21: The story of the late, great Sean Taylor; gone, but not forgotten
By Ian Cummings
Raised in southern Florida, Sean Taylor was gifted from the start.
Taylor grew up in the suburbs of Miami. He spent the first ten years of his life with his grandmother, mother, and the rest of her children. His parents were divorced when he was very young. When his mother grew sick and unable to care for him, he moved to be with his father, a local police officer.
He went to a school named Gulliver Prep. It wasn’t in a bad area, but it was sandwiched in-between two such areas, and sometimes, the violence and tension converged in the middle community. Taylor, like many stuck in-between, chose sports as a way to distance himself from the conflict and the street life as best he could. It was a choice that served him well.
Though sports were a way to escape the violence that permeated into the middle neighborhoods, in reality, no one was ever free from it. The kids from each area always intermingled, and there was conflict that arose in such meetings. Taylor had a gun held to his head during a pickup basketball game on one occasion, saved only by the gun’s inability to function. And on another occasion, during the offseason of 2005, Taylor’s ATVs were stolen, and after an unsuccessful attempt to take them back, his house was pelted with AK-47 fire. Choppers, they called them. Sports softened the reality, at the very least. But in Taylor’s world, that kind of conflict was unavoidable.
Taylor didn’t have trouble separating himself with sports, however. He was a three-sport star in his younger years, playing football, basketball, and running track. He was equally impressive in each, his athletic promise showing no bounds. However, despite his focus on multiple sports, Taylor would soon discover his love for football, and he would effectively cement himself in the lore of the game.
It makes sense that Taylor’s father was a police officer, because on the football field, it was the younger Taylor who laid down the law. He was always a big kid, an energetic kid. As a young boy, he was always on the move, always active. By high school, he was a 6-foot-2 behemoth, looming above the crowd like a giant from a fable’s tale. And it was then that he began to build a reputation as a brutal hitter. From the words of ESPN writer Elizabeth Merrill, “legend has it that Taylor hit a kid so hard once in high school that the boy’s helmet, the face mask and the screws, fell apart”.
He’s the train, and the other guy’s the bus!
It goes without saying that Taylor was a highly coveted prospect coming out of high school. In 2000, his final year at Gulliver Prep, he led the team to a class 2A championship in the state of Florida. The only game his team lost was the game he didn’t play in. He played as many as three positions in high school, but it was as a defensive back that he went to play for Larry Coker and the Miami Hurricanes in 2001. He left his high school as the No. 1 rated prospect in the state of Florida. Some pegged him as the best young star in the nation.
Taylor’s athletic gifts and fierce competitive tendencies were unique to him alone, but his tireless work ethic can be somewhat attributed to his father. Pedro Taylor, or ‘Pete’, as the kids called him, trained Sean and his friends by the day, teaching them to run, run and keep running. His teachings played a part in molding Sean into the player that terrorized opposing players in college at the University of Miami. It was also a reason why Sean chose to stay in the area to continue his career.
Taylor played as a true freshman, a rare feat in its own right, and he began his post-elementary football career by making a name for himself as a reliable special teams player. The next year, he carved out a role as a starter, leading the team in almost all defensive categories. The next year, he grabbed 10 interceptions. And then, after only his junior year, his college career was over. It was on to the NFL. He was too good for these guys.