I remember sitting on the bleachers and the heated metal burning the back of my thighs. About an hour or so later, we all got up and my uncle pulled me aside.
"Come with me." he said. My uncle and I darted through some trees on a back dirt route where we collided with a mountain of a man(at least to a child barely four feet tall). He walked with a strut, almost like he was walking on rocks while trying not to shit his pants. He had weird earrings in his ear. That's all I could stare at. The odd earrings dangling from this large man's ears.
Finally, my uncle cuts the man off and steps in front of a combination of reporters and autograph-seeking fans. My uncle steps up and says "Hey L.T., you mind signing an autograph for the kid?" I had no idea who this man was, except that his presence made my uncle and the gaggle of adults behind us really excited. After all, I was 10(or so), I really didn't follow football like I do now. This wasn't "watch the NFL Combine for 8 hours" Dave. This was "When are we getting home so I can play Nintendo?" Dave. Regardless, Lawrence Taylor gently took the piece of paper I handed him out of my grasp and put his John Hancock on it.
"Make sure you hold on to that. That might be worth something someday." my uncle pledged as we walked back.
Who knew that he would be wrong? Taylor's post-Giants career is well-documented, so I won't go line for line about the piles of excrement the man stepped in over the last two decades. Just know that Lawrence Taylor made as much of an impact off the field as an abusive crack addict, as he did as the pass-rushing nightmare that once snapped Joe Theismann's knee like a twig on national television.
L.T. looked to be making a career resurgence as of late, even while another L.T.(LaDainian Tomlinson) was staking claim to Sir Lawrence of the Meadowlands' moniker. He made a few movie cameos in The Waterboy and Any Given Sunday. He tried his hand at Dancing With The Stars. Then, he got busted in a hotel room for having sex with a girl who was 16 years old.
Suddenly, reformed L.T. was dead and crackhead L.T. resurfaced. I said this before with the Big Ben and Kobe rape charges, sexual assault charges are always a bit hazy. After all, sometimes you have genuine victims(like this young lady and perhaps the victim in the most recent Ben charge) and sometimes you have girls looking to set up a big payday for themselves by trapping a big name with a night of seduction and trumped up allegations. At the end of the day, people are going to believe what they want: regardless of evidence or the believability of the parties involved.
There are still factors about the case that remain hidden, so I'm not going to use this space to crush Taylor until all the facts are out and a sentence is handed down. That being said, when you take away the big name attached to this scandal, it's still a 51-year old man having sex(consensual or not) with a 16-year old girl who was apparently delivered on a silver platter by her pimp. Yes, that's right. Her PIMP. Even if you think Taylor is guilty, you have to agree that the pimp's role in this warrants him getting the same punishment that Taylor would receive if found guilty. What kind of sick individual gives away a child to a man THAT old so she can be the geezer's sex toy? Have we completely lost our sense of morals in this country?
Now, back to Taylor. He's the latest in a string of athletes to find themselves generating the wrong kind of publicity. Taylor, Big Ben, Plaxico Burress, Tiger Woods, Steve McNair, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Chris Benoit, Tito Ortiz, Donte Stallworth.....who exactly are kids supposed to look up to these days? When I was kid, everyone wanted to be like Mike. Now, Mike is a degenerate gambler who can't even compose himself to be humble in his Hall of Fame speech. The overwhelming sense of entitlement has ruined sports idols as we know it. How can we expect a guy like L.T. to understand the word "No", if he's never heard it before?
It's an epidemic of a society that weeds out the superbly-privileged kids and gives them even more privileges. Just take a look at ex-UVA lacrosse player-turned murderer George Huguely. Here's a guy who gets nabbed in November of 2008 for a drunken scuffle with a female police officer in which he threatens to kill the woman and serves absolutely no jail time. None. Two years later, he's doing the perp walk for kicking his girlfriend's door down and bashing her head against the wall until there was nothing left of her. This guy couldn't have used some time to learn from his mistakes back in '08 by doing a little R &R in the clink? Perhaps he would have learned a thing or two about respect by having his new roommates teach him a few things about how to treat a lady. At no point was anger management a consideration for this creep? How about a hug?
The lack of legitimate role models and a significant increase in bad parenting as kids are now more often asked to raised kids has led to a society where the inmates run the asylum. Now, 14-year old kids with a mid-90's fastball think their Chairman of the Board. The parents, knowing their wunderkind is their meal ticket, don't dare do anything that may stand in the way of their big payday. So they let the child run amok. Meanwhile, the kid watches a guy like Stallworth mow someone over with his car and get a month in prison. He watches Kobe Bryant go from alleged rapist to doing Nike commercials. When it comes to the supremely talented, we've become a nation of people with a short memory and a light hand.
Now, I don't know what happened in that hotel room between L.T. and that young girl and, frankly, I don't want to know. The more I read about this case, the more I feel sick for America. As for the autograph, I lost track of it quite some time ago. It may have gotten tossed out of my drawer during one of my many spring cleanings as a kid. It may have been stolen. Wherever it is, it remains exactly what it was in the first place: a scribble on a piece of paper of a man I knew nothing about.
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