NFL Draft: From nearly quitting to No. 1 — the stunning rise of Fernando Mendoza
From growing up idolizing Tom Brady, to nearly quitting football, to now likely being the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL Draft — joining the team Brady partially owns — Fernando Mendoza's life has come full circle.
A few weeks into his first season playing tackle football, Fernando Mendoza told his parents that he wanted to quit. The 10-year-old Cuban-American boy who occasionally stuttered when he spoke was struggling to make friends with his new teammates or to elbow his way into the competition to earn playing time at quarterback. "In fourth grade, I was a new kid on the park football team,” Mendoza recalled in December while delivering his acceptance speech after winning the Heisman Trophy.
“Didn't know a single teammate, and was fourth on the depth chart. By midseason, I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to quit.
” Thankfully for Mendoza, his mom and dad aren’t the type of parents who would let one of their boys quit without finishing what he started. Fernando and Elsa Mendoza insisted that their eldest son return to the South Miami Grey Ghosts and prove what he could do, a decision that helped him learn to overcome the obstacles he would face throughout his teenage years and paved the way for one of football’s most remarkable underdog stories. The same kid who began his tackle football career buried on his team’s quarterback depth chart blossomed into college football’s best player.
The same kid whose first coaches envisioned him as a run-stuffing defensive end went on to quarterback long-struggling Indiana to its first national title. The same kid who once begged his parents to let him walk away from football is now the overwhelming favorite to be the first player taken in this week’s NFL Draft. “He made up his mind that he was not going to quit and he became a fierce competitor and a leader,” Grey Ghosts head coach Johnny Zeigler told Yahoo Sports.
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