I will always be ready to stick up for Sean Taylor. When he was in trouble for waving a gun at some folks and then got his SUV riddled with bullets, well, sometimes old habits die hard. When he spit in an opponent's face, well, the guy's a competitor with a mean streak.
I did and will do this defending because Sean Taylor was a Washington Redskin. He was by far my favorite Redskin, showing up on every video game football fantasy team I ever drafted, prowling the defensive backfield, lurking for an opportunity to spear my roommate’s receivers if they got a little too brave running routes over the middle.
One time, one of The U’s nastiest delivered a blow so heavy it hurt me. After a flick of the right control stick laid a digital wide receiver low courtesy of the Hurricane force of number 21’s equally ferocious Xbox iteration, I jumped out of my chair with a triumphant whoop so fast I drilled my head on my lofted bed.
I thought I owned Sean Taylor. But nobody owned Sean Taylor. Sean Taylor owned you.
Until now, when pointless, stupid violence got the best of a monster of a man. I’ve been trying to write something about Taylor since I first heard he was shot and figured, off hand, that there was no way Taylor could die. Critical condition is awful but not insurmountable. Maybe he’d miss the season. But there was no way he could just go.
And so I gave myself over to the typical statements when someone is taken from the world. The mourning process goes into effect and then someone invariably says, “He would have wanted us to go on,” and then we do go on, doing the things we were already doing, perhaps now with a ceremonial patch.
Not so fast, my friend, writes Frank Murtaugh of the Memphis Flyer, the writer who got my head on straight about Taylor’s death when I stumbled across his column tonight.
While “moving on” isn’t a bad tack to take some of the time, it is not enough to just “go on” when the death of someone so incredible at their art is a signal of an enormous, brutal problem. As Murtaugh alludes to, maybe going on isn’t not only enough, it’s emotionally and socially negligent. Maybe the NFL should have blacked out all its games this weekend, foregone the advertising dollars and held a mirror up to the American people:
[J]ust consider the impact it might have, if thousands -- millions? -- of sports fans were forced to take pause and consider the epidemic of gun violence in our country. To weigh the importance of the Big Game, relative to a human life. To not simply see another athlete fill the role of the fallen victim, with a black patch on his uniform to pay "tribute."
There’s been criticism of the media and there have been tons of creative ways to mourn Taylors loss (the ten-man defense choked me up more than a little bit.) That will all fall by the wayside. The question is really the same here as it was in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings: if the event really touched you, how are you “moving on” differently than you would have before the tragedy shook your world?
Was Sean Taylor’s death pointless? Was he just an athlete, a story of loss and unfulfilled potential but ultimately nothing more? Did the nation miss a moment to move against violence?
When you picked yourself up after hearing the news of Taylor’s passing, here’s my question: how hard did number 21 hit you?
Comments (1)
David,
...any man's death diminishes me...
[John Donne]
After the first death, there is no other.
[Dylan Thomas]
Two fragments of poems that say opposite things.
You can choose which words speak to you.
I'm with Dylan Thomas.
Posted December 5, 2007 3:11 PM
Posted on December 5, 2007 15:11