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Death Hits Redskins Hard
"For me personally, I think I can honestly say this: Sean felt like God made him to play football," Redskins Coach Joe Gibbs said about Sean Taylor, who died early yesterday morning at age 24.
(By John Mcdonnell -- The Washington Post)
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Like Len Bias, the Maryland star whose cocaine-induced death at age 22 shook the area in 1986, Taylor's legend in death might soon supersede the safety who stalked the defensive backfield of the Redskins.
"He had a cult following in this town and nationally," said a team official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "I think part of it was because Sean was underexposed. Who, nowadays, with talent like that, is underexposed? In the world of pro football, it becomes a Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin thing, where a young phenom dies young and we talk about them 40 years later."
"He was the guts of the team, he was," said Derek Blazer, a 32-year-old fan from Fairfax, who sobbed as he spoke outside Redskins Park.
All his teammates envied his talent, but some viewed him as a live wire, capable of mood swings. In a conversation with teammates last month about how unpredictable the Golden State Warriors were as an NBA team, Redskins defensive lineman Demetric Evans compared Stephen Jackson, the Warriors' controversial guard, to Taylor.
"That's their Sean Taylor right there, man -- you never know what that cat is going to do," Evans said to teammates Anthony Montgomery and Ryan Boschetti. "He's one unpredictable dude."
He arrived in Washington in 2004 as an insular individual, who had no time for either celebrity or brainless chitchat with strangers. It was a pattern of behavior he had learned long before being drafted by the Redskins.
Just before he was scheduled to fly to Arizona and be part of a photo shoot for Playboy's 2003 all-American team, Taylor reneged, telling University of Miami media officials he had no interest in going on the trip.
Team and school officials gave up trying to promote Taylor his junior season, his final year at the school, when he was named the Big East defensive player of the year and was a finalist for the Jim Thorpe Award, which honors the nation's top defensive back.
"He just had no time for it," said Doug Walker, the school's former sports information director who is now at Alabama. "It wasn't important to Sean. After a while, we just figured, 'Okay, we'll respect his wishes.' "
"You could see the mistrust even then and you could see he was a little guarded," said Mark Stoops, the former defensive backs coach at Miami and now the defensive coordinator at Arizona. "It took a little time to get through to him. Sean was just quiet and to himself. But he was a person everybody loved."
Stoops remembers getting into Taylor's face many times during a heated discussion "and I would lower his helmet toward me to see if he was looking at me," he said.
"Sean was just smiling," he said. "We would both end up laughing."
