Football 101: No. 6, Lawrence Taylor
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One day before the New York Giants took Lawrence Taylor with the second pick in the 1981 NFL draft, he sent the team a telegram warning them not to take him.
That’s how bad things had gotten in New York. The Giants came into that draft off eight consecutive losing seasons. Four different men had coached the team over that time. Things were dismal. Taylor and his agent insisted that if the Giants didn’t deal with them squarely, he would not hesitate to go play for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the Canadian Football League.
Young apparently dealt squarely, because less than a month later, Taylor signed.
I want to run through the terms of the deal to show you just how different things were then. Taylor signed what was called a three-year, $900,000 deal. But in actuality it was:
A $100,000 signing bonus
A $500,000 salary for three years ($166,666.67 per year).
A $300,000, tax-free and interest-free loan to be repaid in the year 2025.
In any case, everything changed for the Giants the day Taylor signed. They believed they were signing a dominant defensive player. They did not know they were signing an early glimpse at the future, a player who would change everything.
Lawrence Taylor would be the first to tell you: He was not exactly a student of the game. So many of the other great defensive players would spend hours and hours in the video room breaking down offenses, studying schemes, learning everything they could about blockers. You take a guy like Ed Reed: He tended to know the opposing offense as well as their quarterback did, sometimes even better.
LT? Nah.
“At times,” Taylor wrote in My Giant Life, “I didn’t even know what defense we were in or what the offense was doing. But I always told the coaches, ‘When I make mistakes, good things come of it.’”
He was an athletic superhero. That’s all. Running backs and tight ends were not nearly strong enough to block him. Offensive tackles and guards were not nearly fast enough to catch him. And nobody on the field was as mean. In time, teams would try to create all sorts of double-team, triple-team and quadruple-team blocking concoctions to disrupt him, and more often than not it didn’t even matter.
“I guess,” LT says, “I was a freak.”
No guessing about it. Lawrence Taylor grew up in Virginia and he was, at first, a tremendously gifted catcher on various baseball teams. He would always insist — and who could doubt him — that he could have been a major league baseball star had he stuck with it. But once he discovered football, he never even considered sticking with baseball.
“Too much standing around,” he would say. “On the other hand, football brought plenty of action — and it also brought the hitting.”
Yes, he loved the hitting. With his rare combination of power and speed, he probably could have been an electrifying running back. There was a famous play in his second season, Thanksgiving Day against the Lions.