Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (6 page)

Taylor’s personality didn’t change much in his rookie year: great player, tough to get to know. But he was the foundation that Gibbs knew he could build his defense around even though Taylor was running into problems off the field. Gibbs suspended him one game his rookie year after Taylor was arrested for driving under the influence, charges that later were dropped. Taylor’s father, Pedro, was the chief of police in Florida City, and so he should have known right from wrong, but he was a young man with a lot of money in his pocket and was still trying to figure things out. The NFL fined him $71,764 for violating the personal conduct policy when he was charged with a felony count of aggravated assault with a firearm for brandishing a gun in 2005. Taylor took a plea agreement of two misdemeanors and received eighteen months probation. He had been fined seven times by the NFL for late hits. He spit on Tampa Bay Buccaneers running back Michael Pittman in a playoff game after the 2005 season. Like a lot of players, Taylor needed to grow up. He came out of Miami after his junior season and was just twenty-one years old when he entered the NFL. The football is always the easy part.
It’s being out on their own, the new and vastly improved financial situation, the after-hours temptations—those are the things that often provide the biggest impediment to success.

Gibbs was not only a great coach but very spiritual. He had a way of reaching his players, even those who seemed lost. Taylor was putting his people skills to the test. “The way you react to him is you’re trying to win him over,” Gibbs said.

If Taylor felt people around him were trying to take advantage of him and in return he was not trusting, Gibbs at least wanted Taylor to trust him. So Gibbs made a special effort with him. “You get a player like that, and all of a sudden he’s got a lot of money in his deal, so you are trying to work through that,” Gibbs said. “This guy could be a very, very valuable part of what we’re doing here in the future. When you got him on the field, he really was a leader right off the bat. You’re wanting to develop a relationship with him as a coach. Every player is not going to love his coach, but you want his respect and to have a chance. You are kind of wanting all of them to love the Redskins and have a great relationship with you. That’s not going to happen, but you would like to win most of them over.”

The Redskins were just 6–10 in Gibbs’s first season. Not to worry. He had been only 8–8 in his first season with the Redskins in 1981 after losing the first five games. He won the Super Bowl in his second season. That season was reduced to just nine games as a result of the fifty-seven-day strike, turning the year from the usual marathon into a sprint. Redskins fans knew Gibbs was the real deal when he beat Tom Landry in the NFC championship game and then one week later beat Don Shula in the Super Bowl.

Once again, in his second act, the Redskins improved in Gibbs’s second season. In 2005, the Redskins were 10–6 and made the playoffs as a wild card. They beat the Bucs in the first round before losing to the Seahawks. Back on the NASCAR circuit, Gibbs’s team won its third Sprint Cup Series championship. It was a good year.

Gibbs started to notice a change in Taylor before his third season. Taylor had met Jackie Garcia while they were at Gulliver Prep high school in Miami. Taylor was infatuated. She was the niece of the actor Andy Garcia. He came home and told his grandmother about Jackie and said that he had to learn how to speak Spanish. They had a daughter, also named Jackie, in May 2006 after Taylor’s second year with the Redskins. He embraced fatherhood. That changed his demeanor. He also was letting Gibbs into his life.

“He had his first child, and you’d see him walk around with that little girl,” Gibbs said. “He started coming to our chapel services, and I felt there was real change in his life. The next thing, he walked down the hall and said, ‘Hey coach, how you doing?’ It was just a real change at how he looked at things.”

Taylor was having his best season in 2007. The Redskins were 5–3 at the halfway point after an overtime victory against the Jets. But late in the third quarter the next week against the Eagles, Taylor sustained a sprained knee. Without him, the Redskins gave up 20 points in the fourth quarter and lost. Taylor told defensive coordinator Gregg Williams that he didn’t expect to be out very long.

“Hopefully, Sean will be fine,” cornerback Shawn Springs said. “He looked like he’ll be fine. I wouldn’t doubt that he’ll be right back out there.”

Taylor did not play the next week against the Cowboys in a tough 28–23 loss in Dallas. Terrell Owens caught four touchdown passes from Tony Romo as the ’Boys took advantage of the Redskins being without their best defensive player. Washington had now lost two games in a row and desperately needed Taylor to return to the field. They were in Tampa the next week, and once again Taylor was not healthy enough to play. When the Redskins were losing to the Bucs, Taylor was back home in Miami with Jackie, his fiancée, and their eighteen-month-old daughter, taking care of some personal business with his house, which had been
broken into the previous week. It was Thanksgiving weekend. He had arrived in Miami on that Saturday. After watching the Redskins lose their third straight game the next day, he went on a thirty-mile bicycle ride. Maybe that workout would accelerate his return to the field. His team desperately needed him. But he would never play again.

The knee injury that kept him away from his team would cost him his life.

The phone call.

It comes after midnight, and it’s the call every mother and father fear when their children are out of the house. It’s the call every coach fears when his players are not under their control. You can’t watch them 24/7. Nothing much good ever happens after midnight, especially when you are dealing with young men in their twenties, many of whom are millionaires, already with more money than they dreamed they would make in a lifetime.

Giants coach Tom Coughlin got the phone call in 2008 that Plaxico Burress, who had been a close friend of Sean Taylor, accidentally shot himself in the leg on the night after Thanksgiving at a midtown Manhattan nightclub. He never played for the Giants again, and his absence cost them a chance to repeat as Super Bowl champions. The phone rang in the home of Baltimore Ravens coach Brian Billick after midnight, a few hours after the St. Louis Rams defeated the Tennessee Titans in Super Bowl XXXIV in Atlanta in 2000. Billick’s best player, Ray Lewis, was in trouble in Atlanta after a street fight outside a nightclub in upscale Buckhead at 4 a.m. left two men stabbed to death. Lewis and two friends were charged with murder, felony murder, and aggravated assault. Lewis was jailed for nearly three weeks before he was released on $1 million bond. He posted $200,000 in cash. His mother had been waiting for him in Honolulu for Pro Bowl week at the time he was arrested. He never made it. The
phone rang so late in the Billick house that he knew there was a problem.

“Both my daughters, who were living at home at the time, were home,” he said. “I knew this was about my team. You don’t get a call that late when it’s not about one or the other. You knew it wasn’t going to be good.”

Billick didn’t have a lot of information initially, but the Ravens organization placed its faith in Lewis. “The hard thing is there was no one to call for reference to say, ‘Okay, what happens when your best player is indicted on two counts of murder? How did you handle this?’ What was the case study? It had never happened before.”

Four months later, Lewis reached an agreement to plead guilty to misdemeanor obstruction of justice and avoided jail time. The murder charges were dropped.

There is nothing in the playbook, nothing one coach can learn from another, that Gibbs could reference to help him deal with the phone call he was about to receive. The Redskins returned from Tampa on the night of November 25, 2007, after losing to the Bucs. They were reeling at 5–6, the last two losses without their brilliant young safety Sean Taylor, who had become a team leader.

Gibbs’s phone rang at six o’clock on the morning of November 26. It was Dan Snyder. It could not be good.

“Sean has been shot,” Snyder said.

“How bad is it? Where is he shot?” Gibbs said.

“He’s shot in the leg,” Snyder said.

Gibbs’s first thought was, okay, it’s only the leg; Sean is going to be fine. This was a strong twenty-four-year old athlete. He might need time to recover, but at least he hadn’t been shot in the head or the chest. Gibbs didn’t have enough information. “Not realizing exactly where he got shot and the fact that he bled so much,” Gibbs said.

Taylor was in bed with his two Jackies in his house in the upscale area of Palmetto Bay when he heard intruders. He reached
for a machete that he kept by the bed for emergency situations. This was an emergency. The house had been burglarized on November 17, but no one had been home. A kitchen knife had been left on the bed. The intruders clearly didn’t expect anybody to be home this time, either. Taylor played for the Redskins, and he was not supposed to be in Miami.

Taylor tried to block the bedroom door. Two shots were fired. One hit the wall. The other hit Taylor in the leg in the upper thigh area near the femoral artery. Jackie called 911 on her cell phone at 1:40 a.m. Taylor was airlifted to the trauma unit of Jackson Memorial Hospital.

He underwent seven hours of surgery beginning at 5:30 a.m. He lost a massive amount of blood and required seven transfusions. His heart stopped beating twice during surgery. He was unresponsive and unconscious when he came out of surgery. Back at Redskins Park, Gibbs and team chaplain Brett Fuller addressed the players at noon and told them Taylor was in critical condition. Snyder flew to Miami in his private plane and took running back Clinton Portis and others with him. Portis and Taylor were tight from their days together at the University of Miami. Portis played the first two years of his career with the Denver Broncos but was traded to the Redskins for cornerback Champ Bailey two months before the Redskins selected Taylor in the first round.

Portis had seen the change in his friend. “It’s hard to expect a man to grow up overnight,” he was quoted in the
Washington Post
. “But ever since he had this child, it was like a new Sean. And everybody around here knew it. He was always smiling, always happy, always talking about his child.”

There was a shred of optimism when it was reported the night of the surgery that Taylor squeezed the doctor’s hand and made facial expressions. It was false hope. He was dead at 3:30 the next morning.

The coaches’ manual does not provide instructions for how to handle a locker room in mourning when a teammate is shot to
death in the middle of the season. There was no crisis management team to call in. Football teams are like families. At least the good ones are.

“We wind up losing Sean. You never plan for that,” Gibbs said. “Coaches go through a lot of things, but you don’t go through that. We certainly didn’t have a plan. You just kind of embark on something like that, and you just try to do the best you can to handle it from day to day.”

Gibbs’s strength held the Redskins together during the week. He was the leader, the foundation of the organization. The players and staff looked to him for guidance.

Gibbs didn’t second-guess the organization’s decision to allow Taylor to return to his Miami home instead of forcing him to remain in Virginia to keep rehabilitating his knee. “I never really did think a lot about that,” Gibbs said. “It was a decision where we felt it was best for him personally. He wanted to get the situation squared away with his house so he could come back and be more focused on football.”

Gibbs knew his players and knew this was going to be the toughest challenge he ever faced as a head coach. “Our players were distraught,” he said. “Looking them in the eye, you see it had a huge impact on them.”

If the season had not slipped away already, it was surely hanging by its fingertips on the edge of a cliff with a three-hundred-foot drop. Gibbs was always adept at finding ways to motivate his team. He was such a good coach that he often could impose his will on the other team by the sheer brilliance of his game plans. Defenses knew that Gibbs loved the counter trey, a misdirection running play, and that he loved it even more when he had John Riggins. Nobody could stop it.

This was different. It had nothing to do with X’s and O’s. This took Gibbs out of his comfort zone. Less than a week after Taylor died, the Redskins were playing a home game against the Buffalo Bills. If they had any desire to remain in the race for a wild-card
spot, it was imperative that they beat the Bills. But they had to play with broken hearts, the most debilitating injury of all. Gibbs says Taylor is one of the top five athletes he’s ever coached, but it was more than that now. There was a death in the family. A young lady lost her fiancé. A little girl lost her father. Parents lost their son. And Redskins Nation lost one of its best players. How could the Redskins summon the strength to play a football game? During the week, Gibbs had Portis and Santana Moss, another player from Miami, speak to the team about Taylor. Gibbs was dealing with fifty-two personalities who would all attempt to process the loss in their own way.

The Redskins distributed white towels with Taylor’s number 21 to the fans at FedEx Field. Taylor’s locker was encased in Plexiglas. There was a four-minute video tribute to Taylor prior to the game and the Redskins’ marching band wore black hats. Defensive coordinator Gregg Williams elected to open the game with only ten defensive players for the first play. The eleventh spot belonged to Taylor; his replacement, Reed Doughty, stood on the sidelines. Williams made the decision without first consulting with Gibbs. He had described Taylor as being like a son to him, and this was his way of honoring him. “He was going to ride with us one more time,” Williams said.

Buffalo’s Fred Jackson ran for 22 yards against the ten-man defense.

It was a strange game. There were ten scores: eight field goals, a safety, and a touchdown. The only touchdown, a 3-yard run by Portis, had given the Redskins a 16–5 lead with 5:42 left in the third quarter. Buffalo moved to within 16–14 on three field goals by Rian Lindell. But now the Bills were on the Redskins’ 33 with eight seconds to go after Buffalo quarterback Trent Edwards spiked the ball to stop the clock.