When Santana Moss steps onto
the Giants Stadium turf before Thursday’s
NFL season opener in East Rutherford, N.J., the
Washington Redskins’ eighth-year wideout
will close his eyes and blurt out the initials of
a pair of childhood friends who never made it to
adulthood.
It’s a ritual Moss has been performing before
games and practices since arriving at the University of
Miami as a freshman 11 years ago, and since last
November it has been expanded to honor the memory of a
third fallen comrade.
“Deuce to the one!” Moss will yell before
beginning his pregame sprint. Then, he and many of his
Redskins teammates will do their best to channel the
ferocity and passion that slain safety Sean Taylor once
brought to the field.
“That’s me letting Sean know I’m
still out here for him, thinking of him, remembering
him,” Moss said last month. “It hurts so
much to think that he’s gone. But for some of us,
he’ll always be part of this.”
When Taylor, an ultra-talented fourth-year player
seemingly headed for stardom, died last Nov. 27, a day
after being shot by intruders during a robbery attempt
at his Miami-area home, the impact on the Redskins
transcended the loss of perhaps the franchise’s
best player.
For veterans like Moss and halfback Clinton Portis, the
loss of their fellow UM alum and close friend was a
brutal reality check – a reminder that life can
be taken away at any time and should be afforded the
requisite gravity.
For then-rookie safety LaRon Landry, the talented
protégé whom Taylor had done his best to mold, it was
an impetus to play with even more aggression and rage.
For virtually everyone on Washington’s roster
last fall, it was a jarring yet illuminating glimpse
into how interconnected a football team can be –
and how that normally unspoken chemistry can fuel an
unlikely run of overachievement.
“When Sean died, each of us spent some time
reflecting on how he had touched us –
conversations we’d had, wisdom he had
provided,” Pro Bowl tight end Chris Cooley says.
“Eventually, we all started piecing it together
and realized, whoa, that was an amazing person.
He’d impacted so many of us in so many different
ways.”
In the weeks after his death, it was tough not to
believe that Taylor didn’t have a profound
posthumous effect on the Skins’ surprising
playoff drive. The emotionally devastated team paid
tribute to Taylor in the first game after his death by
lining up for the first defensive snap with only 10
men. Washington lost that game in excruciating fashion
to the Buffalo Bills on a last-second field goal, then
flew en masse to Miami for their former
teammate’s funeral.
With 36-year-old quarterback Todd Collins playing the
rest of the way for injured Jason Campbell, the
‘Skins proceeded to defeat the Bears, Giants,
Vikings and Cowboys, the latter a 27-6 victory on the
final day of the regular season to secure a playoff
spot.
The next weekend in Seattle, things got even eerier.
Washington rallied from a 13-0 deficit to take a 14-13
lead early in the fourth quarter on a 30-yard touchdown
pass from Collins to Moss. The ensuing kickoff soared
high above the Qwest Field turf before landing on the
Seattle 14-yard line. Several Seahawks players were
nearby, but none picked it up. The Skins’ Anthony
Mix recovered, bringing Qwest Field to a hush save the
wild celebration on the visitors’ sideline.
Some players pointed to the sky. They felt Taylor was
still helping them.
The Seahawks felt it, too.
“If anybody had destiny on their side in the
playoffs, it was the Washington Redskins,” says
new Washington coach Jim Zorn, who was Seattle’s
quarterbacks coach from 2001-07. “We had big
fears of that.”
The Redskins soon ran out of magic, losing 35-14 after
a miserable flurry in the final minutes. Coach Joe
Gibbs retired, and coordinators Al Saunders and Gregg
Williams ultimately left. Zorn arrived with a different
coaching approach, and the team’s culture began
to change.
Zorn understood, however, that Taylor would have to be
a part of the new order. Early in training camp, Zorn
told the team of his experiences in Seattle in 2003,
when veteran passer Trent Dilfer’s five-year-old
son, Trevin, died after a sudden heart infection.
“We would never, ever say to Trent, even today,
‘You just need to move on,’ ”
Zorn said to the players. “That’s not
something you get over. It’s something you
remember and that you have to live with every day, just
as you guys will with Sean. Through you, his memory
will live on.”
The locker once occupied by Taylor at the team’s
Ashburn, Va., training facility remains as he left it,
encased in Plexiglass. Zorn says there are plans to
honor Taylor’s memory at a game at FedEx Field
early this season. Taylor’s fiancée, Jackie
Garcia, and their daughter, Jackie, visited the
team’s facility in mid-August. Executive vice
president of football operations Vinny Cerrato still
speaks semi-regularly with Taylor’s father,
Pedro, the police chief of Florida City.
“I think we’ll always play for him,”
Portis says. “You look at this team and see
we’ve got all these pieces in place, and you
realize there’s one person who’s not here,
but who should be.”
Moss says Taylor’s death had a deep impact on the
way he views football and life. Over the offseason he
married his longtime girlfriend, LaTosha Allen, with
whom he has two children. He says he is more mature and
more careful than he was before the tragedy struck.
“I can assure you it carries over for me, because
it just let me know how easily this game can be taken
away from you,” Moss says. “Not only this
game, but life. It’s one of the greatest
gut-checks I ever experienced. That man is gone.
“When he passed, that put another kind of surge
in me, as far as what I needed to take care of as a
man. When you’re in this football world,
it’s almost like you’re in college all over
again – it’s not like you’re in the
real world, with real responsibilities. Now I approach
it differently. I’ve been ready to grow up for 13
years now.”
Among other things, Moss says, “It just let me
know that everybody’s not my friend. Everybody
that gives me hugs and daps me off and yells and
screams ‘You’re the best!’
isn’t necessarily in my corner. When I talked to
the authorities who investigated Sean’s death and
heard that the guys who robbed him were guys Sean knew,
it blew me away. They knew him. They liked him. They
knew his sister and loved his game and loved the guy
that he was.
“But, you know, the economy sucks and these young
kids don’t want to work for anything, so they
went to his house when they thought he wasn’t
home and figured, ‘He won’t know we did
it.’ Then he surprised them, and bam. Now
somebody’s life is gone – and their lives
are basically gone, too.”
(Last May one suspect accepted a plea deal and was
sentenced to 29 years in prison; four others are
expected to go to trial in March.)
Another player whom the tragedy hit especially hard was
Landry, the sixth overall pick in the ‘07 draft.
Almost as soon as NFL commissioner Roger Goodell called
his name on the podium, Landry began hearing from
people in NFL circles who cautioned him about
Taylor’s supposedly surly nature.
“Guys were telling me, ‘He’s going to
be a hard guy to work with,’ ” Landry
recalls. “But when I got here, it was the total
opposite. He worked with me in meeting rooms and on the
field and helped me get over that hurdle that all
rookies face.”
As the two safeties grew comfortable playing together,
Cerrato began fantasizing about an extended run of
greatness at the position. Taylor, the strong safety,
“had phenomenal range and incredible ball skills.
He was a kill-you-or-miss-you tackler.” Landry,
the free safety, “is a great blitzer and a great
tackler who’s still developing his downfield
game. They were the perfect complement for one another
– each guy’s strengths complemented the
other’s weaknesses. And they’d have been
playing together forever.”
As part of his mentoring of Landry, Taylor used to give
the rookie a ride to and from the team’s training
facility during the week. Upon learning of
Taylor’s death, Cerrato recalls, “LaRon
starts crying and says, ‘Who’s gonna take
me home?’ ”
It’s a darker emotion that Landry has summoned
since, at least on Sundays. Teammates noticed the way
he stepped up his intensity after Taylor’s death,
intercepting a pair of passes in the playoff game in
Seattle and looking for the type of big hits that No.
21 would have encouraged.
“Most definitely, I try to follow in his
footsteps,” Landry says. “I try to match
his intensity, his style of play and bring what he
brought to the team. I’ll never be as great as he
was. But all of this has inspired me to just …
to just. … Well, instead of using the words I
really want to use, I’ll say to just go out there
and lay it on the line.”
What Landry was unwilling to say was something to which
most men in his profession can relate: He plays angrier
now, summoning more violence, looking to take out his
pain on anyone in his midst. Before every game since
high school, Landry has taken a pen and scrawled
“Suicide Mission” on his chest. Those words
have taken on added resonance since Taylor’s
death.
“It’s not what you think,” Landry
says. “Obviously, this is not life and death. But
it’s a way of reminding myself that if I have to
hurt my own body to do what I need to do, then
that’s what it’s gonna be.”
When Portis looks at Landry now, he sees
“probably the next closest thing that
you’re going to find to Sean Taylor. He’s
next in line. Both are quiet guys. I could have an
off-the-wall conversation with either one that leaves
me shaking my head. And you never know what day they
feel like talking. Some days you’re chatting it
up for hours, and some days you get the blankest stares
and think, ‘Man, that (conversation) never
happened. What’s going on in that dude’s
mind?’ So you just sit back and wait for him to
come to you.”
One thing about Taylor’s death that has bothered
Portis and so many of his teammates is the way some
journalists and others rushed after the shooting to
assume that he had provoked the gunfire. Taylor, after
all, had been the subject of a 2005 firearms-assault
case, though charges were ultimately dropped as part of
negotiated plea bargain.
Yet as Taylor’s career progressed – and
especially after his daughter was born in the spring of
2006 – he began to show a maturity that was
noticeable inside the locker room. Taylor, however,
remained distant and guarded with the media, and the
negative public perception of him remained largely
intact.
“What people didn’t realize, but what we
all knew, was that Sean had changed,” Cooley
says. “He was all about family. He really
didn’t go out. But he didn’t show that side
of himself to people on the outside, because he felt
he’d been burned. It’s too bad.”
Taylor’s teammates learned even more about him
after his death when Garcia spoke to the team. Says
Cerrato: “Jackie told them, ‘You
don’t know how much you guys meant to Sean.
Football was his life.’ The guy had built a video
room in his house and walked around saying,
‘I’ve got to get better. I’ve got to
improve.’ And he had a huge heart. These guys
will never forget.”
As they prepare for a new season, with a new coach and
many new faces, the holdovers in the Redskins’
organization look for any sign that Taylor is still
with them. “We beat Dallas (last December) by
21,” Cerrato says, shaking his head. “We
lost to Seattle by 21 in the playoff game. And we had
the 21st pick in the draft.”
Deuce to the one. It’s a number Moss will carry
with him for the rest of his playing days.
“I look at the locker now and then,” Moss
says quietly. “I hope it’s always there.
Sean meant so much. I really think he was before his
time.”
Every night before he goes to bed, Portis updates his
fallen teammate on the state of the Redskins, part of
the “regular conversations I have with him, like
he was still here.” And sometimes, before he
catches himself, Portis finds himself speaking as
though Taylor’s death never happened.
In August, while eating at a Mexican restaurant in
Washington D.C., Portis struck up a conversation with a
female diner and eventually told her what he did for a
living.
The woman, who was a casual football fan, asked Portis,
“Who’s your favorite player?”
“Past or present?” he asked.
“Past.”
“Bo Jackson. Or Barry Sanders.”
“What about present?”
“My favorite player right now, hands down, is
Sean Taylor,” Portis said. The woman’s eyes
grew big, and there was an uncomfortable pause.
“To this day, that’s my guy,” Portis
told her. “He’s still here.”
(sports.yahoo.com)