Larry Fitzgerald has already given a Hall of Fame speech this year. He says Sunday will be harder. “This would be probably a lot more emotional for me, because it’s home. It’s where I live. It’s with the people that I grew up with,” Fitzgerald said this week, ahead of the Arizona Cardinals putting him in their Ring of Honor and retiring his No. 11 at halftime against the Denver Broncos.
He explained the difference with Canton. “The Hall of Fame is like, it’s league wide,” he said. “There’s Saints fans. There’s Carolina Panthers fans. There’s everybody there because it’s a testament to what professional football is.” Sunday, he said, will be “a solely Cardinal experience, which is authentic to my experience as a Cardinal only.” Fitzgerald played all 17 of his seasons in Arizona, from 2004 to 2020, and is second in NFL history in both catches and receiving yards.
“I felt like my goodbye was like on Zoom”
Fitzgerald said the ceremony was set once before. About three years ago, he said, he and team owner Michael Bidwill agreed on a date, and then “something family-wise came up.” Bidwill, whom Fitzgerald called “like an uncle to me,” told him to pick it up again “when it feels right.” They chose October in part because it is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
He also wanted a proper goodbye. Fitzgerald’s last season came in 2020, with empty stadiums and video calls instead of locker rooms. “I felt like my goodbye was like on Zoom,” he said. “It’d be great to be able to come out there on that field.” He added a hope for the score: “I’m just hoping when I go out there, we’re up at half, taking care of business, and that the fans would be in a lot better mood.”
“It’s the highest honor”
Very few Cardinals have had their numbers retired. Asked what it means to join that list, Fitzgerald said: “I mean, it’s the highest honor.” He named Marshall Goldberg, Pat Tillman and Larry Wilson, calling Tillman “one of the great American heroes” and Wilson “a franchise icon.” Asked if he likes being called a franchise icon himself, he smiled. “It’s not something that I would walk around and beat my chest about,” he said, “but it has a nice ring to it.”
The speech will be short. Fitzgerald said his Hall of Fame speech ran about 12 minutes, but a halftime ceremony has to leave time to bring everyone onto the field and clear it again. “I think I got like a minute, minute and a half or something like that,” he said. “So it won’t be, you know, real long. Nobody will fall asleep.”
Grief for his father
Fitzgerald’s father, longtime Minnesota sportswriter and broadcaster Larry Fitzgerald Sr., died on June 1 at age 71. Asked how he is balancing that grief with this moment, Fitzgerald said: “It’s been a really tough time.” He said his father’s sacrifices “don’t show up on a stat sheet, you know, thousands of hours driving me around and, you know, when I was being a jerk and not doing right, you know, not writing me off.” Losing someone he could talk to every day about “relationships, business,” he said, “that sounding board, it’s been a difficult adjustment.”
He described his father’s last trip, to the Super Bowl in San Francisco in February. “I knew he probably shouldn’t have been traveling,” Fitzgerald said. “I remember I pushed him into the stadium, you know, on his wheelchair and, you know, in my mind, I thought, like, you know, this could be it. I saw the deterioration.” His father still called the game for an Australian broadcast alongside former Cardinals punter Ben Graham, as he did every year, and Fitzgerald said visiting them in the press box was his own Super Bowl routine. “I have great days and I have really, really hard days, like anybody would,” he said.
“The most embarrassing time I ever had”
Fitzgerald was asked about staying with one team for his whole career. “Loyalty just doesn’t feel like it’s the same as it once was,” he said, describing job candidates at his company who are 27 and have already lived in four places. “It wasn’t always great. It was a lot of down times and tough times and times where I could have said, you know what, the grass might be greener on the other side,” he said. “I think you learn a hell of a lot more through tough times than you do from prosperity.”
He pointed to the 58-0 loss at Seattle in 2012. “It was like the most embarrassing time I ever had as a professional,” he said. “I remember, like, I didn’t even have a catch until like the fourth quarter.” The Cardinals won in Seattle the next season. The memory he expects to come back on Sunday is the NFC title in January 2009. “We were somewhat average football team that year that got really good at the right time,” he said. He talked about late nights with his road roommate Sean Morey and Kurt Warner telling the team what to expect, and said he will think “not just the moments, but the men that made the moments.”
“I’m washed now”
Fitzgerald said the pressure of being a role model was greater when he played. “I’m kind of, I’m washed now,” he said. “The kids are like, hey, you’re Larry Fitzgerald, right? So yeah, my dad used to really like you.” He said he never forgot the No. 11 jerseys in the stands. “Most of those kids I know didn’t have the money to buy them,” he said. “I’m not gonna buy my kid a jersey of a player that I don’t respect.”
He admitted he was “horrible with the media when I first got here at 20,” and credited Mark Dalton, the team’s longtime media relations chief, for telling him: “You need to be accountable.” Asked what is next, he named a goal: beating Dalton at pickleball “consistently.” “He’s gotten old, man. He can’t move like he used to,” Fitzgerald said. He said he picked this weekend in part because his son Devin’s team has a bye, so the family can be there together. “Life is good,” he said. “I feel like I built a nice off-ramp for myself.”
The Cardinals, 2-4 after an 18-16 win over the Rams last Sunday, host the 4-2 Broncos at State Farm Stadium on Sunday at 4:05 p.m. ET (11:05 p.m. in Cairo).
No published comments yet. Start the conversation.