He came back to help out his old home.

The former Waltham High and Bentley University football star – now a starting offensive lineman for the Dallas Cowboys – was like a 315-pound rock star at the Prospect Hill housing development on Saturday. He was there, along with dozens of Bentley students, as part of the school's Service-Learning initiative to clean up the grounds and help transform a boarded-up daycare facility into a new community center.

"When I grew up this was my daycare," Bernadeau said a few feet from the door of the building where he once lived. "Then they closed it down. So then all the kids had here was the basketball court. When I got a phone call that Bentley was doing this project, I wanted to be a part of it because this is my home. This is where I grew up. I had to jump on this."

Bernadeau spent the day split between his childhood home and the Waltham Boys & Girls Club where he played basketball with some of the young members. He posed for dozens of pictures, gave perhaps hundreds of autographs, and held a mammoth smile almost the entire day.

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