made me realize for the first time that I was vulnerable. I wasn't Iron Mike. It made me realize what things were important, the value of things. What happened was because of stress. I was in shape, I worked out. I thought heart attacks were for the guy who lived down the street. It didn't have to do with cholesterol or heredity. It was the stress of the job.

When you returned to coaching with the Saints in 1997, you were quoted as saying, "It's not life or death, I'm not going to anguish over it as I did in the past."

But I did. I still did. Ironically, when I took the New Orleans job, I really wasn't looking for a job. I was happy doing what I was doing. I had a good life. They came to me and I told them exactly what it would take me to coach and they matched what I asked for. So I said I'd go down and give it my best shot. And I did. I really put everything into it. I thought history would repeat itself in New Orleans because I had been on three winning Super Bowl teams, as a player, assistant coach and head coach, and I thought this was a no-brainer. Unfortunately, it was.

What went wrong in New Orleans?

It's something that takes time. We would have gotten there. I'm proud of things I did in New Orleans, I really am. We drafted right. We built a team from the bottom up. We had plans for the fourth year I would've been there, for what we would have done with the quarterback situation. We knew what we were going to do but we didn't have the opportunity to finish it.

You still have your restaurant in New Orleans. Do you still have a home there?

We sold the one in New Orleans, thank God. I live in Chicago, downtown, about three blocks from my restaurant. I still have a restaurant in New Orleans, but I have no desire to live there anymore.

Now that you're spending more time in Naples, will we see you more involved in community and charity events?

I expect to be. I always try to be involved in charities and we're going to do a thing here next year, have a two-day event with tents out back, where we present music and raise a lot of money for Make-a-Wish Foundation. That's the charity right now that we're talking about.

You said the heart attack helped you realize the value of things. Can you elaborate on that?

Well, none of us is promised tomorrow. The Bible tells you very explicitly you live today and do the best you can. I think the Golden Rule says it all-do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. If you had that all around the world, we wouldn't have the problems we have. There's no value on human life in our society today. People just take a gun and blow people away. Where does that mentality come from? Forty years ago it wasn't here. You had criminals, but not to the point of indiscriminately wasting human life that way.

What can be done to change that?

I think it has to start at home. I know the upbringing I had-I had such a fear of my dad. I knew that if I did wrong, I would get my ass whipped. Cut and dried. We have a society now where you can't really discipline your children properly. We send them to school and we tell these teachers who are grossly underpaid, "Teach them but don't touch them. Don't discipline them." I think that's a fallacy in our society. That's just the way I feel. It doesn't make me right, it doesn't make me wrong, it just makes me mad.

Everything in life is based on education. And if you can't educate people at an early age, you have a problem. Peer pressure is a tremendous influence on young people. You may have kids who were raised in a very solid family and all of a sudden someone says, well, let's do drugs. And they'll try it because they want to be part of the group. Eighty percent of the minority kids coming into the NFL right now are from single-parent families. Most of that's a mother, or an aunt, or a grandmother. Without the father figure, where's the discipline going to come from? If you want something in life, you have to work for it. My dad worked his butt off. Can it be changed? I don't know. I think we've become a very liberal society. And I'm a very conservative person. I don't mind saying that. I don't care who likes it or doesn't like it. I don't try to be politically correct.

Can you talk about the role of faith and God in your life?

I'm a Christian. I believe in God. I don't try to push what I believe on people. I'm not perfect, I don't pretend to be perfect. But I believe you should live your life a certain way and that you should try to be the best person you can be. And in the end you are what you are. There's a great song by Sinatra, "My Way." That song fit him, that song also fits me. You always wish somewhere along the line you had done things differently. But you know what, you don't have that chance, so you keep going and you do your best. You get knocked on your butt, you get back up, you go back out there and you try again. That's the way I was raised. That's the way I live my life.