Disciplines of a Godly Man

Those who have watched Mike Singletary, perennial All-Pro two-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year and member of the Super Bowl XXV Dream Team, play and have observed his wide-eyed intensity in his churning, crunching samurai hits, are usually surprised when they meet him. He is not an imposing hulk. He is barely six feet tall and weighs maybe 220. Whence the greatness? Discipline. Mike Singletary is as disciplined a student of the game as any who have ever played it. In his biography, Calling the Shots, he says that in watching game films, he will often run a single play 50 to 60 times and that it takes him three hours to watch half a football game, which is only 20 to 30 plays. Because he watches every player, because he mentally knows the opposition's tendency, given the down, distance, hash mark and time remaining, because he reads the opposition's mind through their stances, he is often moving toward the ball's pre-planned destination before the play develops. Mike Singletary's legendary success is testimony to his remarkably disciplined life. We are accustomed to thinking of Ernest Hemingway as a boozy, undisciplined genius who got through a quart of whiskey a day for the last 20 years of his life, but nevertheless had the muse upon him. He was, indeed, an alcoholic driven by complex passions, but when it came to writing, he was the quintessence of discipline. His early writing was characterized by obsessive literary perfectionism as he labored to develop his economy of style, spending hours polishing a sentence or searching for the mot juste, the right word. It is a well-known fact that he wrote the conclusion to his novel, A Farewell to Arms, 17 times in an effort to get it right. This is characteristic of great writers. Dylan Thomas made over 200 hand-written manuscript versions of his poem Fern Hill. Even toward the end, when Hemingway was reaping the ravages of his lifestyle while writing at his Finca Vigia in Cuba, he daily stood before an improvised desk in oversized loafers on yellow tiles from 6.30 a.m. until noon every day, carefully marking his production for the day on a chart. His average was only two pages, 500 words. It was discipline, Ernest Hemingway's massive literary discipline, which transformed the way his fellow Americans and people throughout the English-speaking world expressed themselves. Michelangelo's, da Vinci's, and Tintoretto's multitudes of sketches, the quantitative discipline of their work, prepared the way for the cosmic quality of their work. We wonder at the anatomical perfection of a da Vinci painting, but we forget that Leonardo da Vinci, on one occasion, drew a thousand hands. In the last century, Matisse explained his own mastery, remarking that the difficulty with many who wanted to be artists is that they spend their time chasing models rather than painting them. Again, the discipline factor. In our own time, Winston Churchill has been rightly proclaimed the speaker of the century, and few who have heard his eloquent speeches would disagree. Still fewer would suspect he was anything but unnatural. But the truth is, Churchill had a distracting lisp, which made him the butt of many jokes, and resulted in his inability to be spontaneous in public speaking. Yet he became famous for his speeches and his seemingly impromptu remarks. Actually, Churchill wrote everything out and practiced it. He even choreographed the pauses and pretended fumblings for the right phrase. The margins of his manuscripts carried notes anticipating the cheers, hear-hears, prolonged cheering, and even standing ovation. This done, he practiced endlessly in front of mirrors, fashioning his retorts and facial expressions. F. E. Smith said, Winston has spent the best years of his life writing impromptu speeches. A natural, perhaps, a naturally disciplined, hard-working man. And so it goes whatever the area of life. Thomas Edison came up with the incandescent light after a thousand failures. Jascha Heifetz, the greatest violinist of this century, began playing the violin at the age of three, and early began to practice four hours a day until his death at age seventy-five, when he had long been the greatest in the world, some one hundred two thousand hours of practice. He no doubt gave his own hear-hear to Petarevsky's response to a woman's fawning remarks about his genius, Madam, before I was a genius, I was a drudge. We will never get anywhere in life without discipline, be it in the arts, business, athletics or academics. This is doubly so in spiritual matters. In other areas we may be able