Larry Fitzgerald will on Sunday become the first Super Bowl sportswriter to cover his progeny in the biggest game of the year

WHEN THE NFL’s PR minions unleashed a few thousand reporters and several dozen television crews on the Arizona Cardinals down in Tampa on Tuesday, it appeared, at least from the television clips, that they should have provided my old friend Larry Fitzgerald with a podium all his own.

The longtime sports editor of the Minnesota Spokesman-Review was at least the third-most interviewed figure at the Cardinals’ media day session at Raymond James Stadium, trailing only Arizona quarterback Kurt Warner and Larry’s son and namesake, the electrifying receiver Larry Fitzgerald Jr.

When Super Bowl XLIII kicks off three days hence, the toughest part of Larry Sr’s day will come in abiding with the age-old proscription against cheering in the press box. It is a condition he has never encountered: his hometown Minnesota Vikings lost four of the first 11 Super Bowls, but haven’t been back since.

That Larry has “only” covered the last 27 of them means he has never been tempted to startle his colleagues with a mid-game war whoop. But that resolve figures to be sorely tested Sunday when he becomes the first Super Bowl sportswriter to cover his progeny in the biggest game of the year.

Myself, I managed to cover 35 Super Bowls without surrendering to emotion, but I will find myself unabashedly rooting for the seven-point underdogs when I watch Sunday’s game on television – primarily because of Larry Fitzgerald.

And I’m just guessing that a substantial number of Irish viewers will be pulling for the Cardinals, if only on the strength of the Fitzgerald surname – even though the Larrys, pere et fils, represent Ella’s, not Garrett’s, branch of the family.

Larry and I go back nearly a quarter of a century. When Roger Clemens, in what may retrospectively have been a fit of ’Roid Rage, came after me in the clubhouse at the Metrodome in Minneapolis back in 1991, Larry had my back. And just before kick-off of Super Bowl XXVIII in Atlanta 15 years ago, he and I were among the two dozen sportswriters who silently filed out of the press box and gathered in a corridor during the national anthem, a silent but eloquent protest against the presence of the Confederate flag fluttering above the Georgia Dome.

For many years Big Larry – a former college lineman, he’s always been big, but after a quarter-century of press box food he now borders on gargantuan – brought is wife, Carol, along during Super Bowl week.

That tradition came to an end in 2003, the year Carol succumbed to breast cancer, leaving Larry to raise their sons, Larry Jr and Marcus.

That both parents worked full-time (a public servant, Carol headed up an Aids task force in the Twin Cites, while Larry presided over a syndicated radio programme in addition to his sportswriting duties) had in one respect prepared him for single parenthood – even as boys, Larry and Marcus often accompanied their dad on his Saturday rounds, and grew up rubbing shoulders with players from Minnesota’s professional teams.

From the time he was a 12-year-old ball-boy playing catch with his elders at Vikings’ practice sessions it was apparent that Larry Jr might be destined for stardom, but, his father recalled last week, “it was my job to keep him from knowing that”.

Larry Jr went on to become a standout receiver at the University of Pittsburgh, and was drafted in the first round by the Cardinals. Although he has enjoyed an outstanding six-year career, it has been accomplished largely in obscurity, since for most of those years his Arizona teams were so bad their games were rarely televised outside Phoenix.

Founded in 1898 in Chicago, the Cardinals are the oldest continuously operated football club in America, but while the franchise predates even the NFL, their tradition of ineptitude had been unmatched in all of sport. Prior to this year they had won exactly two post-season games in a history that had seen the vagabond team move from Chicago to St Louis to the Arizona desert. A 1999 opening-round play-off win over the Cowboys was their first since 1947.

Their three play-off victories this year represent one more than the Cardinals’ total for the previous 110 years, and Larry Fitzgerald Jr has been the major reason for that success. In the three play-off wins he has caught 23 passes for 419 yards and five touchdowns.

Throw in the Cardinals’ last two regular-season games and those numbers swell to an even more eye-popping 33 receptions, 650 yards, and eight TDs. He has already smashed the record of the legendary Jerry Rice for post-season receiving yards – and he has the Super Bowl yet to play.

In the NFC championship game two weeks ago, Fitzgerald hauled in passes to score the Cards’ first three touchdowns in their 32-25 win, a couple of them improbably acrobatic exercises.

On the telecast, incidentally, each of those touchdowns seemed quickly to be followed by a cut to a shot of Big Larry watching stoically from the press box. The only emotion evinced came as he jotted down notes.

The Cardinals weren’t supposed to win any of those games, of course, and they certainly weren’t supposed to be in Tampa this weekend.

They might be 5 to 2 underdogs in Sunday’s game, but when the 2008 season began you could have gotten 50 to 1 on the same proposition.

Between his spectacular displays of athleticism and the flowing dreadlocks that seem to shout “look at me!”, Fitzgerald Jr these days finds himself besieged by media types hoping to elicit a trash-talking response that might lend itself to controversy.

They are invariably disappointed, of course. After a lifetime watching the old man’s interviewing technique at work, he’s too well-grounded to fall into that trap. Even before he headed off to college, as Larry Jr revealed to ESPN.com’s Rick Reilly, his father had impressed the credo upon him – answer the question that’s asked, but only the question that’s asked. Don’t add anything. When you win, say little. When you lose, say less. And pass the praise around.

Although Fitzgerald signed a four-year, €30 million contract extension last year, the money doesn’t seem to have gone to his head. By this time in another year he would already be back-packing across Peru or bungee-jumping in New Zealand, or perhaps even rambling around Ireland as he researched the Fitzgerald family roots.

But this has not been any other year, and after the extraordinary events of the past several weeks he has an appointment of another sort come Sunday evening.

And as for Larry Sr?

He was going to be covering Super Bowl XLIII anyway, no matter who was playing in it, but his son’s date with destiny did force him to alter his January travel plans in another respect: Big Larry had booked hotel rooms in Washington for himself and the boys last week, but, he told Reilly, the trip to the historic inauguration became a casualty of the Cardinals’ win in the NFC title game.

“I always had a dream that Larry would play in the Super Bowl,” said Big Larry.

“But never, ever, did I think we’d have a black president.”