Frank Thomas

Taylor Notable Sports Figures
Awards and Accomplishments
1981 East-West Shrine All-Star Team
1981 Japan Bowl All-Star Team
1981 Consensus All-American
1981 Atlantic Coast Conference Player of the Year
1982 NFL Player Association NFC Linebacker of the Year
1982 Associated Press NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year
1982 Bell Trophy (the season’s top rookie)
1982-83, Associated Press NFL Defensive Player of the Year
1986
1982-84, Seagram’s Seven Crowns of Sports Award
1986
1982-91 NFL Pro Bowl team
1983, NFL All-Pro Team
1985-86
1983, 1986 United Press International NFC Defensive Player of the Year
1986 Professional Football Writers of America NFL Player of the
Year
1989 Associated Press All-Pro Team
1989 United Press International All-NFC Team
1989 Professional Football Writers of America All-Pro Team
1989 All-NFL team
1994 NFL 75th Anniversary All-Time Team
1999 Pro Football Hall of Fame
had him bouncing from noseguard to inside linebacker
to outside linebacker.
The coaches finally saw where to put him and gave
him a green light to make the inside linebacker position
his own. They told LT to rely on his instincts, and he
ended up with eighty solo tackles his junior year, forcing
seven fumbles. Teams were scared, and the only
team that season who tried to confront the menace that
was Lawrence Taylor was Oklahoma, which used three
men to block him.
As his college career wound down, he met and fell in
love with Linda Cooley, a soft-spoken woman who admonished
him for his constant belligerence. Taylor’s
close friends told him he would have to change his ways
or risk losing the girl. And he did, proposing to Linda
and then marrying her in 1982.
The Next Level
The New York Giants drafted Taylor as the second
pick overall in the 1981 draft. He signed a six-year,
$1.35 million contract with a $250,000 signing bonus.
Taylor’s entire time on the NFL field might itself be one
long highlight. From the very first season, Taylor was
more than impressive. He was voted All-Pro that first
year, and he started in the Pro Bowl. In a 1981 article in
the Boston Globe, Taylor’s teammate and cornerback
Terry Jackson said, “Lawrence is probably the greatest
athlete I’ve ever been associated with.”
He became the standard against which all other linebackers
were compared. His intimidation of and subsequent
racking up of quarterback sacks prompted the league
to institute the “number of sacks” statistic, which prior to
Taylor’s entrance into the league had not been kept.
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Where Is He Now?
Inducted in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1999, Taylor continues to
work at getting his life back on track, and, like most who have battled substance
abuse problems, every day is a struggle. He has had parts recently
in movies such as The Waterboy (1997), Shaft (2000), and Any Given Sunday,
a 1999 film he had a larger part in. The movie starred Jamie Foxx and
Al Pacino, and was, as Roger Ebert put it, “A smart sports movie swamped
by production overkill.” Oliver Stone directed the film, and Taylor has a
strong supporting role. Taylor has also done voices for video games, one of
the most recent is “Grand Theft Auto.”
Searching for Greener Pastures
Upset with the overall performance of the Giants in
the 1982 and 1983 seasons, Taylor shopped around for
better deals with other teams. Though his contract with
the Giants ran through 1987, and the team wouldn’t
trade him, he signed a deal with the New Jersey Generals,
a USFL team, that would begin in 1988.
But the Giants counter-offered, and Taylor stayed
with the team. In 1986, they would win their first ever
Super Bowl, with Taylor playing an integral part. It
would be the best season of his career, with 20.5 sacks
and the winning of the coveted NFL’s Most Valuable
Player (MVP) award—only the second defensive player
to ever win the award.
Sam Huff, who prior to LT’s entrance into the league,
was considered the ultimate linebacker, has said of Taylor,
in a 1987 Philadelphia Daily News article: “He’s
fantastic. I’ve never seen anyone play the position better.
He’s so relentless…You’ve got to be a hell of a player to
psyche out guys at this level, but Taylor can do it. When
he wants to play, he’s like some monster come down off
a movie screen. He just tosses people around.”
Off the Gridiron
Though he was a phenomenal success on the field,
off the field Taylor’s troubles would escalate. LT became
well known in the New York media for complaining
about the city and its pressures. This was not the
relationship he wanted with the press when, with the
success, money, and pressures of life in the NFL taking
its toll, Taylor would sink into substance abuse.
He handled the pressures of success by turning to his
old college habits—and then some. Drinking heavily
(“Lawrence could put away a case in a night,” friend
Joseph Cale told the Washington Post), staying out late,
and lacking discipline, his performance on the field,
though still outstanding, looked, in the mid-eighties, to
be slipping. Then word got out that Taylor was abusing
cocaine.
Looking for Help
In the spring of 1986, Taylor checked himself into a
rehabilitation program for substance abuse. The state-