Jason Taylor carried slowly off the field up on the shoulders of teammates Sunday afternoon was the last snapshot Dolphins fans would see of their all-time great defender. Taylor waved at the fans’ appreciative cheering but he was shaking his head, embarrassed by the attention, by the royal treatment.
“Don Shula deserves to be carried off. Dan Marino does. I don’t,” he would say later. “I told ’em to put me down three or four times, but they wouldn’t do it.”
Teammate Kendall Langford, one of the carriers, was too preoccupied within the moving throng to hear Taylor’s commands.
“I was worried about holding his legs,” Langford said, laughing. “I didn’t want to be the guy who dropped him!”
Minutes later, in the privacy of the locker room following the Dolphins’ season-ending 19-17 victory over the rival New York Jets, teammates would see more of Taylor than fans ever could. More of what Taylor will miss most of NFL after 15 seasons, 13 with the Dolphins.
The camaraderie and intimate bond of it — the family of it.
Taylor held the game ball he had been presented and stood in the center of the room as his teammates gathered ’round, everyone still in dirty, sweaty uniforms.
The speech
He started talking about how he was the one who felt honored to be in this company, in this fraternity, even on the day when everybody else was honoring him.
He couldn’t finish.
He dissolved into tears, the reverent, building applause of the other men in the room hiding the sounds of his sobs, the sounds of the reality of the sands all gone in a man’s career hourglass, 15 years later, yet seemingly all at once.
The teammates who so respect and adore Taylor became emotional just trying to later relay that scene, to do it justice.
“It was moving. Jason tried to hold ’em back. But he let ’em go,” fellow linebacker Karlos Dansby said of a strong man’s tears. “If you don’t get goosebumps listening to him, and seeing that? Well, you don’t have a heart. You don’t understand.”
So much of the finale of this disappointing 6-10 season was about tomorrow, about what’s next. Now begins in earnest the search for a new coach to (likely) replace Tony Sparano’s interim replacement, Todd Bowles. Now begins the full-bore planning for the upcoming draft, which (hopefully) will produce a first-round quarterback up to being handed the keys to the franchise.
All about J.T.
The future can start now, but Sunday was about the past, about farewell. It was about Jason Taylor.
The second-greatest playing career in the Dolphins’ 46-season history (only Marino’s was greater) closed Sunday. His 139 1/2 career sacks should see him in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Fate had Marino’s final game a humiliating 62-7 playoff loss in Jacksonville. Taylor got luckier, with a win over the team’s biggest rival — a victory that had his handprints on it even if the stat sheet didn’t particularly say so.
The day’s starring defensive role belonged Randy Starks, who had two interceptions and a sack.
“I told him I was jealous. That was the kind of game I wanted to have!” Taylor said.
Instead the retiring No. 99 would have only one tackle, but it was his hit on Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez that led to one of Starks’ interceptions, and a QB pressure that contributed to the other.
Taylor also recovered a late fumble and loped into the end zone for a touchdown, fumbling himself only to see the ball carom fortuitously back up onto his belly. It was a storybook finish to his career … except it didn’t count. Turns out it wasn’t a fumble. The referee’s ruling was correct even as it denied the day its perfect ending.
Feeling the love
Still, Taylor got to feel what he felt before the play was overturned — to feel the crush of teammates on him in a celebratory pile, to hear their shouts drowned out by joyous Dolfans, to hear that chant bloom.
“J.T! J.T! J.T! …”
Taylor would soak in every second of his final game, as well as play just about every second of it. He asked to play every down and coaches properly obliged. He even played on some special teams. And at the very end, as Miami’s offense took the field in “victory formation,” with QB Matt Moore kneeling, there was Taylor right behind him, on the field one last time as an “eligible receiver.”
He will have the rest of his life to not play.
He had that one last moment to savor before the clock and the career read :00.
Good-bye, No. 99
Afterward, as the media were let into the postgame locker room, Taylor’s two young sons, 9 and 7, bounced around near their dad, both in No. 99 jerseys, the smaller one top-heavy in a Dolphins helmet.
“I hit the lottery with a lot of things in life,” he said. “But giving that No. 99 back to the Dolphins for someone else to use because I’m done with it — that was hard.”
After dark Sunday, the white-painted concrete walls of the stadium’s postgame interview room were lined with dozens of Taylor’s family and friends as Taylor, natty in a gray suit, bid farewell formally, thanking who needed thanking with his usual measured eloquence, occasionally halting to collect himself, to fight back tears.
That was the formal goodbye, as ceremonial in its way as that slow ride off the field, bobbing up on a moving wave of teammates almost as if he were floating.
The real farewell, though, had come inside those closed locker-room doors, in that cherished inner sanctum, when for the last time Jason Taylor said goodbye to what he’ll miss the most, before the tears made him stop.
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