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A WEEK INTO the Minnesota Vikings’ 1999 training camp, the person in charge of checking media parking passes was fired. He had broken curfew, and then-coach Dennis Green wasn’t having it.
Neither was the young man’s father. After all, Larry Fitzgerald Sr.’s relationship with Green was one of the reasons Larry Jr. got the gig.
A week later, Green rehired Fitzgerald, but instead of parking lot attendant, Fitzgerald became the ball boy for the wide receivers. That episode played a significant role in the trajectory of Fitzgerald’s career, which culminates Saturday when he’s enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“That’s when,” said Larry’s brother, Marcus, “the true story of Larry Fitzgerald actually happened as far as the wide receiver, the phenom, the person we see today.
“Had to wake him up, because my dad was pissed. My dad was like, ‘What are you doing?’…my mom and my dad. You saw him take [the job] way more serious, and he was way more dedicated. I really think that shook him up enough to know that you don’t have too many chances in life to keep screwing up.”
Fitzgerald wasn’t a ball boy to just any receivers. The Vikings were led by a pair of future Hall of Fame receivers in Randy Moss and Cris Carter, who brought Minnesota to the brink of Super Bowl XXXIII after a 15-1 season. Over the next three seasons, Fitzgerald received a Ph.D.-level education in being a wide receiver and a professional football player. Without those relationships, without those hours of watching Carter and Moss, among others, Fitzgerald might never have been measured for a gold jacket.
Larry Fitzgerald will be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday, the culmination of a journey that began as a Vikings ball boy. ESPN Illustration
“No, I don’t think so,” Fitzgerald told ESPN when asked if he would be going into the Hall without those three years as a ball boy. “And I say that because I think me being around those guys and seeing players coming and going, guys blowing their money, getting hurt, just the underbelly of the league, I don’t know if I would’ve been as focused on the big picture, stayed away from the distractions, not drink, not use drugs. All of the decisions you have to make as a young person that determine the trajectory.
“I don’t know if I would’ve had the insight or foresight to avoid those types of things.”
But he didn’t avoid every temptation.
CARTER REMEMBERS A TIME when Fitzgerald took his “tricked-out Denali” to a car wash and it came back a little light.
“Stole all the change out the ashtray,” Carter said. “I said I hope he’s good at football, because you’re not going to be a good thief.”
Fitzgerald got close to Carter through Marcus, who used to babysit Carter’s kids. Larry spent a couple of spring breaks at Carter’s home in Florida to train. He still talks to Carter and his ex-wife Melanie Morgan — “Aunt Mel” — all the time.
“They were just a really great family,” Fitzgerald said. “And obviously he’s a Hall of Fame talent, so to be able to pick his mind and learn from him was something that meant a great deal to me.
“And to be able to have that type of knowledge with that proximity was not something that most people were able to have.”
The search for knowledge is what most impressed Carter.
“Larry is a student of information,” Carter said. “Everything he’s into, he is deeply into it to an addictive level, and the lifestyle, the fanfare, playing the position, he could see as a youngster, ‘Man, I know what I want to do.'”
However, Carter, like a number of other Vikings, quickly noticed that Fitzgerald had the natural ability to merge his hard work and his thirst for knowledge.
“We got hundreds of ball boys,” Carter said. “Only one became a Hall of Famer because he’s the only one that had the DNA.”
The impressions Carter and Moss made on Fitzgerald weren’t limited to the football field.
Cris Carter and Randy Moss, right, were among Fitzgerald’s mentors during his time as a Vikings ball boy. Elsa/Getty Images
“And I’ll never forget, one of the first camp practices, I always knew [Moss] played basketball,” Fitzgerald said. “We were all shooting in the gym before practice started, and they had to walk through the gym to get to the locker rooms. And I remember him just grabbing the basketball and taking a few steps and just dunking it as he’s walking through in flip-flops.
“And I’m like, Jesus Christ, this dude is just so athletic. And so I think some of the freaky things that he would do every day at practice, they weren’t things that you could really … you could watch it in awe, but you know you never could do it.”
But there was one Moss trait Fitzgerald could emulate.
“He’s one of the few guys that I saw with that level of talent that had that work ethic,” he said. “His work ethic was really good for a guy that was that talented.”
The admiration wasn’t a one-way street.
A GROUP OF about 10 Vikings that often included Moss, Carter, seventh-round pick Matthew Hatchette and quarterback Daunte Culpepper would attend Fitzgerald’s high school games. They’d go to dinner after and made it a weekly thing during home-game weekends.
Korey Stringer, who was a Vikings tackle at the time, once went to one of Fitzgerald’s practices. When he saw Fitzgerald standing on the outside of a huddle at the end of practice, he yelled down from the stands for Fitzgerald to get in the middle of it.
“It became that ‘Hey, we got to help him out’ type of attitude for us as a receiver group,” Hatchette said.
“He was one of the crew, basically,” former Vikings running back Leroy Hoard said.
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It helped that Larry Sr. was a longtime Vikings beat reporter for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, and was very close to Green. Fitzgerald Sr. died June 1 at the age of 71.
“[Larry Jr.] was part of the family a little bit with his dad being the beat writer and Denny’s main guy he talked to about the Vikings,” former Vikings receiver Chris Walsh said.
“He was our kid,” Carter added.
As Fitzgerald got more comfortable and as the receivers embraced him, he began asking questions. Lots of questions.
“He was asking very specific questions like, ‘OK, why’d you turn your hands over on the way you caught it like this, Cris, compared to turning your pinkies together?'” Hatchette recalled. “Stuff like that. ‘How did you keep the defender on your backside when you were attacking the football?’
“Little questions like that were way different questions that a kid would ask at that point.”
The receivers let Fitzgerald sit in on their position meetings, where he’d watch Carter reveal how Detroit Lions defenders would bang their fists together when they were about to check into a different play. It was in those meetings that he learned a valuable lesson from his time as a ball boy: how to read and recognize defenses.
“I think you can be as good as you want, but if you don’t know what the f— is going on in the football field, you’re not going to have very much success. You got to know what’s going on,” Fitzgerald said.
“So, all of those things, I would recognize that just being able to sit in those meetings.”
After practice, after the receivers got their extra work in, Fitzgerald would catch passes from the Jugs machine, often with Hatchette. Walsh remembered Fitzgerald doing the same Jugs drills as the receivers, such as turning to catch the ball as it quickly approached or working the sideline. Fitzgerald would also run routes for quarterbacks who wanted to get in a few more reps. At one point, Carter told him to put on gloves and Fitzgerald was the only ball boy wearing gloves.
“Well, I just thought you’re going to get what you put in in terms of the work,” Fitzgerald said. “And I saw those guys putting a lot of effort into getting better. And I knew that if I wanted to do that, then that was what was going to be required.
“I was going to have to do the same thing, and I just learned the work ethic. I learned the detail. I learned the focus. And those are the things that really stood out to me.”
It was when Fitzgerald would catch balls that the Vikings started to realize his potential.
“His ball skills were amazing,” Hatchette said. “The way he tracks it, the way his body controls how he can jump and turn.”
Jennifer Stewart/Getty Images
“One thing that I could tell you I absolutely positively knew was he could catch,” Hoard said. “That’s something you notice right away.”
“I remember just if Larry got his hands on that ball, he didn’t give it up,” Walsh said.
As his wide receiver career started in earnest as a junior in high school, Fitzgerald started doing little things, like always looking the ball into his hands and tucking it while playing catch before practice.
“He was catching everything away from his body,” Culpepper said. “His hand-eye coordination was amazing. His timing was great. I mean, his body control was great.
“And I just saw, I said, ‘Man, this kid, he can be really good.'”
At Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania, Fitzgerald would catch 100 balls before and after practice, coach Mike Muscella remembered. That was before doing a drill where he’d work on keeping both feet in bounds on the sideline.
“He was getting ready for … not college,” Muscella said. “He was getting ready for after college.”
When former Pittsburgh coach Walt Harris recruited players, he never told them they’d start as a freshman. He felt guilty doing it, preferring to be honest. He made an exception once, for Fitzgerald. Except he didn’t start him his first game of his freshman year. Fitzgerald wasn’t ready, Harris told ESPN. He didn’t fully grasp the terminology Harris was using, but that changed in Week 2. Fitzgerald figured it out and caught 10 passes for 103 yards.
“Once the ball was in the air, he was a far and away different player than what you get out of high school,” Harris said. “I mean, he was a typical high school player when it came to learning the things, the reactions of the offense, the route adjustments, the blitz adjustments. He was a typical high school guy trying to get himself ready for college. But once the ball was in the air, he was like no other.
“And that’s why he’s the first-ballot Hall of Famer.”
GREEN AND THE VIKINGS parted ways in January 2002, and the coach spent two years as an ESPN analyst before being hired by the Arizona Cardinals.
The Cards had the No. 3 pick in 2004, and Green drafted the media parking lot attendant he had fired five years earlier.
“Dennis Green knew me since I was 10 years old,” Fitzgerald said. “He knew my insecurities. He knew my strengths. He knew how I handled adversity. He saw how I handled when my mom passed away, how I responded to that.
“And then the other biggest thing is I wouldn’t have had 11 years around Dennis Green to be able to allow him to see what I was as a person, work ethic, and then to know my dad, my mom, to understand where I came from, my family background that helped shape me. And so all of those things, you got to take it into consideration. If Dennis Green was not the head coach, the Cardinals would not have taken me at No. 3 because there was no need for me at 3.”
Dennis Green, right, took a chance by drafting Fitzgerald with the third overall pick in 2004. Green’s former ball boy made that pick pay off for Green and Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill. Tom Hood/AP Photo
On the stage at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium on Saturday afternoon is exactly where Carter expected Fitzgerald to culminate his career.
“It’s just so gratifying because he had Hall of Fame talent and he maxed it out,” said Carter, who will deliver Fitzgerald’s introduction on Saturday.
All the hours, all the conversations, all the catches that Fitzgerald put in — and that the players around him put into him during his time as a ball boy — helped get him to this point.
But none of that would’ve happened if it weren’t for Green, who died in 2016 at 67. Green took a second chance on someone after teaching him a valuable lesson about following the rules.
“The environment that I worked around with those players, man, it was just amazing to be able to be that close, see what they ate, to see what they thought, to see how they studied, to see how they worked, to see the frequency of the massage therapists, acupuncture, chiropractors, all of these things that you would never be able to have access to,” Fitzgerald said. “I was able to see the private chefs to make sure that the meals that they were eating were healthy and what time they would go to bed because I’m on the same floor with the players. So, I noticed Cris Carter during training camp. I mean, he’s in bed at 9 o’clock. I’m like, ‘OK, so I need to make sure I’m getting my sleep at night.’
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“So, I’m noticing and picking up on all these little details. And I think that just gave me such a huge advantage when I went to college and also being able to implement when I got into the NFL.”
Now, with his career about to be enshrined, those former Vikings who helped him along the way feel like part of them is also going into the Hall of Fame, all because of a training camp job.
“I think it’s just cool,” Hoard said. “I say, ‘How good was our Minnesota team? Our ball boy was a Hall of Famer.'”
