ReZoom

Moon. Payton. Flutie. Former NFL player Robin Earl played with them all, but now he's into helping small businesses grow.

When Robin Earl was a fourth-grader living in Seattle, Wash., he looked away from the football game playing on television and told his father that one day he would play for the Chicago Bears. When his father asked why, he answered, "Because I don't want to get killed by Dick Butkus."

Of course, standing at 6-feet-3-inches and weighing 240 pounds, Butkus was the stuff of boyhood nightmares. The strange thing about the nine-year-old Earl's prediction was that he turned to be right: After a distinguished football career with the University of Washington Huskies (he played fullback to Warren Moon's quarterback) he wound up at the fullback position with Da Bears.

But this was no glory position. Being a rookie fullback with Chicago in the late 1970's (and weighing in at 242 pounds) meant lots of blocking, seeing as the Bears' star ball carrier was a hardworking young guy by the name of Walter Payton.

After two seasons, Earl was moved to tight end, a position known among Chicago sportswriters as a revolving door duty ever since Mike Ditka's departure in 1966. But Earl was happy to learn something new.

"It wasn't bad," he said. "You don't take near the beating at tight end as you would at fullback. It actually may have prolonged my career."

What didn't prolong his career – with the Bears, anyway – was the arrival of Mike Ditka as head coach in 1982, whose legendary intensity had Earl thinking that his days as a transitional tight end were numbered. He found a second career with the United States Football League, the short-lived NFL competitor best remembered as the first home for future NFL stars like Doug Flutie, Reggie White, Jim Kelly and Steve Young. Earl describes his two seasons with the Birmingham Stallions as "an absolute joy."

"It was kind of a resting spot for us older guys," he said. "What made it really fun was that there wasn't a lot of angling for money. Other than the superstars, we were all playing for the same amount."

But while he may have been playing for the same money as his teammates, Earl made preparations for a life away from football. After his first season at the USFL he got into the insurance game, which would stand him in good stead for the next 20 years. It seems that he instinctively understood that what made a good salesman was an almost total lack of artifice: Like football, Earl was at his best as an insurance salesman when he was having fun.

"As a former Bear, I'd get invited to all sorts of golf outings, which I loved because it was where I made my best connections," he said. "I'd meet some people, pass out a few cards, and then go visit them in the winter months."

Earl closed up shop on Robin Earl & Associates in 2002 and joined up with International Profit Associates, Inc., the largest privately held business development company for small businesses in the U.S. When he's not consulting, Earl can sometimes be found standing on the sidelines of Bears home games, often with his two sons.

"I see these guys on the field nowadays and, my God, they're like stallions," Earl said, laughing. "But people tell me I used to look like that, thirty years ago."