For years he was tucked deep in the desert, snatching footballs out of the sky as a kind of anti-T.O., one whose vanilla personality – and mortal physical traits – seemed to obscure him against those who couldn’t let their hands to do all the talking.

All this time, as Super Bowl coverage the past week has proven, Larry Fitzgerald has been outdone by no one on the football field in his four years since leaving Pittsburgh. He’s even shown, through photographic evidence, a tendency to catch passes with his eyes shut.

In athletics, there are occasionally phenomena that are best left as legendary – like Jordan’s hang time or Ted Williams’ vision. Then there’s Fitzgerald, an elite athlete with average attributes who just so happens to have his craft down to a science.

At 6-foot-3, Fitzgerald, a former Big East offensive Player of the Year, is the fourth-tallest receiver on his team. With a 4.63 40-yard dash, he could be beaten in wind sprints by some linebackers.

But not even three Pro Bowls, or his record 419 receiving yards this postseason, do more for his aura than the idea he needs little more than sense to snatch a pass. That perhaps sports’ No. 1 truism – ‘keep your eyes on the ball’ – need not apply to Arizona’s No. 1 target.

So is Fitzgerald’s superb hand-eye coordination other-worldly? Or is it just the product of years of crafting, enabled by circumstances he concertedly accessed?

‘The idea is, practice changes your brain,’ said Dr. Catherine Cornwell, associate professor in neurobiology at Syracuse University.

In a Jan. 16 article in The Wall Street Journal, Fitzgerald spoke of the coordination training given to him by his grandfather, an optometrist, even before the second grade. The article highlighted Fitzgerald’s teenage day job, as a ballboy for the Minnesota Vikings.

It also focused on Fitzgerald’s one particularly unique characteristic – that is, the photos showing him hauling in passes downfield without looking at the ball. He possesses a hand-eye coordination so advanced, it seems, he doesn’t need the eye.

But to Dr. Marc Howard, a behavioral psychologist at SU, that’s not so astounding. Catching footballs, like driving a car, can become so ‘second nature’ that the brain hardly needs any prompting. He likened it to an amnesia patient:

‘There are people who’ve learned to do tasks, like riding a bike, who don’t remember ever having done it before in there life and have no explicit conscious ability to describe how they do it. But nonetheless they can do it,’ Howard said. ‘So it’s kind of like the memory is in their muscle or actually in different parts of the brain.’

In Fitzgerald’s case, practice indeed makes perfect – or at least routine. The hours as a child in his grandfather’s office enhanced his coordination. The weekends playing toss with NFL quarterbacks built his explicit memory bank.

And Fitzgerald knows he’s not a freak of nature, as much as a creature of science, explained by the same theoretical concepts as pianists and string musicians. Tests have been done on violinists, Cornwell said, to see whether parts of the brain change size depending on whether the musician is right-handed or left-handed. The result was that it had: The bigger the difference, the longer the people had been playing.

‘You would expect that practice in whatever football players do would change their brains similarly,’ Cornwell said.

A football player using his brain? To Fitzgerald, it’s not exactly competitive advantage. Last week, he stunned reporters by referring to himself as ‘mortal’ in comparison to Randy Moss, the Patriots wide receiver he grew up idolizing in Minnesota.

His reasoning: Moss was blessed. Born with superior height and speed, he was destined to beat cornerbacks and leap for touchdowns. Hand-eye coordination, on the other hand, is not so much given but earned.

‘People get better at every type of motor task they practice,’ Howard said. ‘When they stop getting better in terms of accuracy, they’re able to do it faster and they’re able – while doing it accurately – to think about other stuff and increase the size of the calculation they do.’

Fitzgerald’s not exactly an everyman – not all ballboys can become Cowboys – but he links the superhero to the citizen in more ways than just his anti-celebrity personality. As a child, it’s been said he slept with a football tucked underneath his arm every night (as many children do).

It’s not a causal relationship there that’s profound, according to Howard, but the psychological impact of a boy’s motivation to never let go of the ball. Thinking about one’s craft, all other things being equal, leads to better performance.

In Fitzgerald’s case, it’s more direct: whether in sleep, or on the field, his eyes are closed. And the football’s usually in his grasp.

Zach Schonbrun is the sports columnist for The Daily Orange, where his columns appear every Wednesday. He can be reached at zsschonb@syr.edu.

Published on January 27, 2009 at 12:00 pm