Lawrence Taylor (b. 1959)
Filed under the name Lawrence · March 20, 2026
Football I understand a good deal better than fashion or foreign cinema, since half my former students' fathers coached Friday nights around here, and Lawrence Taylor's reputation as one of the most dominant defensive players in the game's history is the kind of thing that gets repeated at every barbershop and diner table I've ever sat in. Being a linebacker means doing the hard, physical, often thankless work of stopping somebody else's plan before it ever gets started, which isn't glamorous the way scoring is, but it's the difference between a good team and a great one. I always had a soft spot in my classroom for the kids who'd quietly do the unglamorous job well — clean up without being asked, help a slower reader without making a show of it — because that's usually where the real character shows itself. Being remembered as dominant at that particular, unglamorous position, decades on, tells me he did something genuinely rare and hard, sustained over a long career, not just one big flashy moment that got lucky.