Minneapolis native Larry Fitzgerald Jr. elected to Pro Football Hall of Fame on first ballot

Dennis Ryan, the legendary longtime former Vikings equipment manager, keeps a favorite early memory of Larry Fitzgerald Jr., the greatest ballboy in franchise history and, officially as of Thursday, Feb. 5, a rare first-ballot Pro Football Hall of Fame receiver.

“He stood out; he’s not an easy one to forget,” Ryan laughed just days before Fitzgerald reached Canton, Ohio, following a 17-year NFL career spent entirely with the Cardinals.

Joining the Minneapolis native and Holy Angels star in the five-person Class of 2026 are first-ballot quarterback Drew Brees; kicker and all-time NFL scoring leader Adam Vinatieri; five-time first-team All-Pro linebacker Luke Kuechly; and running back and seniors finalist Roger Craig, who played his final two seasons for the Vikings and was the only member of the five-person group of seniors/coach/contributor to make it.

Former New England coach Bill Belichick and contributor and Patriots owner Robert Kraft were not chosen. The Hall of Fame announcement came at the NFL Honors show in San Francisco.

Back to Ryan’s early memory of the eighth first-ballot Hall of Fame receiver in NFL history.

It was the late ’90s, probably 1998. A Vikings team loaded with star power and future Hall of Famers Randy Moss, Cris Carter, John Randle and Randall McDaniel are at training camp in Mankato, preparing for the iconic season that would start 16-1 but end in heartbreak one step from the Super Bowl.

Fitzgerald Jr. — the older of two Fitzgerald ballboys and sons of Larry Sr., a veteran Twin Cities sportswriter and close confidante of head coach Dennis Green — is about 14 years old in Ryan’s memory.

It’s windy, because, well, it was always windy on those fields that sat atop the hill next to old Gage Hall.

“The young DBs and receivers were really struggling in the wind,” Ryan said. “Larry steps in as part of the drill and he caught everything with such ease. Smooth, soft hands, never flustered.”

Larry steps out of the drills to tend to his many ballboy tasks. One of his chores is shagging loose footballs and returning them to the person feeding the JUGS machine.

“I remember thinking it’d probably be easier for Larry to catch the ball off the JUGS machine than to chase down the ones everybody else was missing,” Ryan says. “Cris and Randy, they loved to come out and just stand there and watch Larry.”

Did the Vikings know then that young Larry would be drafted third overall out of the University of Pittsburgh three months after Green got the Arizona coaching job in 2004? Or play 17 seasons for the Cardinals? Or go to 11 Pro Bowls, earn first-team All-Pro in 2008, come within a whisker to winning Super Bowl MVP and make an All-Decade team? Or stand, to this day, at age 42, No. 2 all-time behind only Jerry Rice in catches (1,432) and receiving yards (17,492)?

And young Larry had great passion for learning anything related to football.

“He was always asking questions, always a student of the game, always interested in how we did things, always had that innate love of the game that all the greatest players have,” Carter said. “He used to tell me he wanted to be just as good as me. Always. I used to always deflect it onto it was about him being the best version of Larry Fitzgerald Jr.”

Carter wasn’t a speed demon, but he had perhaps the best hands in NFL history. Fitzgerald’s game was very similar, Carter said.

“I would give Larry the highest grade a person could ever have in catching a football,” Carter said. “The crème de la crème. And it was obvious even back then.”

Receiver Matthew Hatchette probably spent more time than anybody throwing the ball with young Larry after practice.

The two have remained close. Hatchette trained Fitzgerald’s son, Devin, a receiver heading to Notre Dame in the fall.

“Larry absorbed the best traits from all of us receivers in the ’90s and none of the worst,” Hatchette said. “It seems like yesterday. He was this rising star at Holy Angels Academy. It’s Friday night and standing there on the track watching this kid play is Cris Carter, Randy, Jake Reed, all the receivers, Randall Cunningham, Todd Steussie, Big Korey Stringer.”

“Larry was one of the guys,” Johnson said.

He played video games with Stringer. Basketball with Carter and Moss. One year, when prom rolled around, Moss lent young Larry his car. Eventually, it was Moss who would deliver the Hall of Fame news to Fitzgerald via the Hall’s famous “Knock.”

It was every football-obsessed kid’s dream. Kind of like “on the job training,” as Fitzgerald once called it.

Larry Sr. and his late wife, Carol — the rock of the family, who died of breast cancer in 2003 — would accept nothing less from Larry or Marcus growing up.

“I remember Denny telling me Larry was good enough to play in the NFL; not someday, but right now as a high school kid,” Larry Sr. said. “I was like, ‘Wow.’ A head coach of an NFL team, a guy who worked with Jerry Rice is telling me this. After that, I had to find a way to keep that a secret from Larry so he would keep pushing in school.”

Young Larry kept pushing, all right.

“I’d talk to him every other day,” Hatchette said. “And even when he had played in a Super Bowl, had 1,400-yard seasons, he never got off the phone without saying, ‘Hatch, I just want to be the best ever.’ ”

Fitzgerald had a lot of ex-Vikings of the 1990s rooting for him on Feb. 1, 2009, Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa, Fla. A postseason that saw Fitzgerald set league records for yards receiving (546) and receiving touchdowns (seven) was coming to an end with a 64-yard touchdown to give Arizona a 23-20 lead over Pittsburgh with 2:37 left.

“I’m on the field getting ready to interview Larry for TV moments after that game,” Carter said. “And Larry is asking me, ‘Cris, give me some ways I can get better.’ He had a very Jerry Rice-like mentality that way.”

McDaniel, the Hall of Fame Vikings left guard, wasn’t surprised by anything Fitzgerald did beyond the late ‘90s.

“It’s too bad it was before cell phones,” McDaniel said. “If a kid did today what Larry was doing back then, we’d have all been recording it and it would go viral.”

Former Vikings public relations director Bob Hagan was asked why there aren’t more photos of Fitzgerald with Moss and Carter.

“I tell everyone it’s like if people knew Mick Jagger was going to be Mick Jagger, you’d see more photos of him when he was 10,” Hagan said. “We knew Larry was different, but I guess we didn’t know he was this different.”

“To this day, Larry still credits the Vikings for his development,” Ryan said. “But it was really his God-given talent and his work ethic. Greatness was in Larry Fitzgerald Jr. from a young age, and he drew it out by doing everything he possibly could.”