The Ultimate Warrior: David Morrow

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Morrow, 35, grew up at the very end of a world that anyone his age or older remembers well and anyone a little younger than he is cannot fathom.

"When I was a kid, everyone played multiple sports," he says. "No one was on a travel team. You'd go outside and play all day with your friends. Your parents would call you in to eat. There were three TV networks and only a few other stations. Now, there are all these forces keeping kids in the house. TV. The internet. Thousands of channels. iPods. DVDs. Parents have to push their kids to get outside."

And to his critics, the ones who say his "hot" ads are a little too hot?

"Our message is definitely PG compared to what kids have access to nowadays," he says. "I think it's na?ve of adults to think otherwise. The discovery factor for kids now is instant. When older kids were talking about something and you didn't know what it was, you had to work up the courage to ask your older brother or another kid. Now, you can go Google it. We're not selling sugar sodas here. We're not selling candy. We're not selling video games. We're using these messages to promote something very positive. There's a lot of layers to what we're doing, but we're promoting something very, very healthy for kids."

Morrow is extremely passionate about lacrosse, something that might have seemed unlikely to him midway through his freshman year at Princeton. Morrow was an All-America defenseman at Brother Rice, where he also was a defenseman in hockey.

"I was really a hockey player," he says. "I was much better at hockey than lacrosse. By the middle of my freshman fall, I wanted to quit lacrosse. I was the worst guy on the team. I didn't know what was going on. I wasn't comfortable. I came from Michigan, where there were only seven teams in the whole state. I came to play with kids who had played lacrosse their whole lives and had such a better understanding of the game. I was never really a good lacrosse player."

He did have one ability.

"I could run fast," he says. "I was like Forrest Gump. Coach T told me to keep my stick in front of my guy and run with him and that if I did that, nobody would run past me."

Morrow decided to stick it out, and it worked out pretty well from there. He would play in all 16 games his freshman year, as Princeton reached the NCAA tournament for the first time ever. He became a first-team All-Ivy and third-team All-America selection his sophomore year.

His junior year, in 1992, was a huge one by every possible definition: Morrow became a first-team All-America defenseman and the Division I defenseman of the year, and Princeton won the first of its six NCAA championships.

"My goal was to be a starter by my senior year," he says. "When we won the national championship and I won those individual awards, it was very shocking to me. I think self-confidence is a big part of it. I think a lot of kids don't realize that when they're doing sprints and working out in the gym that everyone is close in terms of how fast they are or how strong they are. It's the little things that separate one guy from the next, and 90% of it is thinking that you can."

As a senior, Morrow was again first-team All-America and defenseman of the year as Princeton reached the Final Four, and he also added the honor of becoming the Division I Player of the Year. Today, 14 years later, he remains the last defensive player to win the award and one of two all-time to do so, along with Dave Pietramala of Hopkins, today the Blue Jays' head coach.