Peterson says goodbye to conflicted fans
Ex-Cards’ legacy a mix of right, wrong moves
Patrick Peterson’s goodbye letter to the Cardinals and their fans, published Tuesday in The Players’ Tribune, began and ended with references to Arizona’s beautiful sunsets.
No argument there from anyone who has spent a night or two in our state.
In between, he discussed the legacy he created in 10 years as a cornerback with the team.
Plenty of argument there from anyone who followed Peterson’s career since the Cardinals selected him with the fifth overall draft pick in 2011.
“Sometimes it takes going through your lowest moments to realize how much you really mean to a place. And how much that place means to you.”
Patrick Peterson
Ex-Cardinals cornerback
Usually an athlete who stays with one franchise 10 years and has the success Peterson had — eight Pro Bowls, three allPro selections, membership in the NFL all-decade team of the 2010s — is beloved by fans.
But Peterson’s relationship with Cardinals fans is complicated, and there were no tearful sendoffs earlier this year when Peterson signed a one-year, $8 million deal with the Vikings.
“Legacy,” the title of Peterson’s letter, is an overused word in sports, but if Peterson leaves behind one in Arizona, it’s this:
Good guy. Generous heart. For many seasons, a great player.
But often stunningly clueless about how his words and actions played with a fan base that often found him hard to embrace. All of those attributes were apparent even in the early stages of Peterson’s career.
He was likable, almost always upbeat and smiling. To reporters, he was usually generous with his time. Maybe because of that smile, his comments about being the best cornerback in the NFL seemed more brash when printed than they did when spoken.
Peterson donated money and time to charitable causes, including feeding the hungry and creating reading nooks in the libraries of several elementary schools in the Valley.
There was a lot to like over the past 10 years. And just enough missteps that a good portion of the fan base seemed happy the Cardinals didn’t make much, if any, effort to re-sign Peterson after last season.
The bad times
“Sometimes it takes going through your lowest moments to realize how much you really mean to a place,” Peterson wrote. “And how much that place means to you.”
In the letter, Peterson wrote about a couple of those moments, and left a significant one out.
He covered the 2014 season, when he inexplicably gained weight and played awful. Eventually, he was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.
“I was 24 years old at the time. I’m like, What the hell?” he wrote.
“I cried like a baby in the doctor’s office. I was like, ‘Diabetes?? I’m a football player, I’m young, I’m in shape, I’m fit.’ None of it made sense.
“But the docs helped me figure out my diet and everything, and then I realized it wasn’t like a fatal diagnosis or the end of my career. I got my diet under control, and everything began to click for me. Once I figured out what was wrong with my body, I could focus on football again.”
Other problems, Peterson created himself.
In 2018 and 2019, Peterson’s actions damaged the chances of first-year coaches trying to find footing in the NFL.
Midway through the team’s miserable 2018 season, Peterson asked to be traded. That was news to coach Steve Wilks, who had conversations with Peterson, a captain, almost daily.
Blindsided by the news, Wilks had to address why his All-Pro cornerback, a captain, wanted out.
Peterson apologized to fans in January during the pro-am of the Waste Management Phoenix Open. Wilks had been fired weeks earlier.
Peterson didn’t write about that in his letter.
In 2019, Peterson was suspended for the first six games after testing positive for performance-enhancing substances. It was the first six games of coach Kliff Kingsbury’s tenure.
In the letter, Peterson blamed it on an unnamed substance he said he took in 2018 and 2019. He was unaware, he wrote, of exactly what he was taking over the course of two years.
“There were some nights when I cried myself to sleep,” Peterson wrote. “I just wondered, Why me? It was like, I’d been taking this same thing for the last two seasons, so how all of a sudden is this happening?”
Picked on
Performance dictates tolerance in even the lowest levels of athletics. The Cardinals, and their fans, could have looked past Peterson’s mistakes had Peterson played better the last two years.
Peterson’s play slipped. Opponents no longer avoided him; they targeted him, and with greater success than ever before.
That led to the Cardinals’ decision to let Peterson go in free agency and to Peterson becoming a member of the Vikings, who will play the Cardinals this season at State Farm Stadium.
Peterson wrote he still feels like a Cardinal and expressed hope that one day his name will be in the team’s ring of honor.
Maybe then, when the sun has set on a complicated career, Peterson will be fully embraced by a fan base that right now doesn’t seem sad he is finishing his career in another team’s uniform.