Shortly after being drafted by the Arizona Cardinals in 2013, defensive back Tyrann Mathieu announced that he’d prefer not be referred to as “The Honey Badger.”
But nobody seemed to pay attention.
He picked up the catchy nickname during his playing days at LSU for his tenacious and unrelenting style of play. But for Mathieu it signified more than football.
“It wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t want to be called ‘The Honey Badger,’” he said during a teleconference call with the St. Louis media this week. “I just didn’t want it to reflect on a bad time in my life.