The poster boy used to be a punk.
“It’s true, I was,” Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald said.
Long before he became one of the top receivers in NFL history, stringing together 11 Pro Bowl appearances and settling multiple records, Fitzgerald was a troubled teen with bad grades, sloppy habits and a poor attitude.
It was the fall of 2001 and while Pat Tillman was contemplating walking away from the Cardinals and the NFL to join the U.S. Army, which he would do the following spring, Fitzgerald begrudgingly got shipped from his hometown of Minneapolis to Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania.