Letter to WaPo’s Leonard Shapiro
This letter was written by my friend and colleague, Eddie Cornwell, MD, Director of Trauma/Surgical Critical Care at Johns Hopkins and lifetime Washington Redskins fan.
I turn 51 this week and have been reading the Post sports section for 5 years. I have been going to Redskins games since 1965, and have devoted much of my energy in my professional life to the issues of violence prevention, and the thug life mentality that glamorizes violence in our culture. So several of my life’s passions interface with your column on Sean Taylor (Nov 27th, “Taylor’s Death is Tragic, but Not Surprising“) .
I am on call in the hospital at 0430 –and the violence in East Baltimore has taken a brief hiatus that allows me to send my first ever critical (hopefully constructively so) note to a Post columnist. I enjoy occasional friendly repartee when I disagree on issues of sport, but I found your column to be a little lazy, and even offensive–from the title to the conclusion in search of a circumstance.
It is certainly fair, appropriate, and necessary to chronicle the troubling events — as you and your colleagues have done — that pointed to the need for some serious maturation from the time Taylor was drafted as a 20 yr old manchild from the U of Miami. But you treat all the signs that he had turned his life around over the last 18 months as some sort of inconvenient truth. In Gibbs’ Monday press conferences, when he is about to gush over one of his players–he prefaces his comments with “I gotta tell ya—”. Over the last year or so, only Clinton Portis exceeds Taylor in frequency as the beneficiary of such gushing—and often more about the all important character issue than about his play.
“I gotta tell you—Sean has done every little thing we have asked —”Sean is one of our leaders”—”Sean’s teammates have voted him to our Leadership council”— “Sean has turned things around—Things change when you have your first baby.”
You seem to ignore your own paragraph 7 where you write ” … it would be terribly easy to rush to some sort of instant judgment based on what we think we all knew about Taylor and the sort of life he once, and for all we know, still led.”
It also seemed odd that your journalistic instinct prompted you to devote 2 paragraphs to quoting your own colleague Mike Wilbon, who shares your conclusions (”…sad, yes, but hardly surprising”), as though you needed some cover for your own opinions. But Mike stressed how Sean had decided to change his environment — raising the possibility that the environment may have followed him — and he asserted at the outset of his column that it would have nothing to do with football.
You, on the other hand get a little flippant and dismissive when dealing with Sean’s more recent reputation with phrases like “the sort of life he once, and FOR ALL WE KNOW, STILL LED”, and “a stream of Redskins players and coaches were PARADED in front of the cameras and microphones at Redskins Park to testify that Taylor had truly turned his life around..” , and “..In the wake of his shooting, we are now hearing about a SO-CALLED new Sean Taylor…”.
Also, unlike Mike, you chose to link football (paragraph 11 ..”On the field…loved to make bold statements with vicious and often dangerous hits that occasionally got him tossed from games….seemed to embrace the thug image on and off the field..) — to support your thesis; but you rely on old news while minimizing all the evidence of a new Sean.
He got tossed from the Tampa Bay playoff game 2 years ago — and should have — for the disgusting act of spitting on Michael Pittman — the low point of Sean’s career in my opinion. Have I missed something?– what hits got him tossed from games? Certainly the position of safety is one where drawing a permanent link between on field viciousness and off field attitude is unjustified (Gary Fencik, Ronnie Lott, Mark Carrier, and John Lynch come to mind).
I wonder if it would be “unsurprising” if -God forbid– Bill Romanowski were shot in his home. He spit in an opponents face, broke Kerry Collins jaw with a flying helmet first hit in a preseason game, ended a teammates career with multiple facial fractures from a sucker punch in practice, and justified his abuse of performance enhancers to the need to keep up with Black players. Would it be fair to link this football related evidence about his character to some predictability about being shot in your home by a late night intruder?
Finally, the statement …”the fact that he rarely spoke to members of the media only enhanced his reputation as a moody, enigmatic athlete that we hardly ever got to know..” is just lazy. There were abundant testimonials about Sean from teammates, coaches, beat reporters Bram Weinstein, Kelli Johnson–and interviews on the team website—all before he was gunned down in his own bedroom. I don’t naively base my opinions from the cliche-laden interviews with many football players–but its unfair for you to play both sides of the fence: Ignore the countless assertions in the media about the new Sean, then cite his refusal to talk to the media as enhancement of a reputation as a moody enigma. How much time and evidence of exemplary behavior must be compiled before you avoid the cheap and easy reference to Michael Vick, Pac-Man Jones and Tank Johnson in the same sentence as Sean Taylor?
Yesterday, I discharged a 21 yr old Black kid who survived gunshot wounds to his intestines, stomach , liver, heart and lungs. From all that I have seen in East Baltimore, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. it would have been easy to assume the attitude with his family during his 2-1/2 month recovery that his near death was maddening but “not surprising”. I’m glad I didn’t–as it would have sent the wrong message to the medical students and surgical residents I help to train.
I found out weeks into his recovery (not that it made a difference) that he was returning to his delivery truck on his job, and was shot during a burglary attempt, and had never been in trouble in his life. Your words reach far more than mine—i avoided the rush to judgment. So should you.
Respectfully submitted.
Eddie Cornwell
