Tased On South Beach

There's a great lesson on leadership that Dick Vermeil used. Have you ever heard of coach Dick Vermeil? Longtime legend, and I don't know if he's in the hall of fame yet, but NFL coach, and he was with St. Louis. He'd been with Philadelphia, retired and. And then he was with St. Louis. And here's the story. Now, they kicked off the 1999 season all super excited because they've got a quarterback. You got to have a quarterback to win. And they had a quarterback that made everything, had all these great receivers. They had an unbelievable coordinator. Mike Martz came in there, came up with all these incredibly brilliant passing plays and. And they had a quarterback who could make it sing. Everybody was excited. It was St. Louis's time and new energy. Coach Vermeil was running around. Great offseason. They started the year and what happens? Trent Green gets. Bam. Knocked out. No more Trent Green. And now what happens with Dick Vermeil? He went. He had been sky high. Now that was over. He was deader than a doornail. And now, of course, he had to put the happy face on with all of his people and all, but he was, he was so beat down inside, just like, you know, life is you. He never won a Super Bowl. He had a lot of disappointments in Philadelphia. Here we had it together, and I'm just the king of bad luck. But he, you can't do that. You can't do that with your team. And all they had. Here's the other little thing. Ingredient of the story is they had their backup quarterback who stepped up was an unknown guy named Kurt Warner. Now, Kurt Warner was a guy who bounced around the league, wasn't drafted, cut, couldn't play, played. I don't know if he played in Canada, but he played in the, you know, the indoor leagues. He played in Europe a season. He played. He was actually worked as a bag boy. Couldn't get a job in football, and they need to come back and he want to give it one more try. And this was their guy, this. And everybody knew this on the team. And so that's why not only was Vermeil down, the whole team was like, oh, Lord, help us. We've got Kurt Warner, you know, and they were looking forward to a 16 game season of disaster. But here's what Vermeil did. Vermeil stepped to the plate and said this. He. He got in front of the media, he got in front of his team and got himself psyched up and he worked it out his mind. Nobody's Going to feel sorry for us. We got a game to play. And so he got out there and he said, let me tell you this, you know, it's devastating. We lost Trent, we lost a quarterback, but our quarterback is now Kurt Warner. And he said, we're going to go out and play and we're going to play good football. He said, let me tell you about the St. Louis Rams. We gonna play and we're gonna play good football and not make an excuse. It was just a tremendous. I need to go find that speech on YouTube and pull it out. Go look for it. But it was unbelievable. Even though at home the night before, he was ready to commit suicide, blow his brains out, feel sorry himself, he got out there and said, the team, we're gonna go with Quirk Warner, and he's gonna play great. Worry about Kurt Warner. You know what Kurt Warner did? They went out and they won the Super bowl. They went through 16 games. See, this is where they started. They're down in the dumps. They went out there and they won. Went not only went to the super bowl, they won the Super Bowl. I think the first Super bowl in St. Louis history, or in a long time anyway. Kurt Warner, he was brilliant. I think he was mvp. But see, Kurt needed the coach to believe in him. The team needed to know the coach was behind him. But if Dick Vermeil hadn't stood up and made that stand, folks, they would have got slaughtered that year because everybody would have picked up that the coach has given up. So what's the thing about that? Disasters are going to happen to you. So what are you going to do? What are you going to say? In fact, Bruce Arians, recently, Coach Bruce Arians was saying he made a statement to the media. He said, now he's a coach of the Arizona Cardinals now. And he said too many times, when a guy gets even, something simple as a guy getting a day off, he goes off and gets Tased in South beach or something. And we don't want any of that. But guess what? Sometimes that's what you get. Just like I did a video on the MVP get gets arrested at the Super Bowl. In fact, the previous super bowl to this one, this is a 99 season, that was a 98 season. Disasters are going to happen. So what are you going to do and what will you say? If you're the leader, you can use the Vermeil principle. And that means you got to face the worst. You can't hide from the worst. You've got to face the worst. And then you got to look your team in the eye and tell them that even if the worst happens, you're going to find a way to win anyway. Even if one of our best guys gets a few days off on a bye week, goes down to south beach and gets tased, that don't matter. We're going to win anyway. We're going to play great. And you let them know you believe in your team. And so you face you let your team know you're not afraid of disasters happening. You're going to do everything you can to avoid disasters happening, but some kind of disaster is unavoidable you're going to have to overcome. And so you face the worst possibility and you let them look you in and see you in in your eyes, that you're not afraid of it and that if it does happen, you're going to hang in there tough and find a way to win anyway. That's what you do. That's what you say. And because Dick Vermeil was tough enough, mentally tough enough to do that, he took he led St. Louis to the 1999 Super bowl, even with a backup quarterback named Kurt Warner. Leave me your questions and comments. Subscribe if you want more videos if you're not already on the subscriber list. And let me know if you've got stories of your own, come see us at wide Dell on winning.com as well. Sam.