Dan Pompei

The list of hall of fame players who became successful head coaches is a short one.

There’s Mike Ditka. And Raymond Berry.

And… and… and….

Well, others who tried with less success were Forrest Gregg, Bart Starr and Norm Van Brocklin.

Another who is trying now is Mike Singletary.

It might be harder for a great former player to be a great head coach than it is for a rank and file player to achieve greatness as a coach. Most, perhaps realizing they would struggle to deal with players from all corners of a locker room, never even try.

“I think it’s one of the main reasons a lot of great players don’t become head coaches,” Singletary said. “They can’t relate to the guys who are like blue collar guys. They might have had the ability but not the work ethic, so they have a hard time understanding what it’s all about and the commitment it takes in order to be a good football player and a team player.”

Players who achieve greatness often might not have the drive and desire it takes to be a head coach. And it isn’t just in football.

Can you blame Michael Jordan, for instance, for preferring to be an “owner” with ambiguous responsibilities to being a head coach who gets his hands dirty every day? Wayne Gretzky was “The Great One” as a player, but not as a head coach. He lasted four years as coach of the Phoenix Coyotes before recently stepping down with a record of 143-161-24.

Other former great players who have tried coaching or managing with mixed results from other sports include Lenny Wilkins, Jacques Lemaire, Frank Robinson and Yogi Berra.

Singletary believes he is different from a lot of other great players because he was not as physically blessed as many hall of famers. “It’s an advantage to me,” the 49ers coach said. “I’ve explained to a lot of guys I wasn’t one of those guys who had a tremendous amount of talent who don’t understand what work is. I had that mentality of a guy who could be cut any day. I had to do all the little things to help me get to that point. Being one of the smallest linebackers in the league and maybe one of the slowest, I had to do the extras. So I can understand the guy with all the talent who is supposed to be a great player — his personality and thought process — as well as the guy who plays special teams all his life.”

It is more common for men who were good but not great NFL players to have success as head coaches. Examples include Don Shula, Dan Reeves, Tony Dungy, Marty Schottenheimer and Herm Edwards.

There certainly is a mystique about head coaches who played the game, especially for those who played the game at a high level. It’s difficult not to respect someone like Singletary. Difficult, that is, as long as you know who he is.

Slideshow   Players turned coaches While some of the greats like Wayne Gretzky and Isiah Thomas haven't done nearly as well as coaches, others like Joe Torre and Mike Ditka have excelled. NBCSports.com

Many of the Generation Y players who today’s coaches deal with have no knowledge about players from previous eras. Singletary has experienced it first hand.

“Some of these guys have no idea about what I did as a player,” he said. “It’s more what I did on Nintendo. ‘Man, you were great on my Nintendo. You were the fastest guy I had.’ You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s the world we live in. That’s where a lot of these guys are. I think guys appreciate me more when they know me, when they get a chance to talk with me.”

At least a great player’s résumé opens doors. But sometimes that’s all it does. A head coach’s playing history isn’t going to win him any games.

“It’s kind of like I tell my kids,” Singletary says. “It’s one thing when you have a reputation, a last name. At some point in time, it may get you in the door, but in order to stay, you have to do something. The name is not enough.”

The qualities that make a player great aren’t the same qualities that make a head coach great. If Singletary is fortunate enough to have enough qualities from both pools, he will go where few have gone before him.