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One day before the New York Giants took Lawrence Taylor with the second pick in the 1981 NFL draft, he sent the team a telegram warning them not to take him.

That’s how bad things had gotten in New York. The Giants came into that draft off eight consecutive losing seasons. Four different men had coached the team over that time. Things were dismal. Taylor and his agent insisted that if the Giants didn’t deal with them squarely, he would not hesitate to go play for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the Canadian Football League.

Young apparently dealt squarely, because less than a month later, Taylor signed.

I want to run through the terms of the deal to show you just how different things were then. Taylor signed what was called a three-year, $900,000 deal. But in actuality it was:

• A $100,000 signing bonus
• A $500,000 salary for three years ($166,666.67 per year).
• A $300,000, tax-free and interest-free loan to be repaid in the year 2025.

In any case, everything changed for the Giants the day Taylor signed. They believed they were signing a dominant defensive player. They did not know they were signing an early glimpse at the future, a player who would change everything.

John Biever//Getty Images

Taylor, here sacking Dallas Cowboys QB Gary Hogeboom in 1985, terrorized quarterbacks and often served as a one-man blitz for the Giants.

Lawrence Taylor would be the first to tell you: He was not exactly a student of the game. So many of the other great defensive players would spend hours and hours in the video room breaking down offenses, studying schemes, learning everything they could about blockers. You take a guy like Ed Reed: He tended to know the opposing offense as well as their quarterback did, sometimes even better.

LT? Nah.

“At times,” Taylor wrote in My Giant Life, “I didn’t even know what defense we were in or what the offense was doing. But I always told the coaches, ‘When I make mistakes, good things come of it.’”

He was an athletic superhero. That’s all. Running backs and tight ends were not nearly strong enough to block him. Offensive tackles and guards were not nearly fast enough to catch him. And nobody on the field was as mean. In time, teams would try to create all sorts of double-team, triple-team and quadruple-team blocking concoctions to disrupt him, and more often than not it didn’t even matter.

“I guess,” LT says, “I was a freak.”

No guessing about it. Lawrence Taylor grew up in Virginia and he was, at first, a tremendously gifted catcher on various baseball teams. He would always insist — and who could doubt him — that he could have been a major league baseball star had he stuck with it. But once he discovered football, he never even considered sticking with baseball.

“Too much standing around,” he would say. “On the other hand, football brought plenty of action—and it also brought the hitting.”

Yes, he loved the hitting. With his rare combination of power and speed, he probably could have been an electrifying running back. There was a famous play in his second season, Thanksgiving Day against the Lions.

The game was tied in the fourth quarter, and Taylor had badly hurt his foot. The Lions were in the red zone, and quarterback Gary Danielson dropped back and tried to hit Leonard Thompson near the end zone.

Taylor stepped in front, grabbed the ball, and raced down the sideline, looking for all the world like Earl Campbell or Bo Jackson. Seeing that run alone gives you a sense of what an incredible running back he might have been.

“I thought you had a bad wheel,” a teammate yelled at him after the game.

LT smiled. “The ball in my hand took care of the pain,” he said.

Taylor played with an aura of ferociousness matched only by a handful of players in NFL history.

Actually, that whole game gives you a pretty good idea of what Taylor was all about. It was, as mentioned, his second season—in his rookie year he was named both Defensive Rookie of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year. But he got off to a sluggish start in 1982. It was the strike season, remember, and coach Ray Perkins didn’t like his effort and didn’t like it when he said he was “just trying to get through the season.” So Perkins actually benched Taylor at the start of the game (hiding it by saying that Taylor was not quite healthy enough to start).

Well, Taylor just stewed on the sideline; he was outraged. He missed the first quarter, then came in, forced a fumble, destroyed Danielson on a key sack, and of course, made the interception that won the game.

“If I’m in the game,” he said, “I can control it.” He was named NFL Defensive Player of the Year again in 1982.

He came along exactly at the time that the NFL was becoming a passing league. Before 1979, no NFL quarterback had ever thrown for 4,000 yards.* Then in 1980, the year before Taylor, Dan Fouts and Brian Sipe both threw for 4,000.

*Joe Namath threw for 4,007 yards in 1967, but the Jets were in the AFL.

In Taylor’s second year, for the first time in NFL history, teams threw the ball more than they ran it. The looser rules for offensive linemen and tougher rules for defensive backs simply opened up the game. Teams have thrown the ball more than they’ve run it every season since 1984. Defenses were suddenly at a decisive disadvantage.

Taylor was their counterstrike. Under the guidance of defensive coordinator Bill Parcells, Taylor became, essentially, the first pass-rushing linebacker in the NFL. The blitz had been around for 40 or so years, but it had been designed to overload offensive lines. Taylor was a one-man blitz. In 1986, under the guidance of a young defensive coordinator named Bill Belichick, he set the NFL record with 20.5 sacks and led the Giants to a Super Bowl title.

“He arrived in the NFL,” writer Paul Zimmerman said, “like an emissary from another planet.”

Focus on Sport//Getty Images

Taylor was All-Pro eight times and the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year three times.

Soon, every team needed their own Lawrence Taylor — and players like Andre Tippett and Chip Banks and Derrick Thomas and Kevin Greene began popping up.

This led offenses to put more effort on getting the most athletically gifted tackles to ever play professional football.

You cannot write a history of modern pro football without Lawrence Taylor.

“He changed the way defense is played, the way pass-rushing is played, the way linebackers play and the way offenses block linebackers,” John Madden said.

He did all this with an aura of ferociousness matched only by a handful of players in NFL history — Dick Butkus, certainly, Night Train Lane, Deacon Jones, Mean Joe Greene, etc. Eric Dickerson tells a funny story about his first NFL game, which was against the Giants and Taylor. On a key play, he was told to block Taylor to free up a pass. He came in and cut Taylor, who was not amused.

“You don’t cut me!” Taylor said. “I will KILL you.”

Dickerson said he asked out of the game at that point and preferred not to return until LT calmed down a bit. What he failed to realize was that LT never calmed down, and when Dickerson returned, Taylor started once again talking about killing him.*

*E.J. Junior tells a funny story about Taylor that’s not exactly related to anything but too good to pass up. They came out of college the same year, and both played in the East-West Shrine Game. As part of the festivities, the players went bowling. Junior said that when it was Taylor’s turn to bowl, he threw the ball so that it did not land until it was halfway up the lane. It not only knocked down all the pins, it also destroyed the fiberglass backing, too. “It was a sheer act of brute strength,” Junior told Paul Zimmerman. “We kind of quietly backed away and left the alley.”

Taylor is one of only two defensive players to ever be named the league MVP.

The accolades are there—eight-time All-Pro, three-time defensive player of the year, one of only two defensive players to ever be named the league MVP (along with Alan Page—but in some ways, they diminish Taylor because they make him sound like other great players. And he wasn’t. He was all his own.

There’s no way to recount all the miracles Taylor performed on the field. He once ran down Randall Cunningham from behind. He chased down receivers from literally the other side of the field. He has knocked offensive linemen into their own quarterbacks, causing fumbles. He once played a game against the Saints where his shoulder was so bad he had to wear a harness. He had three sacks and two forced fumbles.

Zimmerman wrote about what he considered the greatest defensive play he ever saw, from 1983, when the Giants were playing Washington. Joe Theismann dropped back to pass, Taylor came in on his usual blitz, and he was picked up by tackle Joe Jacoby, who some think belongs in the Hall of Fame.

“Taylor grabs Jacoby by the shoulder pads and throws him,” Zimmerman wrote.

At this point, Theismann is escaping the pocket. Taylor begins chase but is met by Washington’s other tackle, George Starke.

“Taylor knocks him to the ground without breaking stride,” Zimmerman wrote.

At this point, Theismann is on the move. He was a speedy quarterback.

Taylor ran him down despite giving Theismann a 10-yard head start.

Off the field, his life has often been out of control. He was jailed three times for drug-related offenses and was suspended by the league at one point. He has had various brushes with the law since he retired and has also made numerous public efforts to put his life together. He has talked about the burden that comes with being this larger-than-life figure named Lawrence Taylor.

I like what football historian Brad Oremland says about him: “He was the first of his kind, maybe the only of his kind.”

Joe Posnanski has been named the best sportswriter in America by five different organizations, including the Sports Media Hall of Fame and the Associated Press Sports Editors. He has also won two Sports Emmy Awards. He is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of six books, and he co-hosts the PosCast with television writer and creator Michael Schur.  

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