Cris Carter Talks Larry Fitzgerald’s HOF Induction, Ohio State & More w/Rich

Larry Fitzgerald called him Uncle Chris from the stage in Canton, and Cris Carter wants everyone to understand that the title was chosen on purpose.

"I wanted him to know that he had a great dad, and I was a guy that grew up without a dad," Carter told Rich. "I wasn't going to be his friend. I was there to be a mentor to him. I was there to teach him things that he wasn't going to be able to get, and I'm there to tell him the truth." Not a father, not a brother. Something in between, with the authority to say the hard thing.

Larry Fitzgerald Sr. covered Carter's Vikings teams as a beat writer under Dennis Green, and his son was the ball boy. When it came time for military school, there was a cost problem, and Carter quietly solved it.

"We never talked about it, but I'm the one that pays for Larry to go to Valley Forge," Carter said. He and Fitzgerald Sr. cooked up a fictitious contract in which the father would ghost write for Carter in Minnesota to cover the tuition. "His dad never did any writing for me, but Larry got to where he needed to be."

Carter had a template for it. He had seen players with that same disposition straighten out at military school, Eddie George chief among them. Fitzgerald was young and, in Carter's words, not that disciplined. He hated Valley Forge. It built him, and it routed him to Pittsburgh and Walt Harris instead of Ohio State.

So when Fitzgerald asked Carter, two nights before, to put the gold jacket on him, it hit differently.

"You've helped out a lot of people in your career. You put people on, you've employed people, but we never expect to get paid out by anything," Carter said. Randy Moss delivered the knock at the door and Carter delivered the jacket, which crystallized what those Minnesota years meant. "It changed his arc in life forever."

Then the competitor showed up. Fitzgerald cracked jokes about Carter's hands, so Carter went home and ran the tape, two screens side by side.

"Larry is almost a perfect receiver," Carter allowed. "But Cris Carter catches every ball that everybody else catches, and then I catch a few that no one catches." He conceded the vertical, roughly 36 for him against maybe 38 for Fitzgerald, credit to what Carter described as a built-in turbocharged launch. On the one-handers, though, he was blunt. "My video was standalone." He wants a game of horse next year, a JUGS machine, right hand or left, gloves or no gloves, filmed while he works out Fitzgerald's son Devin ahead of Notre Dame.

Underneath the needling is something Carter will not joke about.

"It's the only time my life makes sense," he said. "It makes sense to me why I was so focused as a kid. It makes sense to me why I would walk from the housing project to get to practice." That is also why the room has a rule now: do not get on a podcast and downgrade a gold jacket.

Which brings him to the next one he expects to earn. Rich asked how good Jeremiah Smith is.

"Heisman Trophy," Carter said, before revealing he sent Smith and his receivers coach a video Saturday morning telling Smith he expects him to be the third gold jacket he has had a hand in, after Fitzgerald and Moss. His comp: a combination of Calvin Johnson and Julio Jones with Fitzgerald's disposition.

"He's a problem," Carter said. Only one more time for Michigan.