Late Saturday night Kurt Warner scripted the final chapter of his unlikely rise to gridiron stardom following his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
Monday the former Arizona Cardinals’ great took a moment to reflect back on his whirlwind weekend in the midwest.
“I think the moments that stick out the most is what nobody else gets to see,” Warner said in a phone interview with Sports360AZ.com’s Brad Cesmat. “You’re sitting down with some of these other guys, these hall-of-famers you watched on the field. You remember them as football players but you don’t really know them as people. You get a chance to sit down and find out who they are.”
Warner, the last to speak, said he wrote his speech himself in essentially just a single draft.
“It was something that I wanted to do on my own,” Warner explained to Cesmat. “I wanted it to be my words and what I wanted it to say to the different individuals. Share the story that I wanted to share. So I made it something, at the end of the day, that I wanted to be responsible for more than anybody else.”
He also wanted to make it uniquely special to the people who you may not have heard or known about along the way to his improbable road to Canton.
“The whole speech was getting away from what everybody knows,” he said. “The people, the places, the stories that people have already heard before. Because, so often with all of us who find ourselves in these places, there’s particular people and particular stories that really shaped us as individuals. That’s what I wanted to do was touch on those people that never get thanked or ever get mentioned. [The people] that you don’t hear about.
