Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Influence on game continues today
If it’s a surprise he’s 242 pounds, his career path to Saturday’s enshrinement in Canton, Ohio, is pockmarked by unconventional surprise. He conquered a childhood of poverty without his biological father. He didn’t play football until a high school junior. He received one college scholarship offer — and only after his high school coach begged an Akron assistant to watch him play basketball.
He hurt so much after losing that he’d hide in the Dolphins’ locker room to cry. He became so obsessed that his email and cellphone password for years was “Twenty-three,” as in the single-season NFL sack record he chased. He became such a leader that he went out of character and threw an epic postgame fit after a loss in Cleveland that makes him laugh now. Coach Nick Saban thought it turned around the 2005 season.
Taylor’s appearance — his too-thin frame — is central to his story, though. It’s why he became a Dolphin. Jimmy Johnson, who will present Taylor at the induction, told Taylor the back-story of his draft the other day at Johnson’s Big Chill restaurant in Tavernier.
Norv Turner, then the Washington Redskins’ coach, coached Taylor in the Senior Bowl. Taylor was such a lesser name only one team would privately work him out. But he lit it up that week to the point Turner considered him the best player on the field, as he later told Johnson, his former Dallas Cowboys boss, who was then coaching the Dolphins.
“He also said Jason was so small that [Redskins General Manager] Charley Casserly wouldn’t take him,” Johnson recalled. “I figured if he wasn’t taking him after working with him that meant I had a chance to wait and get him.”
Johnson wanted both Taylor and cornerback Sam Madison in that draft. But other teams would take Madison higher, he figured.
“That’s why I took him in the second round and you in the third,” he told Taylor.
“You SOB, you cost me a lot of money,” Taylor said.
“You made it up,” Johnson responded.
‘I’m going to go change this game’
Taylor and Johnson laughed in the manner the passed time and shared success affords such laughter. But there were long stretches Taylor fought who he was. He came into the NFL when the prototype defensive ends were Reggie White, at 300 pounds, and Bruce Smith, who was considered on the light side at 265 — 30 pounds heavier than Taylor upon entering the league.
So Taylor ate a loaf of bread at nights to gain weight. He drank five bottles of water before his weekly weigh-in to hit the mandated target. “Each bottle meant a pound,” he said. In his third year, when he struggled with just 2 1⁄2 sacks, teammate Trace Armstrong told him to forget the weight and add another move. Offensive tackles had caught on to his speed rush after nine sacks the previous season.
So Taylor did two things. He worked and worked to add an inside move based on leverage. And he taped an index card taped inside his locker. “F— the scale,” it read. He never weighed himself with any thought again. By his fourth year, he took off to the point the big play became his calling card, not his weight.
“I’m going to go change this game,” he told the team chaplain, Leo Armbrust, on the sideline in Cincinnati with the Dolphins trailing 13-3 before halftime. On the next play, he had a strip-sack, fumble recovery and ran 29 yards for a touchdown, screaming at Armbrust, “What’d I tell you?”
“We had a game against Oakland, and his first three snaps of the game were like sack, sack and sack for a fumble,” said Todd Wade, the former Dolphins offensive tackle. “I remember thinking, ‘Glad I’m not that tackle.’”
‘I went off ’
If Johnson developed him, if he came into Pro Bowl form in Dave Wannstedt’s defenses, Saban adapted his game to the way the NFL changed in the new millennium. He moved Taylor around. He let him pick his spots of attack. The same intelligence Johnson said was crucial to drafting him — “I knew he’d learn how to play” — became a weapon on the field.
And off it, too, as that rant against Cleveland said.
“I thought some guys quit,” Taylor said. “When Nick was talking to the team after the game, saying we’d learn from this, I was pacing in the back of the room. Usually, he wouldn’t put up with that. But he must’ve known something was wrong for me to do that. After he was done he said, ‘Anything else have something to say?’” Taylor chuckles. “I went off.” Typically, Taylor did his anger in private. He’d go to the trainers’ room — “Slamming the door, trying to break the glass.” And he hurt so much that, as Ambrust said, “He’d cry tears of passion.” But this time he cleared a table of everything on it, including a coffee pot that scalded teammate Matt Roth. He later said he was too scared to show pain.
“I said a lot of things, including if anyone wanted to quit, they should do it now — that I’d pay their salary the rest of the year,” Taylor said. (Channing Crowder, the team clown, came up to him on the flight home and said, “Hey, I want to know if you serious about paying for my salary if ...”)
The Dolphins won their final five games of the season. It was such a memorable rant that, a year later, Jason Garrett, who left the Dolphins to coach the Cowboys, called Taylor over before a preseason game. “That postgame speech you gave was the greatest ever,” he said.
Taylor’s career wasn’t storybook. No Super Bowls. Not enough trips to the playoffs. And then there was the fireworks with Bill Parcells, who on his first day after taking over the team said only to Taylor, “You got any gas left in the tank?”
“That was it,” Taylor said. “He didn’t even look me in the eye.”
He was traded against his wishes to Washington and had an on-again-off-again relationship with Dolphins management even as he returned for two separate stints until retiring after the 2011 season.
But he considers himself a Dolphin. And a South Floridian. Taylor lives in Plantation, and his foundation raises anywhere from $750,000 to $1 million annually in scholarships and donations to local youth.
“This is home,” said Taylor, who also this year became an assistant football coach at St. Thomas Aquinas High School, where his oldest of three children is a freshman.
A large Canton contingent
Taylor’s football life started when he was cutting grass before his junior year in high school and a man stopped to ask if he played football. George Novak, the Woodlawn Hills High coach in Pittsburgh, only saw a tall, lanky body. He told Taylor to come to a workout that same evening. He had Taylor run one pass route. “You made the team,” Novak said. Novak will be in Canton on Saturday. So will more than 100 players from Taylor’s Akron teams. There will be dozens of former teammates and coaches like Wannstedt, Rex Ryan, Atlanta Falcons head coach Dan Quinn (a former Dolphins defensive line coach) and South Carolina coach Will Muschamp (former Dolphins defensive coordinator).
Taylor is equally happy that three lesserknown people will be on the plane flying from Dolphins camp after Saturday’s practice. Equipment manager Joe Cimino, assistant equipment manager Charlie Thiele and assistant trainer Troy Maurer helped Taylor his entire career. He asked if they could go.
He didn’t do everything he wanted on the field. His name dots the NFL record book from most career touchdowns by a NFL defensive lineman or linebacker (nine) to most fumbles returned for TDs by any defensive player (six). He never did get the 23 sacks. He topped out at 18 1⁄2 in 2002.
But the kid who was too small doesn’t have to look too hard to see how he helped influence the game. The Dolphins’ top draft pick this year, Charles Harris, is a 250-pound pass rusher. That size isn’t a hindrance now.
And Harris, no dummy, asked Taylor to help him with his moves.