Sean Taylor, 1983-2007

I stare at my computer, knowing I have to write something. It’s been a long week, and I need to put something on paper. Something besides the obvious. But nothing seems to sound right. So, if you’ll indulge me, I’ll start with the basics.

Sean Taylor was a good person, a loving father and a terrific football player. On the field, he was the best safety in the NFL. In this, his fourth season, he was finally showing all the traits that all free safeties need. No longer was he just some freelancer looking to put the big hit on a defenseless receiver. He was starting to excel in covering the entire field. He was becoming a great pseudo-linebacker; someone who could easily come up in the box and play the run. He was starting to be the very definition of the safety position: a safety net. As the last line of defense, he would cover up other players’ mistakes. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat at FedEx Field this season and watched LaRon Landry or Carlos Rogers or one of the linebackers completely blow a coverage on the tight end or slot receiver, only to have Taylor make up so much ground and save the Redskins from a big play. After two seasons of just wanting to hit people, in the past year and half, Taylor had become the most complete safety in the NFL. He accomplished all that without losing any of his intimidation. If you decided to send a receiver towards him, that receiver was going to get decked. Game-planning for the Redskins defense started with one simple rule: Don’t go over the middle.

Furthermore, Taylor was becoming a team leader. He was no longer the young kid in the middle of veterans. In a secondary with a three-year player and a rookie, Taylor was more mentor than anything else. He was closer to Gregg Williams than any other player on the team and basically played the role of Williams on the field. He would stay late for film sessions, stay late during practices and stay after the games in the locker room, win or lose.

He was a once in a generation talent at safety. In college, I called play-by-play for Maryland football at WMUC, the student radio station. I had the good fortune to cover Shawne Merriman for a couple of seasons. For those who have never been to Byrd Stadium, all media members sit in Tyser Tower on the South side of the field. All television and radio sit on the fourth floor, which is several stories above the action. As a play-by-play guy, from all the way up on the fourth floor, it was very tough to see numbers most of the time. Luckily, I knew whenever Merriman made a play. All you would see was this blur, going faster and harder than anyone else on the field. You didn’t need to look for a number or wait for the pile to be uncovered. You knew it was Merriman because he was just so much better than anyone else on the team. I figured that this was par for the course in covering college athletics. Because there can sometimes be so much talent discrepancy on each team, there is always going to be a player or two who move at different speeds than everyone else. In the NFL, it’s much more difficult. Everyone moves at the same speed. If a player isn’t capable of doing so, he never makes the league to begin with. But over the last few years, when I attended Redskins games as a fan or member of the media, I had flashbacks to my days in Tyser Tower. Sometimes, all I would be able to see was a blur. I didn’t have to wait for the pile to be sorted out. I didn’t have to wait to see the numbers. I knew who was responsible for making the play. It was Sean Taylor. Over and over and over again. Even in the NFL, he moved at speeds and with such force that it could have only been him.

Sean Taylor the father is one aspect of his life I can’t vouch for. You will just have to take it on face value from all the quotes this week. From Williams and Joe Gibbs, to Clinton Portis and Santana Moss, to Derrick Dockery and Antonio Pierce, to Antrel Rolle and Jeremy Shockey, to Mike Tomlin and Herm Edwards, everyone to a man, has said what an outstanding father Taylor was. Go find me one person who has said otherwise. As an employee at Comcast Sportsnet, I have access to mountains of archived tape and photos. Some of the people at the station uncovered rolls and rolls of film from this past training camp with terrific shots of Taylor and his daughter playing together at Redskins Park. You can see it in his eyes. She was the only thing that really, truly mattered to Sean. I wish that I, and I wish the station, had the ability and time to share that film and those photographs with you. That will always be my wish I guess.

Sean Taylor being a good father went hand in hand with him being a great person. Something that is being almost completely ignored about that tragic Monday morning was the fact that Taylor was shot and killed while trying to protect his daughter and girlfriend. Taylor put his career, and his life, on the line to defend his family. If that’s not the true definition of a safety, I don’t know what is. The fact that he would sacrifice his life to protect two others makes him a man amongst men in my book. It makes him a real life hero and outweighs and outshines anything he ever did on the football field.

Taylor also spent hours upon hours with kids and fans. After training camp, after practices, at schools, at functions, at team sanctioned events and at non-team sanctioned events, Taylor spent more time with young fans than most players do around the league. He may not have talked to the media much, but he certainly talked to his fans. As seriously as he took football, he realized that it was just a game, and he knew the only thing making the NFL relevant and football important were the fans themselves. Very few players ever understand that.

On a personal level, I did not know him. I was only in contact with him once. For the Redskins game this year against the Cardinals, I was on the field less than an hour before kickoff. It was very hot and I decided to go up to the press box early. We crossed paths in the tunnel as he was on his way out for warm-ups. I gave him a nod with a simple “go get ‘em”. He gave me a half-smile, a nod and a “yep”. That was it. No it wasn’t much, but I wasn’t exactly looking to have a conversation with him. I was doing my job and he was about to go do his. But as I covered the Redskins, both at training camp and at games, I saw Taylor interact with plenty of people outside of the media. People he felt comfortable with. I did get a chance to see Sean Taylor the person. And he was certainly someone who was likable, honest and good natured.

Now, for the part of this piece I’ve been dreading. I was hoping to write something just about Sean Taylor. Unfortunately, there has been so much bad and negative press about him the past week that I can’t let it go without rebuttal. Taylor is not here to argue for himself anymore, nor would he have argued if he was still alive. Maybe this should be another post, but I really don’t want to keep writing about death, sorrow and grief more than I have to. So for that, I apologize.

Was Taylor a perfect person? No. We all knew the answer to that. He had at least one DUI on his record (maybe another one depending on who you listen to). The assault charges brought against him two years ago were mostly false. The prosecutor in that case wanted to further his moonlighting career as a DJ and thought prosecuting a high profile subject would help. The case only got more absurd from there. The chargers were so blatantly false, that they boarded on slander. However, Taylor certainly could have handled that situation much better than he did. The attention he received during that trial my not have been fair, but he did bring some of it on himself.

On this page, I make poke fun at athletes like Jamal and Ray Lewis. Athletes like Randy Moss and Terrell Owens. Athletes that get in trouble with the law or with their respective leagues. I don’t root for players who do the kind of crap they do. In D.C. this past baseball season, Dmitri Young became a fan favorite at Nationals games. I was sickened to see this. This was a man who nearly beat his girlfriend to death and had problems with alcohol. And this was a guy that people wanted to see succeed? I didn’t get it. Heck, I really don’t root for Mike Sellers, who has multiple arrests for drug related incidents. I want him to do well for the Redskins sake, but I cringe a little when he finds his way into the end zone and begins celebrating.

Athletes who have problems, and refuse to change (like many of the names above) are the players that I make fun of and attack. Everyone deserves a second chance, but I don’t believe in giving people more than that. Sean Taylor made a mistake. And then he turned his life around. That’s why this isn’t hypocrisy. There are many, whether they are athletes or entertainers, who grow up in impoverished areas, roll with a certain group, and then keep that group around them when they start to make large sums of money. In almost every case, the person who sticks with their old “crew” will end up in trouble because of the people around him. And so few of these celebrities are willing to get rid of their old friends. Taylor did that. He realized he had a problem, fixed it, and was a model citizen ever since his issues in Miami a couple of years ago. That’s why I rooted for Sean Taylor and that’s why I’ll defend him.

Futhermore, it is absolutely disgusting to see Taylor’s problems in the middle of every obituary this week. There is a time and a place to bring that stuff up, and an obituary is the last place for it to appear. The sports writers who came up with these obituaries are the same writers who Taylor refused to talk to. With Taylor dead, they held a grudge and wanted the last say. You never hear about Brett Favre’s pain-killer addiction. You never hear about Tom Brady’s DWI citation at Michigan. Just because these athletes throw a smile and a couple of lines at the cameras, they get a free pass. For no other reason than spite have Taylor’s issues come up repeatedly throughout the week. This is why journalists continue to be, in poll after poll, the second least liked profession after lawyers. On top of all that, after Taylor’s sudden death, journalists from around the country started speculating that this wasn’t a random crime: This was someone in Taylor’s crew that got mad at him. This was someone in a rival gang that wanted revenge. This was a drug deal gone wrong. This couldn’t just be random violence. Taylor had to be at fault here too. Why else would he sleep with a machete under the bed?

From all accounts from the actual police (not the reporters playing the role of policemen), this was completely random. The suspects arrested did not know Taylor, except for the fact he was rich. They wanted to rob his house. They thought he wasn’t home. They weren’t planning on killing him. No drug deal. No gang warfare. Nothing other than Taylor being rich and at the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing other than Taylor being completely innocent in this tragedy. As usual, that isn’t good enough for the media, who look to vilify the innocent and make innocent the villains.

And the reason that Taylor had a machete under his bed was because he wasn’t allowed to have a gun. Remember, because of that ATV incident, Taylor was on probation, and being in possession of a firearm would be a big violation. Hundreds of thousands of people in this country sleep with handguns in their bedroom dressers. Or shotguns in their closets. No one thinks this is weird. They own guns for a sense of protection, whether real, perceived or completely imaginary. Rich people, poor people, people from bad and good neighborhoods, people from the city and people from the middle of nowhere all own guns and keep them in their bedrooms at night to feel safer. Miami-Dade County took that right away from Taylor. Taylor couldn’t have a gun, so he figured that he’d at least have some protection, and he chose to sleep with a machete in the bedroom. Considering what happened, can you blame him? His house had been burglarized a week before the shooting, he couldn’t own a gun and he wanted to protect his family. Considering those facts, is sleeping with a machete under the bed strange? Not really. Miami-Dade made Taylor bring a knife to a gun-fight, and it cost him his life.

Now to my favorite target: ESPN. I’ve complained about their programming for years. Even in my most bitter commentary, there’s always been an element of sarcasm to what I’ve said. Not any more. They should be embarrassed how they covered this story. When I first heard that Taylor was shot Monday morning, it was around 11 am. I would have turned to Comcast Sportsnet, but I knew that there was no way our station would be on-air that early. As a small cable station, we simply couldn’t get enough people to the studio to put on a news show until 2 or 3 pm at the earliest (which is actually when we started to do live coverage of the incident). I figured ESPN, with their vast inventory of people and money, would be keeping an eye on it. So on came ESPN. There was no news what so ever. No break-ins. No special ESPN News coverage. Not even a graphic in the lower part of your screen. Absolutely nothing. Linda Cohn was on-air yapping on the 10th repeat of SportsCenter. The biggest story of the NFL season, and nary a peep from ESPN. And they’ve continued to basically ignore the story ever since. They didn’t break in to coverage when Taylor died Tuesday. They haven’t sent reporters to Redskins practices as of yet. They didn’t send anyone to Miami for two days. They didn’t even send a camera man to get tape. They’ve been getting feeds from WJLA and WTTG. The biggest sports network in the world didn’t send one person to cover this story on site for 48 hours and were completely reliant on local stations for video.

I half-joked on Tuesday that if Tom Brady caught a cold, or Brett Favre banged his elbow, ESPN would cover it non-stop (and in a scary bit of irony, Favre actually hurt his elbow only two days later, and ESPN hasn’t stopped talking about it since). From their obsessive coverage of everything McNabb-Owens related, to their ridiculous coverage of everything New England, to their minute-by-minute focus on the Yankees this offseason, ESPN paid so much attention to stories that didn’t exist and didn’t matter, and paid very little to a story of life and death. And when they actually reported on the story, they got most of their facts wrong and painted Taylor as a villain.

Luckily, established writers from across the nation have ripped ESPN to shreds. Including Mike Wilbon and Dan Le Batard, two writers who also collect checks from ESPN. The cable ratings back this up. The rating numbers (the only thing ESPN really pays attention to) show how bad ESPN botched this coverage. In the D.C.-Baltimore-Richmond area, Comcast Sportnet crushed ESPN in the ratings from Monday thru Thursday. This had never happened before. This should never happen. I don’t bring this point up because I work at CSN. I’m certainly not bragging. I really don’t care what we do in the ratings. I don’t see an extra dime in my paycheck if the station does well. I’m working there because it’s my foot in the door. All this shows is that ESPN completely failed on multiple levels because they didn’t want to waste time on Taylor, but instead wanted to spend more time talking about the Cowboys or Patriots or Yankees. They vilified Taylor because it was convenient and it would make the story easier to push under the rug. The only problem for ESPN is the rest of the national media called the big boys on it, and ESPN looks terrible because of this. For my part, and I will swear right here and right now, unless a Redskins game or Maryland game is on ESPN, I will not watch any of their networks for a very long time. They have lost themselves a viewer, and I can guarantee you, I’m not the only Redskins fan who will no longer watch ESPN.

As far as the Redskins are concerned, it’s hard to say what will happen. I can’t recall the last time an NFL team lost a huge star in the middle of the season. I’m not sure this type of situation has ever happened. They could come out tomorrow and go through the motions and get blasted by the Bills. Or, they could use all that pent up emotion and ride it to a big win with the Bills playing the unwitting role of someone stepping into a hornets nest. Either way, it is going to be a very strange game this Sunday. It is going to be very strange at FedEx Field for the rest of the season. It may not be normal again for some time. I wouldn’t put the magnitude of this tragedy at Len Bias levels (to which it has been compared by some) but it isn’t far behind. This is a death that the Redskins and their fans will be feeling for a very, very long time. To say that the rest of the games this season are meaningless is an understatement. And say what you want about Joe Gibbs, but I think he’s the perfect person to lead a team in this situation.

I use this page as a way to put my ideas out there. I know a lot of people don’t read it. I know a lot of people don’t care what I think. I know this page has no bearing on anything important. I use it to joke around and talk about sports. But let’s take a second here to dive into religion. If I offend any of you, then I’m sorry ahead of time.

I’m not a very religious person. I’d like to think that I do believe in a higher power, but it isn’t easy sometimes. It isn’t easy to believe in a God that allows thousands of innocent children to starve every day. It isn’t easy to believe in a God that allows millions to parish every year in natural disasters and wars. It isn’t easy to believe in a God that allows people like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot come to power and have complete control over millions of lives. It isn’t easy to believe in a God that allows a madman to kill 12 million people in less than a decade.

So maybe that’s why I can’t understand how people can say that Sean Taylor is in a better place. How is that possible? This was a man who was entering the prime of his career and the prime of his life. He was about to marry his girlfriend and he had a young daughter that was going to bring him years of joy. How could life get any better? How could Sean possibly be in a better place than his place here on Earth? And for those who say it’s “God’s plan”, I don’t buy that either. What possible good could come out of taking a young man’s life? What possible good could come out of taking a father away from his little daughter? From taking a brother and friend away from his teammates? From taking an icon away from an incredibly loyal fan base? What kind of plan is that? I could live to be a thousand years old, and I would never understand it.

I do know this, if there is a God and heaven and everything else you hear about in the spiritual books, then Sean definitely earned himself a trip up there. The good he did in this world outweighed the bad a hundred times over. He brought joy to the large Redskins fan base for four years. He brought a good deal of spirit and energy into the lives of his teammates and coaches. He helped bring a young girl into the world. So if you are a Redskins fan who is in despair, please don’t be. His daughter, girlfriend and teammates will see him again one day in heaven. You will too. Just don’t go over the middle.