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At a Stamford High Pride Rally, Bingham, a 1978 Stamford High graduate, returned to the school where he spent only one year but that left a deep impression on him in the person of football coach Marc Lyons.
Bingham was attending Wright Tech and visited Stamford High School one day to see his younger brother, who was working out in the weight room. Lyons spotted him and thought he was a college student. Bingham told him he was interested in going to college. He was at Wright Tech because of his interest in pursuing electrical engineering in college.
"He said, 'Well you come play football for me and I will get you to college,' " Bingham said.
That chance meeting led him to play football at Stamford High in his senior year and led to him become a star player at Syracuse University and then an NFL linebacker for five years with the Pittsburgh Steelers and the San Diego Chargers.
In comments to students at the assembly last week, Bingham told them not to let failure define them and instead keep working toward their goals.
"Failing once, failing ten times doesn't make you a failure. It's how you look at yourself, you have to keep picking yourself up," he said, noting that Steve Jobs, the iPhone inventor, was fired from a job. "Dare to dream, dare to dream."
Bingham was part of a group of athletes who attended Stamford High and returned for the event in front of a packed crowd of students and staff.
In comments before the event, Chordale Booker, a 2009 graduate, who picked up a gold medal at the U.S.A. Boxing National Championship and is training for a shot on the U.S. Olympic boxing team, said with a laugh: "I played basketball here and I used to get in trouble here all the time. This was my high school (boxing) ring."
Booker said he struggled with anger and was even arrested. His father, Dale, urged him to straighten himself out and avoid the mistakes that he made that landed him in prison for many years while Booker was growing up.
"That's the thing that always stays in my head, him telling me: 'You got to do better. I don't want you ending up like me,' " Booker said.
His father died in 2010 and Booker said he took those words to heart and combined that with his determination and disciple to make something of himself.
"I didn't want to be one of those people wasted their talent," he said.
NFL player Khairi Fortt and former NFL player Alex Joseph also attended the event, as did Rick Robustelli, son of Stamford High School graduate and NFL Hall of Famer Andy Robustelli. Also in attendance was Matt Manewal, who played baseball at Yale after graduating from Stamford High.
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