Lawrence Taylor, 51, was recently arrested for raping a 16-year-old girl in a Holiday Inn hotel room. The retired Hall of Fame American football player is a 10-time Pro Bowl selection, nine time first-team All Pro, and a two time Super Bowl Champion. Many believe he is the best linebacker to ever play the game, and his accolades make him one of the most decorated athletes of all-time.
With all of those great words typed on my screen, it has been brought to my attention that he should be kicked out of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Are you kidding me? This is the same guy who already a murky past -- loved to party, numerous run-ins with the law for drug abuse, married three times (that we know of). And now you want to lash out utterances like “This guy should be tossed from Canton, Ohio immediately.” Really?
I loathe at the people who make irrational judgements. The people who obtain these over-emotional thoughts are the ones who cannot stand people who are more successful than them.
Occurrences, like this alleged rape by Taylor, transpire periodically throughout the years; it’s almost as if it’s become of nature.
My question: Do people truly understand what the Hall of Fame is?
In any Hall of Fame there are a number of people who lie in the halls of darkness with filthy past, filled with putrid incidents and circumstances that left people scratching their head. That doesn’t mean people should over-react like a mother who cakes on the Neosporin and slaps four band-aids around their child’s finger after they fall in the gravel. Come on people your better than that.
Hall of Fames are museums, not holy communions. Don’t treat these places like they are a cathedral, filled with Jesus’s disciples who will castrate you if you don’t believe someone should be there because of their proceedings off-the field; that’s nonsense.
If ‘we’ are going to go by that criteria -- the measurement of what the athlete did off-the-field decided whether he or she stays in the HOF -- then lets boot Elvis Presleyout of the Rock and Roll HOF. Or, lets take Michael Irvin’s bust out of Canton.
When I read columns about how Lawrence should be kicked out of Canton, I almost vomit in my mouth.
Put what Taylor did off-the-field in one manila folder and file his on-the-field success in another.
Saying that he deserves to be kicked out of Canton is ludicrous and undeniably idiotic.
This goes for Major League Baseball players as well. So what if they injected illegal substances into their system. No, I don’t believe it should be allowed because many steroids, as well as other drugs, are illegal by law. But if the athlete got away with using them -- albeit, one month, one year, or 10 years -- he or she should not be punished by getting kicked out of their respective HOF’s. If you don’t like it, don’t vote for them.
However, I’d say your insane if you didn’t ...
Why can’t we let people like Barry Bonds in and why can’t we keep people like Taylor in?
The solution is simple: tag a “This person did (fill in the blank) on their plaque and be done with it. That way, when visitors, tourists, and former players and coaches walk through the venue, they understand what the person contributed to the history of their sport.
Don’t you want to walk through the HOF and say “WOW! Lawrence Taylor was incredible. It’s sad to see he had problems upstairs, though.” Or do you want Taylor -- a man so legendary to the game, the majority of people would put him into a category of his own -- to be completely erased? I’ll choose A.
Raping is an awful act that deserves a harsh punishment but tapping the delete key and removing such a key player from a place that is nothing more than a museum would be an outlandish act.
