Sean Taylor dies at age 24

[daft_picks]

It's shameful how this discussion has turned. Regardless of the circumstances this is nothing but a terrible tragedy and should not be a cause for any hatred among people. Sean Taylor was a great football player, but the real tragedy here is not that he will no longer play the game but that he was taken from his newly born daughter. No matter who Taylor was involved with or what things he may have done in his past there is no doubt in my mind that his killing was of the most unjustifiable evil.

Please stop arguing amongst yourselves and show remorse and regret for his family, the circumstances again have no bearing on any of us and we should all be sorry for those that loved and cared for him. Of which there were many, I go to UM and have seen nothing but support for him and mostly for those survived by him. Please show some respect and leave all your grudges, differences, and petty name calling out of this.

Thank you.

[FlyersFan]

but the real tragedy here is not that he will no longer play the game but that he was taken from his newly born daughter. No matter who Taylor was involved with or what things he may have done in his past there is no doubt in my mind that his killing was of the most unjustifiable evil.


Thank you.

:thumbs:

[Skinsfan]

calling somebody a gangsta is not racist nobody said anything about his race. There are gangstas of all races and IMO they are all *******s:puke:

Thats not what he said.. he said lets call a spade a spade... which winds down to this... here is the "laundry list" (i would love to see ANY OF YOU EXPERTS, and you are obviously experts in this because you are so quick to judge, come up with a laundry list that is TRUE AND ACCURATE)... but here it is:

1) DWI charge thrown out by the JUDGE who looked at the video and said it was obvious ST passed the sobriety test

2) Brandishing a firearm... thrown out when it was proven in a court of law that ST was the victem and the other party was the one pointing the gun at him... prosecuter was fires/resigned over the incident

3) confronting somone who stole his ATV... got in a fist fight with him <-- obviously bad judgement, but hardly out of the ordinary.... most people in here would have done the same... not sure how this equates to being a thug, gangsta, or running with the bad crowd

4) spitting in a players face.... DOZENS of nfl players have done it.... i saw a list some where of all the official NFL fines for spitting at someone.... not sure where it is, but it certainly isn't exlcusive to those people that most of you would automatically lump in as a thug

so there we go.. .botoom line... he got in a fight withsome who stole his ATV... yeah... big f-n thug there

every single one of you should be ashamed of yourselves... if you are going to drag a dead person's name through the mud, at least do it honestly....

[Skinsfan]

No, **** that Cuse, these ******* redskins fans are ridiculous on this site. Hey Skinsfan, **** off.

You have never met Sean Taylor, you don't know him, you have never been in the same room as him, you have zero connection with him. You have some bizarre celebrity boner for him because he played for the redskins. Dude, get a ******* life. Listen, take a step back and realize we all watch a bunch of millionaires play a 3 hour game 16 times a year. A GAME.

For all you dopey redskins fans, YOU NEVER KNEW SEAN TAYLOR. I;m an Eagles fan, but if Donovan McNabb got murdered I wouldn't be on a gambling site arguing with people about it.

Skinsfan, go **** yourself cuz, and dont drop the racist bomb, thats worst than the fake relationship you and GM had with ST.

as i said before, MODS, PLEASE LOCK THIS UP..............

oh, BTW, the redskins ******* suck..........

shamrock. go kill yourself.

saying "lets call a spade a spade" is a racist comment, point blank. You say I have never met ST and don't know.... fine then.... that applies to EVERY one here in this thread. So if I have no right to defend him because I didn't know him..... then you, and everyone else, dont have a right to make remarks such as "call a spade a spade".... when you make those comments based on NOTHING but perception (as FF mentioned in his post) then that is RACIST.... thats not my opinion... look it up on dictionary.com

If Mcnabb was murdered and you weren't emotionally affected, then you are not human, and certainly not an eagles fan. And yes, you WOULD be in here arguing about it. The only way you wouldn't be in here arguing about it is if you had no emotional attachment to this sort of thing... and if that were the case, you wouldn't be in THIS thread posting anything. But back to your attacks... Basically the whole DC area is in shock. People at my job were crying. The radio shows were filled with crying callers... you can say what you want, but you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Since it is apparently affecting millions of people the same way it is me, I know that your comments bear no weight.

[Big Pimpin]

It all doesn't matter really cause dude is dead..

But come on Skins..u know damn well the guy wasn't a saint


In 2005, Taylor was accused of brandishing a gun at a man and repeatedly hitting him during a fight that broke out after Taylor and some friends went looking for the people who had allegedly stolen his all-terrain vehicles.

Taylor reached a deal with prosecutors last year after they agreed to drop felony charges against him. He pleaded no contest to two misdemeanors in the assault case and was sentenced to 18 months probation.



With his money for a defense team that he has..if he was really that innocent,he wouldn't have plead the case out. I do agree though that I would have very well likely done the same thing as he did if someone stole my stuff.

Even his own friends admit he used to hang with some very bad people. Regardless,he didn't deserve to die at all.

Now we see that these clowns had been to his house prior when he was there is not surprising. I guess maybe we should lay some blame on his sister for hanging out with dirtbags as well.

He actually gives one dude a job doing odds jobs at the house and the clown still wants to rob him. Unreal the ****bags in this world but not surprising in the least

[Skinsfan]

It all doesn't matter really cause dude is dead..

But come on Skins..u know damn well the guy wasn't a saint


In 2005, Taylor was accused of brandishing a gun at a man and repeatedly hitting him during a fight that broke out after Taylor and some friends went looking for the people who had allegedly stolen his all-terrain vehicles.

Taylor reached a deal with prosecutors last year after they agreed to drop felony charges against him. He pleaded no contest to two misdemeanors in the assault case and was sentenced to 18 months probation.



With his money for a defense team that he has..if he was really that innocent,he wouldn't have plead the case out. I do agree though that I would have very well likely done the same thing as he did if someone stole my stuff.

Even his own friends admit he used to hang with some very bad people. Regardless,he didn't deserve to die at all.

Now we see that these clowns had been to his house prior when he was there is not surprising. I guess maybe we should lay some blame on his sister for hanging out with dirtbags as well.

He actually gives one dude a job doing odds jobs at the house and the clown still wants to rob him. Unreal the ****bags in this world but not surprising in the least

If you read up on the case, you would realize he didnt plead out to the felony charges... those were thrown out when it was shown in court that ST was not the one with the gun. The no contest he pleaded was for the assault (fist fight).

[Skinsfan]

By the way BP, I never called him a saint.... defending him and calling him a saint are 2 different things.

I'm just sick of everyone calling him a thug when there is no evidence backing this up.... my real beef is with the media who keep misrepresenting the facts, and distorting them to fit their own desired image.

BOTTOM LINE.... most people NEED to compartmentalize things. They NEED to label ST a thug so that this senseless murder was somehow justified. They NEED to be able to say ST brought it upon himself, because if this is truly random, who is really ever safe in their own home?

[Skinsfan]

oh and cusefan... I should probably apologize to you for calling you a racist.... I was just upset at one comment you made... obviously one comment does not define a person, so i take back the racist comment but your statement "call a spade a spade" when you have nothing to back it up with except the image the media is forcing upon us is highly unfair, and could be considered slightly racist.

[Skinsfan]

PART 1

In life, and in death, Taylor was a natural mystery

By Elizabeth Merrill
ESPN.com
(Archive)
Updated: November 30, 2007, 4:19 PM ET
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MIAMI -- The school is not what it seems. It sits on 30 acres of manicured land near condos and bird-watchers. The folks at Miami Douglas MacArthur South, an alternative high school full of inner-city kids and at-risk teenagers, have a saying: Even good kids can make bad decisions.

Nobody really knows why Sean Taylor showed up one day in February. He was like that, often leaving people guessing. He'd done speaking gigs at schools around the Miami area as penance for one of his own questionable decisions, but this trip was voluntary.

He was supposed to talk for an hour, and stayed for three. And when the young NFL star who seemingly had finally figured it all out finished his spiel about staying on a straight path, at least two young men vowed to stay in school, just like Taylor.

"They were really taken by him," says Steve Rummel, the former principal at MacArthur. "They said, 'I'm going to college. I can do this.'

"He touched a lot of them."

Eight months later, Rummel struggles to explain how a 24-year-old man who by all accounts was trying to avoid trouble found it in his home early Monday morning, gunned down while his fiancée and 18-month-old daughter hid under the covers. He's trying to figure out why Sean is gone.

[+] Enlarge

Al Pereira/Getty Images
Former teammates say things seemed to make sense for Taylor on the field.
Many of the details of Taylor's death, much like his life, remain a mystery. Shock jocks and hair-sprayed pundits chalk it up as a cautionary tale of a thug life spiraling to a violent end. Police say he may be the random victim of a robbery gone bad.

Taylor's friends are left to try to fill in the holes and defend the memory of a man whose true identity, to most, reveals itself in old replay videos of bone-crushing hits.

"He didn't grow up in some neighborhood where there were drugs being sold on the streets," says former NFL linebacker Ralph Ortega, who coached Taylor in high school. "Sean didn't grow up stealing bicycles or running around with some gang.

"He was an extremely clean-cut, well-mannered kid. And that's what I remember. If there's another truth, fine. But I'd like to hear it from somebody who was really there."

Gulliver Preparatory is not in the 'hood. Kids wear uniforms and drive Lexuses and BMWs past a guard shack that protects them from the grit of the city. Enrique Iglesias and a nephew of George W. Bush went to school here. Some of them matriculate to Harvard, others chase grass-stained dreams. Gulliver prides itself on getting its best and brightest ready, and the price isn't cheap. The school's Web site lists its tuition range from $7,000 to $24,000.

It also considers itself a melting pot of youthful opportunity (the school offers athletic scholarships), which is why the son of a Florida police officer, middle-class at best, could fit in with the doctors' kids and young diplomats.

It didn't hurt that Taylor was 6-foot-3, fast and feared. Legend has it Taylor hit a kid so hard once in high school that the boy's helmet, the face mask and the screws, fell apart. He had gifts that Ortega, maybe biased, says eventually would have made him the standard for all NFL safeties. Taylor led Gulliver to its first and only state championship in 2000. His teammates were together on a trip one night, playing NCAA Football on their PlayStations, when one of them said, "Hey man, someday you're going to be on this game."

Taylor, modestly embarrassed, told the kid to shut up.

"He wasn't cocky, you know, that wasn't him," says former Gulliver teammate Greg Bellamy. "You were drawn to a good vibe.

"He's very charismatic," Bellamy says, still referring to his friend in the present tense. "Very easy to be liked."

His life was a series of contradictions. Maybe Taylor liked it that way. He was tough and intimidating and could level 200-pound receivers on the football field, but when he went water-skiing with his more privileged friends, he was afraid of the seaweed.

He giggled with his buddies about girls, but met Jackie Garcia in high school, took her to the prom, and their relationship endured three years at the University of Miami and 3½ seasons in the NFL.

And unlike many tough-luck stories of south Florida athletes who struggle to get out, Taylor seemingly had stability in his home, with a father who is the Florida City police chief.

They gathered at his house at 5 in the morning in high school, a handful of bleary-eyed teenage football players, because Taylor's dad promised he could make them better. He ran them up and down the streets of south Miami, their arms stretching to touch the back of a basketball hoop.

One Gulliver alumnus credits the elder Taylor with helping him get a football scholarship by showing him how to shave a few tenths of a second off his 40-yard dash through hard work.

When reporters camped out at Pedro Taylor's house this week, scrounging for a sound bite or a morsel of an answer, the Gulliver boys at first didn't know who they were talking about. They always knew Taylor's dad as "Pete."

Pedro Taylor's calming, half-smiling face is shown on the Florida City Police Department Web site, on top of a "Message from the Chief." It says his staff is dedicated to making Florida City the safest play to work and live.

"In public, he's remarkably strong," says family friend Mark Sinnreich. "He's a deeply religious man. He thinks God and Jesus have a bigger plan for Sean."

No, Sean Taylor did not grow up in the ghetto. But he didn't have to wander far to find trouble. It was just a few miles away in West Perrine, an impoverished area in the Village of Palmetto Bay where broken glass and stray shopping carts litter the streets and worn-out rags hang on clotheslines.

[Skinsfan]

PART 2

There are varied opinions about the exact time when Taylor's reputation plummeted from hardworking son to just another troubled athlete from Miami. He was known to occasionally spit on his opponent, but friends say Taylor did it because he was taught in youth football that paybacks were mandatory.

He was quiet and distrustful of the media, but that didn't necessarily sully his image.

Hanging out in West Perrine did. Taylor was a celebrity, a first-round draft pick for the Washington Redskins and an $18 million man. One day in 2005 he parked a pair of brand-new all-terrain vehicles in front of a friend's house in a sketchy neighborhood. They were stolen, and Taylor lost his cool.

An ensuing confrontation with a group of young men boiled over to guns and threats, and Taylor's SUV was sprayed with bullets. He eventually faced three aggravated assault charges and the possibility of more than 40 years in prison.

The case was high on drama -- prosecutor Michael Grieco resigned after Taylor's lawyers said he was using the fame to promote his side gig as a nightclub DJ -- but low on punishment. Taylor pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge and was given 18 months probation. He agreed to speak to 10 schools on the importance of education and donated money to each institution. He stayed away from guns. His only mode of protection in the late-night hours on Sunday was a machete that he kept under his bed. His former lawyer, Richard Sharpstein, still maintains that Taylor was a victim in the case.

But what was a man who seemingly had it all doing in West Perrine? A friend who declined to be named says Taylor spent his first couple of years in the NFL trying to shake hangers-on from his childhood. He described them as people who weren't necessarily friends but wanted to hang around with an NFL star for his fame and money.

In an interview with reporters in Arizona this week, Cardinals cornerback Antrel Rolle, a friend of Taylor's since they were 6 years old, said some former friends were out to get Taylor, who was trying to live a more stable life by focusing on his girlfriend and daughter.

"...I know he lived his life pretty much scared every day of his life when he was down in Miami because those people were targeting him," Rolle said.

Roughly a year ago, Sharpstein had a conversation with Taylor about getting out. He was settling in as one of the Redskins' marquee players and had an in-season home in Ashburn, Va. Why couldn't he just take Jackie and the baby and move to D.C.?

"But he loved Miami," Sharpstein says. "I don't think I ever had a serious, 'You must move from Miami, Sean,' talk. It was just sort of like, 'Stay out of the old neighborhoods and don't let people set you up,' stuff like that. 'You're going to be taken advantage of because you're rich and people are jealous of you.'"

In the middle of the 2006 season, Taylor did move. He quietly packed his belongings and retreated from a rowdy, young end of the Redskins' locker room to a spot next to Renaldo Wynn's stall. Taylor never really told Wynn why he did it.

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David Stluka/Getty Images
Taylor moved his locker to be closer to Renaldo Wynn -- an act Wynn says his teammate never fully explained.
His new locker was in the middle of hard-core veterans, God-fearing men with scars and wisdom about the ways of the NFL. Wynn was considered a clubhouse leader, a defensive end with a wife and kids and a mother who was a schoolteacher for more than 30 years. When Taylor parked in their end of the locker room, Wynn made a joke about how he was moving from the ghetto to the other side of town.

"Hey man, just needed a change," was all Taylor said.

He was always doing things that even his teammates didn't understand. Like the time he got up and walked out of the rookie symposium early, drawing a $25,000 fine. Outside, maybe Sean Taylor didn't make sense. But on the football field, everything did.

In these days of last memories and unanswered questions, friends flash back to Taylor on the football field before practice, in the cold rain, smiling. He never complained, they say. He was just happy to be in the one place he could be under a helmet and reveal himself.

"He was radiant, you know?" says Redskins offensive coordinator Al Saunders. "One of those really popular guys you loved to be around. So positive, so energetic. You enjoy coaching when you have an opportunity to be around someone like that. They make the game, make the day, so enjoyable."

Wynn, who is with the Saints now, finds comfort in the laughs. He thinks about the time Taylor was ejected in the playoffs for spitting and stewed in the locker room, where Wynn's mother was waiting while her son was being worked on by the trainers.

She doted over Taylor, who was about to explode. She said, "Baby, it's going to be OK." For months after that, Taylor would ask Wynn how his mom was doing.

"I think he got it when a lot of guys don't get it," Wynn says.

"You could definitely notice the change. It was quite extreme. He always talked about his daughter. He always talked about stuff that was just about life. He'd say, 'I'm like a sponge trying to suck up as much wisdom as I can.'"

They met at Gulliver Prep on Wednesday morning, old friends and young faces, to say goodbye to Taylor.

Bellamy, a hulking former lineman who's now an assistant coach at Gulliver, rocked back and forth as tried to maintain his composure and sum up a man who was ultimately not what he seemed.

Sometime Monday, Bellamy's mom called to tell him Taylor's house had been broken into. Bellamy assumed his friend wasn't home because of football. But Taylor didn't make it to the game at Tampa Bay because of a knee injury.

They'd see Taylor pop in occasionally at Gulliver to visit, and when he'd leave, young men would ask Bellamy what they needed to do to be the next Sean Taylor. That, he can answer. But like everybody else, he's haunted with questions.

"I was kind of wanting to have a conversation with him," Bellamy says. "I didn't get to tell him how much the kids really look forward to him coming down. That's the one thing I kind of regret.

"I wish I would've known he was in town."

Elizabeth Merrill is a senior writer for ESPN.com. She can be reached at merrill2323@hotmail.com.

[Mappo]

Calling a "spade a spade" is not a racist phrase, point blank.

"Q. A friend of mine became upset when I used the phrase “to call a spade a spade.” She says that it’s a vicious racist term. Is she right?

Your friend is dead wrong, and it’s a sign of our hypersensitive times that innocent words are often branded as offensive. Quite bluntly, such a reaction is the product of ignorance.

If you go back to the earliest written version of the saying, you bump up against a Greek satirist named Lucian (2nd century A.D.). To express the idea of speaking bluntly, of calling things what they are, he used the phrase (in his language), “to call a fig a fig and a boat a boat.” So where did the word spade come from?

It’s based on a mistranslation by the Dutch Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus [ca. 1466 - 1536]. In Greek, skaphis is a shovel or spade, and skaphos is a boat, a skiff. He chose the wrong word, and “to call a spade a spade” came into being. In 1539, John Tavener brought Erasmus’ Latin version into English in his Garden of Wysdome: “Whiche call . . . a mattok nothing els but a mattok, and a spade a spade.” A mattock, by the way, is a digging tool with a flat blade set at right angles to the handle. So Tavener was advancing the meaning of the proverb to show that even allied objects should be carefully distinguished. After that, the saying was off and running, and it was used by dozens of writers, eventually dooming it to cliché status."


Wordmall: Mistakenly racist terms

And now that this thread has ventured into the etymology of various phrases, can it now be locked? :thumbs:

[Skinsfan]

statements without context are useless... if you have empirical evidence that the "spade" is in fact a spade, then you are just stating facts. If, on the other hand, you have nothing other than speculation, and you project your assumptions onto people and wrap it up as an uncontestable fact (i.e. "calling a spade a spade"), then it is an entirely different situation. In other words, its not the statement itself that is inherently racist, but the fact that people take assumptions and turn them into "facts" and just write people off. If this were Brett Favre, nobody would be calling "a spade a spade" even though he and his family supposedly have a colorful history.

thanks for the history lesson though

lock up this thread, by all means.

[Skinsfan]

Let me lighten up the mood here a little bit and pose this scenario to you all:

Let's say Flyersfan and I got in a fight, and I beat him up a little bit and he beat me up a little bit. Futhermore, lets say I tell the cops that Flyersfan raped me... literally.. anally raped me

and the cops press charges against him for rape

and it goes to court, and somewhere along the line the rape charge gets thrown out for whatever reason, which isn't specifically disclosed to the public... could have been because it was proved FF didnt do it, or it could have been because the prosecution botched the case... WHATEVER.... it gets thrown out.

Is Flyersfan now to be branded as a gay rapist for the rest of his life? There is no reason to believe that I wasn't just lying to the police. Should we just call a spade a spade, and write off FF for the rest of his life.. never give him the benefit of the doubt?

[Mappo]

Well, if Flyersfan's friend from his university days made a public statement that Flyersfan was quite fond of anal rape back a few years prior, one might reasonably speculate that the charges were dropped because of a botched prosecution, rather than "proof" that it didn't happen...particularly if several actual prosecutorial missteps were made.

Let's then say that Person A makes such a reasonable speculation on an internet gambling forum. Then let's say Person B (who has never actually met Flyersfan and yet has some weird attachment to him) comes along, drops about seven F bombs in a post calling Person A a HOMOPHOBE, and rants on and on about the homophobic nature of his remarks.

I would think Person B is being more of a douchebag than Person A, but that's just me.

By the way, you implored people to google for the fact that Sean Taylor was "proven in a court of law" (your words, not mine) to have not wielded a gun in the incident where he was charged with the felonies. I have, in fact, googled it. I see information of an eventual plea agreement, which I certainly do not see as "proof" that a gun was not in actuality wielded (in fact, if anything, it would lead me to believe that there was likely some merit to the charges).

Please direct me to such proof, if it exists, as you claim.

[Skinsfan]

Hogs Haven :: The Sean Taylor Narrative

that has plenty of links to some facts, but BETTER yet.. how about you hear it from the lawyers mouth:

http://podcast.wjfk.com/wjfk2/775872.mp3

now how about you post a link where any of ST's friends claim ST was "fond" of thug life