There's Frank Gore. "He's the story of courage," Soldinger says, for Gore overcame poverty, grades, two major knee surgeries and made the NFL.
"There's Sean Taylor ," Soldinger says.
The veteran coach stops for a beat when this picture appears because the air gets sucked out of the room. Or maybe it's just him. Maybe it's just the way he feels each time this photo of Taylor from the 2007 Pro Bowl is shown, body attacking, arms flexed, ferocious as ever in mid-tackle.
Soldinger first saw Taylor as a youth attending Miami's summer football camp. He saw Taylor grow each year - 10, 11, 12. At one point in those years, he walked over to Taylor's father, Pedro, and said the kid had a special talent.
Pedro beamed, even if he recognized the talent already. By the time Sean was in high school, Pedro had him doing 700 pushups and running a mile-and-a-half before school. He also took Sean after high-school practice for a workout of their own.
When Sean played on Soldinger's special teams as a Miami freshman in 2001, Taylor was unlike anything the veteran assistant had seen. And he only got better, all the way to the Pro Bowl where, a few days before all the sadness to come, Taylor took Soldinger aside, apologized for some past behavior and said, "Everything is coming together for me, coach."
"Sean is the story of aggressiveness," Soldinger tells these high-school kids. "At least 50 percent of success in football can be attributed to aggressiveness. I never saw a player more aggressive than he was. It's a mindset. It's more than that. He embodied so many qualities you look for in a football player."
He says, "He was as good as I've seen."
The room is quiet. Soldinger is quiet. Everyone knows how this story ends in sadness, with Taylor's murder four years ago. But what they don't know is the sadness never actually ends for those closest to him. It just goes on each day. And on.
"It's a shame what happened," Soldinger tells the kids.
In Homestead, in a three-bedroom townhouse, in a living room where the bills are piling up again, Donna Junor drops her voice to a whisper and tells of recently ripping up a photo of her son from his Lauderhill youth team.
Other family members have learned to live in pain. Junor is trying. To that end, she took down the air-brushed portrait of Sean hanging in the living room a year ago and gave it to a friend.
"I couldn't take seeing Sean there every day," she says.
But when she came across his youth-league photo in a box of mementos, she couldn't stop herself. It bubbled up a happy memory about his first year playing on that flag-football team. He was, what, age six? Seven?
She worked then, so her oldest daughter, Monika Martin, took Sean to the games. One day, Martin told her mom how everyone at the park cheered for Sean. So Junor went and, sure enough, her boy was faster and more athletic than the other kids. And she saw for herself. Everyone did cheer him.
"That was the start of him playing football," she says.
No comments:
Post a Comment