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.’”