has arrived in the NFL.
The in this year’s draft, Fernando Mendoza brings one of football’s most unexpected stories to the pros.
Legendary football agent Leigh Steinberg, who has represented an NFL-record eight first overall draft picks, believes what sets Mendoza apart from the other hyped prospects is his words.
“The way he relates to people,” Steinberg said was the most unique part about Mendoza, in an interview with Fox News Digital.
“He seems to have a really nice touch in dealing with teammates. It seems to be a natural leader. He relates well in interviews. He relates well in everything. And so, the job of a franchise quarterback is to represent the franchise, and he becomes the most visible face of a franchise. And you know, he’s handsome. He speaks well, and I think he’s sort of an ideal representative or spokesman for the team.”
How did a kid from Florida who know one saw coming become a , and the NFL’s next big thing?
The reason Fernando Mendoza is in the U.S. and making his mark on football history is because of a bold decision by his grandparents decades ago.
After Fidel Castro seized control of Cuba and installed a communist regime, all four of Mendoza’s grandparents fled the country and came to America.
“We all thought it was temporary,” Mendoza’s maternal grandfather Alberto Espino previously told The Washington Post of the “There was no way the United States would allow a communist regime 90 miles away.”
But Castro’s reign endured, so Espino and the Mendozas remained in the U.S. and built their life as Americans. That meant American sports.
Both of his parents grew up in as the children of Cuban refugees.
Mendoza’s father, Fernando Mendoza Sr., was a rower at Brown University and a 1987 Junior World Championships gold medalist.
But Mendoza’s father also played football when he was younger, and was teammates with head coach Mario Cristobal at Christopher Columbus High School during the 1980s. Mendoza would go on to defeat his father’s former teammate in this year’s CFP national championship game.
Meanwhile, his mother, Elsa Mendoza, played tennis at the University of Miami.
When Mendoza was a child, his mother was diagnosed with a serious disease
Mendoza was born in in 2003 as the first of his parents’ three children, before his family moved back to Miami, Florida where he would grow up.
But when Mendoza was only about four years old, his mother was diagnosed with . It’s a chronic, autoimmune disease of the central nervous system that can affect the brain and spinal cord. She has spent the last few years in a wheelchair.
Elsa Mendoza wrote about the experience in a 2015 letter to her sons that was published in The Player’s Tribune.
“I was diagnosed about 18 years ago, but of course you never knew that. You and Alberto were so young, and I was doing fineâ¦.. and mostly I didnt want you to worry. It just felt like this impossible thing to place on you guys. On my sweet boys. And then I kept doing fine until about 10 years ago, when we went skiing and I broke my ankle and knee,” she wrote.
“But even after that, I wasnt quite ready to tell you â only that my leg hadnt healed all the way, which is why your mom had her limp. It wasnt until five years ago, when I got Covid, that things started to go downhill in a way where there was no more hiding it. It was during football season, and I realized I wasnt going to be able to travel. And the thought of you wondering if I supported you any less, because suddenly I wasnt at your games? I hated that. So thats when I knew we had to sit you and your brother down.”
She went on to recall, “how hard of a conversation it ended up being. ‘Your mom has this degenerative disease ⦠and while we dont know how it will progre
