THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Lawrence Taylor never played football in London. LaDanian Tomlinson, on the other hand, did – with the then-San Diego Chargers in a 37-32 loss to the New Orleans Saints, at Wembley, in 2008, which is still the best of all London's International Series games.
But for a few years in the mid-Nineties, London had its very own LT, Lionel Taylor, offensive coordinator and then head coach of the Monarchs, when the World League of American Football was reborn as an all-European circuit in 1995. LT died in August last year, news which passed me by at the time, as I was stuck in hospital, but when I did find out eventually I was even more upset, because I'd intended to write about him a few months earlier. I'd located him at a rest home near Albuquerque, but before I could make the call, my illness was diagnosed, and it fell by the wayside.
So let me write it now, and remind readers about why Lionel Taylor was an important football player, one whom I believe ought to be in the Hall of Fame, and to share with you some of the reasons why I remember him with such fondness.
Covering the World League in those days was a lot of fun, and for me it was a second education in football (my first hadn't gone all that deep back at Wesleyan in the late Sixties). The six-team league was set up by the NFL as a developmental operation and also to promote the NFL in Europe. It wasn't hugely successful in that second task, but it did very well at the first – Kurt Warner is the most famous product of its 13 seasons, but plenty of other stars came out of Europe, as well as a lot of solid players who would never have had a spot on an NFL roster without the WLAF.
It was a great education because, in general, the coaches (with a few exceptions) were very open and the access for reporters was great: I could watch pre-season scrimmages on the field, standing with friendly coaches about the players we were seeing. I would ask questions, always on the basis that I would quote them positively, and keep their negative analyses for myself.
Lionel was one of the more approachable guys. He had a combination of tightly peering "Chinese eyes", and a wide-open smile. He could crush you with a handshake or shake you up when his big mitt slapped you on the back. He was also one of the more open guys: as offensive coordinator for the Monarchs he shared some blunt opinions, sometimes seeming baffled why his offenses couldn't perform better (his first QB, in 1995, was Brad Johnson, who eventually would win a Super Bowl with Tampa Bay). I thought sometimes that Lionel was a classic case of a great player who expected the guys he coached to be able to do what he would have been able to do himself, and couldn't really adjust to their inability, or possibly to other shortcomings (offensive line play, for example) that might affect his planning.
This made sense because not only was Lionel a great player, he got there the hard way. Born in Kansas City in 1935, he moved with his mother Bertha Glen, who was a cook, to live in Lorado, West Virginia with his stepfather JC Taylor. He went to Buffalo High School in Accoville, a segregated school in a largely segregated state, where he was second-team all-state in both football and basketball (this was black-only all state). He started at the historically black West Virginia State in 1954, which was also the year, following the Supreme Court's Brown v Board of Education decision, that this distinguished college began to integrate. That became an almost-endless process, stalled by the state's refusal to match the federal funding that State was due as a land-grant college. Without matching funding from the state, the federal money was not forthcoming. It would not be restored until 2001, some 47 years later.
Taylor, who had no scholarship, left West Virginia after a year, but got lucky. He had been recruited by Donnie Gibson, the coach at New Mexico Highlands, in Las Vegas New Mexico. Gibson had played college football at Marshall, in West Virginia, and offered Lionel a scholarship. It paid off: playing end, Taylor was all-Frontier conference in both football and basketball. In the spring of 1956, at the conference track championships, he won the long jump, was second in the discus and third in the shot put. In the fall of 1957 he was ineligible, because of that year at WV State, so Gibson made him a coach and scout: Lionel persuaded Charley Cowan (who'd been at Buffalo HS behind him and also dropped out of State) to come to Vegas: Cowan would eventually join the Rams in 1961 and play 15 years in the NFL.
Lionel's route was harder. Because he didn't play that final year, he fell off the radar. He was never drafted, but in 1958 the Bears signed him to a tryout. He was cut, but played in the Pacific Football Conference, in the last season for the last of the top-flight minor-league and semi-pro teams on the west coast. He played for the Bakersfield Spoilers, and his quarterback was Tom Flores, future Oakland Raiders QB and NFL coach who is now in the Hall of Fame. They are the only recognizable names from that season, yet they still managed to go 0-6 against teams like the Tucson Rattlers, Orange County Rhinos, Salinas Packers and Petaluma Leghorns.
In 1959 he returned to the Bears, and actually played in eight games, though he registered no statistics. In 1960 preseason he caught his first NFL TD pass, from Zeke Bratkowski, but George Halas showed no signs of intending to play him. Taylor asked Halas for his release, and Papa Bear agreed. The American Football League was in its first season, and the GM of the Denver Broncos was Dean Griffing, a long time coach/GM in the Canadian League who had been the GM of Tucson when LT played for Bakersfield. With the AFL season already two game old, Griffing wanted him, so Taylor got to New York on a Sunday, signed a contract in the street outside the Polo Grounds, and caught six passes for 125 yards and a 33 yard TD from Frank Tripucka, which gave Denver a late lead against the New York Titans. The Broncos lost the game on a late blocked punt returned for a TD, in what would become a trademark of the early Denver teams, but Taylor had established himself as a starter.
He finished the season having caught 92 passes in 11 games, for 1,235 yards and 12 touchdowns, and was picked first-team all AFL. The next season, he became the first person in pro football to catch 100 balls in a (14 game) season, again for over a thousand yards, and again he was first team all AFL, which he repeated in 1962. In 1963 he was second-team all league. 1964 was his least productive season, and also the year Charley Hennigan of the Houston Oilers caught 101 passes; those remained the only 100 catch years in either AFL or NFL until the seasons were expanded to 16 games. In 1965, Taylor rebounded: 85 catches, 1131 yards 6 TD, but somehow wasn't an all-pro. In 1966 he hurt his knee part-way through the season, but played through it. He was traded to the Raiders in '67, but retired, then returned to play on a limited basis with the Oilers for two seasons.
I said at the start I thought LT should be in the Hall of Fame. Taylor was big for a receiver, 6-2 215; the big receivers in the NFL at that time tended to be flankers like Boyd Dowler and Gary Collins. They were both on the NFL all-decade team of the Sixties, as was Del Shofner. LT may not have been as fast as Shofner, but those huge hands were combined with a basketball sense of how to box out defenders, and he was a dangerous runner after the catch. There are two AFL receivers in the Hall: Lance Alworth, one of the all-time greats, and Don Maynard, who was Joe Namath's top target. They were the top two on the AFL all-time team, 1960-69. The second team receivers were Hennigan and Art Powell, neither of whom has the all-league status Taylor did. Otis Taylor of Kansas City is another contender, but his career extends into the Seventies NFL: I rate the two Taylors as better Hall of Fame candidates than Hennigan or Powell.
Lionel's problem, some say, is that his great years (1960-65) coincide with what is perceived as the weaker years of the AFL; he dominated not such great players in that time. There is an element of truth in that, and apart from the '63 Chargers the really good AFL teams do begin to appear in '65 or '66, but there is also that fact that Taylor didn't start in the AFL until he was already 25, and when injury curtailed him, he was already 31. But in his six-year prime he caught 508 passes for 6,424 yards: an average of 84 catches and 1,071 yards per season with 43 TD (7 per year). And being the first to 100 catches in a season is more than a gimmick: it signaled a sea change in the way pro football would be played.
After retirement, Taylor got his first coaching gig under Otto Graham, coaching the College All-Stars in their 1969 26-24 loss to the New York Jets. From 1970-76 he was the receivers coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, where he won two Super Bowls coaching John Stallworth and Lynn Swann. He went to the Rams in 1977 as receivers coach, and in 1980-81 was their offensive coordinator, the first black coordinator on a Super Bowl team. He coached at Oregon State and then was head coach at Texas Southern, where he went 13-41-1 in 5 seasons, before going back to the NFL as tight end coach in 1989 and pass game coordinator in 1990.
Which set the stage for his return with the Monarchs in 1995. Their head coach was Bobby Hammond, a former NFL running back who'd been an assistant with three teams, most recently the Eagles, and was considered an up and coming young coaching prospect. Hammond was a good looking, well-spoken guy who radiated confidence; he also turned out to be aggressive and confrontational behind the scenes. The Monarchs went 4-6 in his first year, and when they lost the first two games of the '96 season badly, he was fired, with accompanying behind the scenes stories leaking out. LT took over as head coach and the Monarchs went 4-4 the rest of the way, but the next two years saw 4-6 and 3-7 seasons, and after playing in three locations as the England Monarchs that year, the team was moved to Berlin.
LT's mark finished at 11-17, but there was a lot of front office chaos around him, which helped account for some of the chaos on field. In the '97 season they went through five quarterbacks, including Kerry Joseph, who went on to play safety for the Seahawks for four years, then moved to Canada for a long and successful run as a quarterback, including a Grey Cup and a Most Outstanding Player award. It also included Charley Puleri, a product of the Bronx via New Mexico State, who actually won two starts and in his post-game press conferences sounded like a street soldier from the Sopranos.
But my favorite memories of LT came in pre-season, where I was introduced to Club LT, when the press were invited to the coach's "suite" which was amply stocked with liquor, ice, mixers and beer. The Monarchs were training in Carrollton, Georgia, and I drove out there from Atlanta. I was running a little late, and when I arrived there was a Target opposite the team residence, so I pulled in to get a notebook to keep track of their scrimmage. As I looked down the aisles for office supplies, I bumped into Rad Radakovic, LT's defense coordinator, who was also wandering the aisles as if looking for something.
"Hi coach," I said. "Don't you have a scrimmage starting in a few minutes?" "Oh yeah, guess so," he replied, and I offered to drive him over but he said he'd be there in plenty of time. I watched the scrimmage, talked to LT about his team, and retreated with the other scribes to Club LT, where I mentioned my encounter with Rad. "It was never in doubt," Lionel told me...though to this day I'm not quite sure to what he referred by saying "it".
Football for me in those seasons was still a game more than a business, and few people made the game more fun than LT. I regret I didn't pursue some of those storylines from his life which I only discovered later, and as I said at the start, I really regret that I waited until it was too late to make contact with him again. He died in care on August 6, with his wife of 67 years, Lorencita at his side, and he leaves four generations of survivors.
I think of him as someone who both worked hard to get where he was, and never let that struggle get in the way of his enjoying his life. Put him in the Hall of Fame. And rest in peace.
