Linebacker Lawrence Taylor Usually Gets What He Wants, Including the Quarterbacks : The Legend of L.T. Grows on Giants

Bless the New York Giants, who have dragged linebacker Lawrence Taylor through Super Bowl media week the way you would an unwilling child to his first day of kindergarten.

Smell the rubber burning from Taylor’s tennis shoes. OK, he’s here and he’s talking, but get it through your head that he’d rather be anywhere else than surrounded by a bunch of pinheads with microphones and tape recorders. He’s only here by National Football League mandate.

Rarely does Taylor not get what he wants. That’s the great part of being Lawrence Taylor, linebacker and legend.

Some legends don’t need to be told of their immortality. They don’t need the media, the public. They don’t need advice. They need the Super Bowl but not Super Bowl week.

Some legends can break commandments, walk under ladders, play with fire. They can do all the things you’re not supposed to do and get away with it. They can control their own images and destinies.

Taylor is that kind of legend.

You can tell Lawrence Taylor to stay in school and get his college degree, and he can ask, “Why?” You can tell Taylor he must lift weights to become a better player. And he can ask: “Better than who? Myself?”

And while you’re trying to straighten out his life, Taylor’s getting into his $36,000 Mercedes for a drive to his $400,000 house in New Jersey.

Is there really a problem here?

Taylor, the linebacker of his generation, emerged from a substance-treatment program last spring to have the season of his career, a season in which he led the NFL in sacks with 20 1/2, won the NFL’s Most Valuable Player award and regained his title as king.

Yet, the larger than life that Taylor becomes, the more people want to pry. And the harder Taylor slams the door in the public’s face. He has built an impenetrable wall between his public and private lives. You are allowed to know that he is married to wife Linda and that the Taylors have three children.

Very few get close to Taylor. It all, of course, serves to fuel the legend.

“There are only 24 hours in a day,” Giant General Manager George Young said. “A guy can’t live up to all those stories.”

Those are the ones about his moods and his habits and his life style. This from the man who once thought you got respect by chugging beer a case at a time and wrecking an entire saloon with your bare hands.

Taylor, who in December broke a season-long media silence, offers only glimpses of his personality. Just enough to keep you wondering, just enough to keep your distance.

“I guess I’m just a plain wild dude,” Taylor said after the Giants’ playoff win over the San Francisco 49ers. “I live life wild, I play wild, but I do it all my own way. I really don’t care what other people expect of me, or what I’m supposed to do, or how society say I’m supposed to do certain things. I do it my way. I don’t put on airs or stuff. I hang with the bums. I hang with the regular people. I make mistakes like everyone else.”

One of which was substance abuse, the substance reportedly being cocaine. Taylor issued a statement through the Giants last March, admitting that he was receiving treatment for an undisclosed substance problem.

Taylor’s play on the field this season would seem to reflect that his problems are behind him. Beasley Reece, a close friend and former teammate of Taylor’s, noted recently that you can’t even find a beer in Taylor’s refrigerator.

Yet Taylor apparently would hate to kill a perfectly good mystery.

Recently, when asked what he does better than any outside linebacker, Taylor responded, “Drink.”

Super Bowl interview sessions with Taylor this week have bordered on carnival, as a media corps estimated near 100 surrounded the linebacker Tuesday, everybody hoping somehow to crack the Taylor shell.

Taylor steadfastly refused to talk about the past, though he did say that some of it would be offered in book form sometime this spring, when his autobiography is released. Now this is the stuff of legends.

Yet Young wondered how Taylor is so different than prominent legends of the past such as Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle, both of whom will be remembered for their homers, not their livers.

“We’re trying to mold him into the way we think he ought to be,” Young said of Taylor. “No one did that for Leonardo DaVinci or Van Gogh. The guy cut off his ear and still painted pretty well. Athletics are not the endeavor of the well adjusted all the time.”

Sometimes, Young said, it’s better just to sit back and admire a man’s skills.

The Giants have for years tried to persuade Taylor to join the team’s successful off-season weightlifting program. Taylor is the only Giant veteran who lives in the New York area who is not in the program.

It’s not exactly something you make Lawrence Taylor do.

“You have to talk about it lightly,” Johnny Parker, the team’s weight and strength coordinator, said. “He says ‘Oh yeah, Johnny, I’ll lift some, but you know I never know what I’m going to be doing.’ It’s hard to pin him down. What I try to tell him is, ‘Seriously, do you want to dance the first dance with your daughter?’ I want him to run away from the game, not limp from it.”

Parker said the football world does not want to know what Taylor would be like after a little weight-lifting.

“Imagine if the sun got 1% hotter,” Parker said. “It would burn up the earth. Lawrence is the sun.”

But where does Taylor get his motivation? Without the help of machines, he is already one of the athletic marvels of his generation.

Parker remembers a day Taylor walked into camp and saw some other players doing an exercise in which you leap, flat-footed, from ground to elevated boxes.

Taylor looked curiously at the players and asked it he could try.

“We have boxes that are 30, 36 and 42 inches from the ground,” Parker said. “He jumped up on the 42-inch box with no more effort then you’d walk from the sidewalk and jump up to the curb.”

Reece recalled that he once was able to beat Taylor at golf. Taylor was so upset that he went out and bought golf-video instructional cassettes and was soon shooting in the 70s.

Taylor played on the Giants’ off-season basketball team and four times scored more than 60 points in a game.

Taylor is 6-foot-3 and 245 pounds, with strength enough to run through an offensive tackle and speed enough to catch a running back.

In the Giants’ first game against the Washington Redskins this season, Taylor was called for holding on one play and was so incensed that on the next play he bowled over a Redskin player and sacked quarterback Jay Schroeder. The bowled-over player was Joe Jacoby, 6-7 and 305.

“He’s the greatest athlete I’ve seen,” Parker said. “You guys have Magic Johnson and Eric Dickerson out there. He has to be in their class. He’d have made a phenomenal heavyweight boxer.”

Phenomenal is a nice way to describe Taylor’s 1986 season. He led the league in sacks and put significant pressure on the opposing quarterback 116 other times. He was third on the Giants in tackles with 105, even though every opponent’s offensive coordinator put his heart and soul into thwarting him.

Only two times this season did anyone or any team effectively control Taylor. Tackle Ron Mattes of the Seattle Seahawks shut him down in a game Oct. 19, and Green Bay’s tackle Ken Ruettgers stopped him Dec. 20.

Taylor had 20 1/2 sacks entering the final game of the season and had a good chance to break Mark Gastineau’s NFL sack record of 22. But Ruettgers admittedly played the game of his career and kept Taylor from the record.

Taylor is the envy of any player who had to work to be a great player.

“He has great God-given ability,” said Denver all-pro linebacker Karl Mecklenburg, who admittedly does not. “I’m sure he has always been the best player on any team he ever played on.”

Sam Huff, the Giants’ great middle linebacker in the 1950s and early 1960s, said he never saw anything like Taylor in his day.

“Get a list of adjectives and put them all under his name,” he said, “If you’re looking for a super linebacker, he’s it. Look at the qualities--the hands, the quickness. And he’s a little bit mean on the football team. He’s the fastest linebacker I’ve ever seen. He’s an excellent tackler and he’s dominating. And he seems to be a leader on the field.”

The Taylor mystique might want you to believe that he rolled out of bed and played a great game with a hangover. But this is a man who takes his football seriously. Maybe too seriously.

“When I throw up, I know I’m ready to play,” Taylor said with a straight face this week. “When you’re yelling and your eyes turn red and you feel like slapping your mother, that’s when you know you’re ready to play ball. I don’t try to imitate or make something up emotionally. If I don’t have it, I don’t have it and I know it’s going to be a long day.”

On the field, Taylor can be every bit as menacing as his image.

“I can be a nice person and I can be an s.o.b.,” he said. “I think most players are like that. Nice players won’t get very far on the field. Nasty players, mean players, get farther. It’s the nature of the game. There’s no place to be nice.”

For Taylor, the hype of Super Bowl week distracts from what he and his teammates came to do. Taylor is preparing, emotionally and physically, for Denver quarterback John Elway.

Taylor senses the hunt. He’s paring his body weight down to about 243 pounds this week. He wants to be as quick as he can for the elusive Elway, one of the league’s more gifted running quarterbacks.

“I’ll wear light shoes to get into a position to chase,” Taylor said. “If I’m playing a game where I don’t need to be light, I’ll go up to 250, 251.”

Taylor is readying himself for the game of his life.

But Parker and others wonder when it will all end for Taylor. He will soon turn 28, and next season will be his seventh in the league. And although he probably hasn’t abused his body as much as we are led to believe, he certainly is no choir boy, as Young says.

“He overdoes most things, on and off the field,” Young said.

Taylor is at the prime of his athletic career. But at what point does a hard life take its toll, even on the greatest of athletes.

Parker wonders.

“God gave Lawrence the ultimate in every trait,,” Parker said. “The sad thing is that Lawrence is going to lose it gradually.”

Parker said that a loss in reaction time of one-hundredth of a second would be disastrous for Taylor.

He’s trying to convince Taylor that he can prolong a great career with proper training. But try to telling that to a comic book hero.

“Lawrence has a Superman image,” Parker said. “There’s an image he has to live up to. Superman didn’t lift weights. He’s almost compelled to uphold the image.”

It’s been that way at least since his college days at North Carolina, when Taylor would do most anything to get attention.

“I was trying to be a hoodlum in college,” he told the New York Times in 1984. “I was going out to fraternity houses and destroying everything. I had a reputation in Chapel Hill that nobody messed with L.T. I kind of liked that. That’s what it’s all about, getting respect.”

For Lawrence Taylor, there has been no other way than his way.

Maybe he knows something we don’t.

Growing up in Williamsburg, Va., Taylor told his parents that he would be a millionaire by age 21. He wasn’t far off. Taylor’s contract calls for him to earn $1 million for the 1988 season.

In high school, Taylor told his father he’d earn a football scholarship to college, even though he didn’t take up the sport until his junior year.

He went to college and majored in recreation. He skipped classes, hung out in pool halls, irritated his own coaches and opposing quarterbacks and earned a million-dollar NFL contract for all his trouble.

No doubt some are betting that someday the Lawrence Taylor machine will fall apart, leaving only assorted coils, springs and cogwheels.

But Taylor has fooled us before. Maybe that’s not the way it works with this legend. Maybe he’ll always just be one really wild dude.