Angelo On Urlacher: 'The Quintessential Team Player'
(WSCR) If you want to get a good look at the type of person and player Brian Urlacher really was, look no further than former Bears general manager Jerry Angelo.
Though Angelo didn't draft Urlacher, he joined the Bears following No. 54's rookie season.
In the wake of Urlacher's official retirement, Angelo joined The Boers and Bernstein Show to talk about the kind of person the Bears middle linebacker really was.
"He was the quintessential team player," Angelo said. "That's what I loved about him personally. He was about the team. Money never spoiled him. Regardless of what success other players had around him, he was as happy for the emergence of Lance Briggs and whoever else we had on our team. Sometimes, players can get a little envious of one another. You never saw that with Brian Urlacher. He couldn't be any more happier for his teammates. When we brought Julius Peppers in, he was Julius' biggest fan. It just says so much about the person, and we all know what a great player he was.
Jerry Angelo On The Boers and Bernstein Show
"He meant so much to our football team, to the franchise. He just handled himself with total class. It's hard to imagine that you could have the type of work ethic that Brian had, given all his God-given talents, but he worked as hard as any player we had in that locker room. You thought he was a college free agent the way he worked every day."
Urlacher spent 13 seasons with the Bears, earning eight Pro Bowl nominations before calling it quits. Angelo recalls Urlacher treating everyone in the organization with the utmost respect day in and day out.
"He had fun with all his teammates," Urlacher said. "I never heard a bad thing said about him by anybody in the locker room. I don't care if you talked to our equipment manager, our trainers, certainly our players, we had a handful of coaches like most teams have - everybody loved him. Not just as a player, but as a person. He really epitomized what football was about. … He made football better. You can't really say that about a lot of players."
