Tillman is the Cardinal player who gave up a multi-million dollar contract to join the army in 2001, and was killed in Afghanistan in 2004.
Memory of Pat Tillman Lives On in Phoenix – NYTimes.com
TAMPA, Fla. — The most visible Cardinal has been dead nearly five years. Pat Tillman, the football player turned fallen soldier, is here, there and everywhere Arizona plays, the 2008 team embodying his selflessness and success against great odds.
Until this season, Tillman was the lone blossom on Arizona’s blighted N.F.L. franchise, filling the Phoenix community’s collective heart with pride.
His No. 40 replica jersey — the top seller on the team Web site — hangs off the shoulders of grandmothers and bikers and businessmen who form a human ring of honor in the stands. Tillman is idolized by people who never saw him play. Journalists here are sizing him for a Super Bowl ring.
Soldiers will watch the Cardinals play the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday in Super Bowl XLIII from a U.S.O. center in Afghanistan that bears Tillman’s name and was built with money donated by the N.F.L. in his memory.
“It’s great,” said the former quarterback Jake Plummer, who was Tillman’s college and Cardinals teammate and a close friend. “But in the grand scheme of things, it all kind of stinks because he’s not around.”
Tillman was an undersized, overachieving safety who gave up his N.F.L. career eight months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to become an Army Ranger. He served first in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, where he was killed in combat in April 2004. He was 27. It took multiple investigations and prodding from his family to reveal that he had been killed by fire from his fellow soldiers, not from the enemy.
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