You May Not Know This About Fitz

JeffGollin

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In expectations that our chances of drafting Larry Fitzgerald are better than 50-50, I thought you'd get a kick out of the following article found on the ESPN board by writer, Tom Friend. (I'm usually not a sentimental slob, but it brought a tear to my eye):
Football in the dark. Every night, football in the dark. He's in bed, and the lights are out, and damn if he isn't tossing the ball five feet in the air and trying to catch it. Ouch! It nicks his forehead. Ouch! It hits him in the jaw. But the ball keeps going up, 10 times, 20 times in a row, every night before he falls asleep, and he'll tell you it's better that way. Because he can feel the ball better in the dark, because he can see her better in the dark.

His mom's been gone a year now. When she died, on April 10, 2003, he was just a lanky receiver with oversized hands, a step slow and almost resigned to it. But after he lost her, after he made the mistake of his life by not giving her a proper good-bye, he blossomed. Became a game-breaker. Kept visiting the end zone. After he lost her, football became his life. His escape. Now he plays it in the dark.

After her funeral, before the cathartic summer in a Pittsburgh weight room, he asked his father if he could keep her driver's license. He put it in his wallet, next to his own, which meant that every time he flashed his ID, he'd see her name. Carol Lee Fitzgerald. And every time he flashed his ID, he'd see her face.

"That picture, it's him," says his father. "He looks just like her."
It's true. They have the same braids, same cheekbones, same complexion. "I wanted her license because I know it's something she used all the time," says Larry Fitzgerald, weeks away from shaking hands with Paul Tagliabue. "So now I have it. Wherever I go, she goes. Write a check, got to show your license. Use your credit card, got to show your license."

Go to the NFL early ... got to show your license.

Larry and his backpack. Larry and his backpack are walking to a stadium in February, a middle-of-nowhere stadium in Lincoln, Neb., where it's 20 degrees outside. The bellboy at the Holiday Inn that Larry is temporarily calling home has offered a ride in the hotel van, but Larry doesn't take shortcuts. Larry wants to walk the two miles to the stadium gym. He wants to walk it with his backpack. The backpack with the wallet inside.

He has come to Lincoln for five weeks to train for a 40-yard dash. Five weeks of lifting, five weeks of working on his burst, five weeks of living in the hinterlands with his strength-and-conditioning coach. All for something that'll be over in a tad more than four seconds. Doesn't make sense, but what does anymore? If he runs a 4.4 40, he's probably the No.1 or No.2 overall pick in this month's draft. If he slips and runs a 4.55, he probably drops one to three slots. Shouldn't there be more to it? Won't the NFL scouts and coaches factor in his life story? His metamorphosis? The day his mother died?

See, there's a reason why Larry Fitzgerald is the anti-Terrell Owens, the anti-David Boston. There's a reason his time in the 40-yard dash should be irrelevant. There's a reason the NFL shouldn't care that he's only 20 years old. There's a reason he's already an adult.

It begins with a car accident. Larry Fitzgerald, the original Larry Fitzgerald, has just spent Thanksgiving weekend 1978 trying to talk Carol Lee Johnson into coming to Minneapolis. He's been chasing her since their high school days on the South Side of Chicago. She's always had a wall up, always thought he was a ladies' man. But he keeps showing up at her door, and when she won't come downstairs, he wines and dines her two younger sisters (well, he takes them to McDonald's, anyway). Even after he's moved to Minneapolis to chase a career as a sportswriter, he keeps sending her notes, keeps popping up in Chicago on holidays.

You're sweet, she tells him that Thanksgiving, but I'm not coming back with you. So he drives back to Minneapolis alone, in a snowstorm. Drives back and, a few hours outside of Chicago, slams his yellow Corvette into an I-94 median strip. He's unconscious for seven days, and when he wakes up, guess who's sitting by his side. Carol. He asks her to marry him, right there in the hospital room, but tells her not to answer until he buys a ring. Doesn't matter. Her answer's yes, a definite yes. And that's how two kids in their mid-20s started their life together, in a hospital room. "Think about it," Larry Fitzgerald Sr. says. "If she had gone with me to Minneapolis, she would've been killed. The impact was on the passenger's side."

They'd tell that story often to their sons, Larry and Marcus. The idea was to keep them grounded, humble. And those boys had every reason not to be humble. Larry Sr. had become a big man around Minneapolis. Not only was he an imposing figure, a 270-pound former lineman at Indiana State, he was also a talk-show host at KMOJ radio and a sports editor for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, the state's largest community-based paper. His nickname was Big Fitz. Kirby Puckett, Kevin Garnett, Michael Jordan -- they loved him.

Big Fitz hosted Dennis Green's radio show. You don't think that opened doors? Green, then the Vikings' head coach, invited Larry Sr.'s two sons to be ball boys at training camp and on game days. It sounded glamorous. Then the Fitzgerald brothers learned the truth: they were glorified towel boys. "Guys would throw their towels in the corner," Larry Jr. says. "All their body hair in those towels. You had to pick 'em up. You're like, 'Ughhh.' "

All through high school, the wannabe wide receiver did the Vikings' dirty work. But he took advantage of his access. He picked Cris Carter's brain. Kept his eye on Randy Moss. Caught passes one-handed from the JUGS machine. Caught passes two-handed from Daunte Culpepper. "I have good hands, but he used to light them up," Larry says. "Boom. Boom. They would be all red."
Soon, Viking players were coming to his high school games at the Academy of Holy Angels, where Larry was a phenom (73 catches, 17 touchdowns as a senior). Moss, Culpepper and Carter, whom Larry called Uncle Cris, would drive up in their Escalades, music thumping. But Larry stayed grounded. Why? Because his mother was sick.

During Larry's freshman year, Carol found a malignant lump in her breast. The family was floored. Carol was the matriarch, the one who talked Big Fitz into letting their kids play Pee Wee football, who insisted her sons hold the door for ladies, who included them in her AIDS charity work. When she became ill, a despondent Larry Jr. gave up on school. A's and B's became D's and F's. It took two years for Carol, who was undergoing chemotherapy, to straighten him out. By then, though, his GPA had dipped too low; he wasn't going to qualify for D-I football.

Midway through Larry's senior year, coaches from Pittsburgh who were working hard to recruit him suggested he enroll at a prep school, Valley Forge Military Academy and College, near Philadelphia. Larry agreed to go because Chris Doleman, a former Viking and another family friend, had gone there; because he had no other choice; because otherwise he'd have to sit and watch Carol get worse. It was a rough time. He cut his dreads. Kids half his size, but with a higher rank in the school's military structure, would order him around. His typical day started with a 5:30 a.m. wake-up call and a 10-minute breakfast. Then his job was to sweep under the urinals. Then he'd have to shine his shoes and shine the brass on his uniform belt and hat. Then inspection. Then school. Then lunch, school again, football practice and dinner. Then a 30-minute break. Then a mandatory two-hour study hall. At 9:30 p.m., he'd have 30 minutes to shower and brush his teeth. By 10 o'clock, "Taps" was playing on the loudspeakers. That meant lights out. Or else.

Larry got in trouble once -- he won't say why -- and as penance he had to clean the grout between the bathroom tiles with a safety pin. He was at Valley Forge for a year and a half, all while his mother's cancer was spreading to her lungs and her brain. He'd ask her about the pain, but she only wanted to talk about his grades, and how thrilled she was that he'd raised his GPA to 3.3. And when he was done, when he finally enrolled at Pitt in August 2002, he grew out his braids again. In honor of her.

His freshman season at Pitt was a preview. The coaches loved the way he fetched towels in the locker room (old habit). The way he pulled out chairs for coaches' wives at the dinner table. The way he called everyone on the staff "sir." The way he memorized the first name of every secretary in the athletic department. The way he celebrated his first two college touchdowns, against Toledo in the fifth game of the season, by simply flipping the ball to the refs. "Problem was, he'd flip it before the ref could get his arms down," remembers Dave Kennedy, then Pitt's strength coach. "One ref said, 'No.1's a great kid, but he keeps hitting me in the nuts. Can you just have him hand me the ball?' "

Larry did a lot of handing off to refs from then on. His breakout game was a three-touchdown day at Virginia Tech in November 2002, his freshman year, although it wasn't his speed that got him open. He ran only a 4.7 40 then, so those touchdowns were all about his great hands, great eyes (20/15 vision) and body contortions. "I told him, 'You've got hands like Jerry Rice,' " says Pitt defensive back Reggie Carter. "Larry said, 'What? I got better hands than Jerry Rice.' "

But everything changed after that season. Big Fitz called in April. Carol had fallen into a coma, and the worst part was that Larry Jr. had just had an argument with her. Two weeks before, the last time they spoke, Carol had annoyed Larry by meddling in his long-distance relationship with Brittney McGraw, his high school girlfriend. He felt it wasn't his mom's place, and he didn't call her after that. Now she was in a coma. And he hadn't told her he was sorry.

"When they pronounced her dead, he was overcome with grief," Larry Sr. says. "He said, 'Dad, I didn't talk to Mom, I didn't straighten things out.' I grabbed him and hugged him, and said, 'Larry, I don't ever want you to carry that with you. Your mother loved you and you loved your mother.' "

He became a recluse nonetheless. He returned to Pitt, sat idly in his room for weeks. He talked mostly to his dad and to Brittney, who had lost both of her parents in the span of a year and with whom he's still close. He asked his dad never to sell their house -- "It was my mom's dream home," says Larry Jr. -- and asked him never to remove Carol's voice from their answering machine.

Soon enough, though, he needed an escape, so he knocked on Dave Kennedy's door. Train me, he said to the conditioning coach. Kennedy had come to Pitt from Ohio State, where he'd turned Eddie George into a Greek statue. Now Larry needed a diversion, needed Kennedy's boot camp. If he could handle Valley Forge, he could handle anything. So last summer he essentially lived in the Pitt training facility, in the Pitt film room, in the Pitt health food store. "He wanted to live his life a certain way," his father says. If Larry Jr. left campus, it was to babysit Kennedy's kids. If he dropped a pass, he disciplined himself by doing a 50-yard bear crawl. He gained 15 pounds, lowered his body fat to 5 percent, improved his vertical leap to 38" and ... couldn't wait to see a stopwatch.

"Before, I remember Coach K messing with him about his speed," Carter says. "Larry'd say he ran a 4.6, and Coach K would say, 'Yeah, right.' You don't understand how slow Larry was. A 4.6 was pushing it. But that summer? He ran in the 4.4's."

Whatever shell Larry had been in was gone now. Once his sophomore season began, he scored touchdowns in every game except the Continental Tire Bowl (an NCAA-record 18 straight over two seasons). His constant comment to the Pitt quarterbacks was, "Just throw it up high, I'll catch it." The result was 92 receptions, 22 touchdowns and a second-place finish in the Heisman voting. But what his teammate Carter remembers most about the year is Larry loosening up. He may still have been handing the ball to the refs during games, but after touchdowns in practice, Larry was actually spiking it. He was doing end zone cartwheels.

Behind closed doors, though, nothing had changed. Larry was still a campus recluse. He kept photos of Carol on one of the walls in his bedroom and a pair of her earrings in his drawer. His suitemates, Carter and quarterback Tyler Palko, also noticed Larry taking a football to bed with him. It's something Larry did as a child, with an old scuffed ball, but now he was taking a brand-new NFL ball to bed, and taking it with him on road trips. He even took it to the Heisman ceremony in New York. Mostly, though, he played catch with it in the dark. Always talking to Carol. Always apologizing. Always telling Carol that he was going to be a pro.

Of course, it's not a complete metamorphosis until the NFL says it is.
It's sad but true. Larry Fitzgerald needed to run a sub-4.5 40 to get the league's complete validation. That's why he followed Kennedy to Nebraska the minute Kennedy took the job as the Huskers' strength coach. He followed him there for five Valley Forge-like weeks. And when it was time to run in front of the entire league on March 22 in Pittsburgh, Larry Fitzgerald did something that few people probably ever do: he dedicated a 40-yard dash to his mother.

The new Cardinals coach is Dennis Green, and he owns the third overall pick. He was there, beaming. So was Uncle Cris. So was Larry's dad, broadcasting his radio show from the Pitt training facility. And so was Raiders general manager Mike Lombardi, whose team has the second pick, and who, believe it or not, is an alum of Valley Forge Military Academy. "I have to say, I noticed a twinkle in his eye," Big Fitz says of Lombardi.

So Larry removed his warm-ups that day and stepped on the scale: 221 pounds. He got measured: a hair over 6-foot-3. He bench-pressed 225 pounds 20 times, as good as most linebacker prospects. Then he reached into his backpack, fiddled with his wallet -- the wallet with the two licenses -- and ran.

At the finish line, Green smiled at his stopwatch, turned to Big Fitz and said, "I got him at 4.46."

Done.
 
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LVCARDFREAK

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Even more reason to take this kid.
I generally dont put a lot of stake into 'off-field' issues with atheltes as we tend to hold them to higher standards, but can you imagine a WR corp with Boldin and Fitz-both great receivers-both great people?

The David Boston/Simeon Rice era would certainly be a distant memory then!

:thumbup:
 

Cards Czar

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Wow that is one of the best write-ups that I have read in a long long time.
I cant wait until the 3rd pick and hear L. Fitzgeralds name called.
 

MAKTEN

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Jeff,

How did you paste this into a thread. I was going to earlier but couldn't because ESPN Insider makes it difficult. Did you have this as a copyable link elsewhere? Just curious, and thanks for posting it!
 

Tangodnzr

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LVCARDFREAK said:
Even more reason to take this kid.
I generally dont put a lot of stake into 'off-field' issues with atheltes as we tend to hold them to higher standards, but can you imagine a WR corp with Boldin and Fitz-both great receivers-both great people?

The David Boston/Simeon Rice era would certainly be a distant memory then!

:thumbup:

On this...we totally agree. :thumbup:

Great post Jeff, it brought tears to my eyes too.
 
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JeffGollin

JeffGollin

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ESPN Workaround

How did you paste this into a thread. I was going to earlier but couldn't because ESPN Insider makes it difficult. Did you have this as a copyable link elsewhere? Just curious, and thanks for posting it!
After several frustrating attempts at trial and error, I (a) right-clicked the EPSN page, (b) a menu box popped up and I became aware of a "view html" menu option and clicked it. (c) When I opened the "View HTML page, I found code that could be highlighted.

(d) I then opened up a blank page in Front Page 2002 and clicked the "HTML" tab. (e) I then copied and pasted the entire page of code from the "View HTML" ESPN page on my browser onto the blank Front Page html code page and then switched back to Front Page's "Standard View" (WYSISYG) tab. A replica of the ESPN page (the way most people view it) appeared except that, this time, the copy on it was "highlightable." I was then able to (f) copy the text and then (g) paste it in the appropriate spot on the New Thread page of this forum.
 

MAKTEN

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JeffGollin said:
How did you paste this into a thread. I was going to earlier but couldn't because ESPN Insider makes it difficult. Did you have this as a copyable link elsewhere? Just curious, and thanks for posting it!
After several frustrating attempts at trial and error, I (a) right-clicked the EPSN page, (b) a menu box popped up and I became aware of a "view html" menu option and clicked it. (c) When I opened the "View HTML page, I found code that could be highlighted.

(d) I then opened up a blank page in Front Page 2002 and clicked the "HTML" tab. (e) I then copied and pasted the entire page of code from the "View HTML" ESPN page on my browser onto the blank Front Page html code page and then switched back to Front Page's "Standard View" (WYSISYG) tab. A replica of the ESPN page (the way most people view it) appeared except that, this time, the copy on it was "highlightable." I was then able to (f) copy the text and then (g) paste it in the appropriate spot on the New Thread page of this forum.

thanks, i figured as much. I was going to just 'view source' but it required to much editing and since I'm at work...who am I kidding
 

NeverSayDieFan

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DOUBLE or is it TRIPLE--WOW!! (Lost track of the WOW's)

Guys w/heart usually find a way to win. I'm hoping hard we get him. GO CARDS!!
 

green machine

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I wasn't sold on Fitz before, but now he's the guy I want to see the Cards take with that 3rd pick. What an amazing story.
 

thirty-two

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Same here, Green Machine.

Wow - that was an incredible story.
 

Crimson Warrior

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Renz said:
Man, I hope he is there at #3! I will be beyond stoked!

I think, at the very least, it is a strong possibility that the faiders take him at #2.

Also, I have to admit that I would not be exactly thrilled if we take another WR. We need playmakers on defense too!

Maybe our defensive line gets it done this year with the addition of Berry, and, a 2nd or 3rd round DL pick.

And maybe Starks steps up and we get enough production out of Macklin and Hill so that we don't get picked apart on the corners.

DJ is solid at FS. I guess Wilson deserves one more year. Maybe he raises the level of his game in the new scheme.

Thats too many maybes for me to be comfortable. I'd like a Taylor or a Wilfork or a Hall or even a Harris for goodness sake.

But, after reading that great, great article, I won't be too disappointed if we take Fitz.
 
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