This weekend was the seventh anniversary of the murder of Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor. On Sunday, his former teammate in the Redskins secondary, Laron Landry, was playing his first game against his former team and appeared to pay tribute to his former backfield mate by wrapping small pieces of tape around portions of his facemask.
@dcsportsbog Laron taped up his face mask for Sean pic.twitter.com/Dp3dcw76CA
— Adam Bechtold (@ATBechtold) November 30, 2014
Two months ago, Landry shared a story about Taylor on his Instagram page:
http://instagram.com/p/tdRisqGkRk/
The story of Taylor’s facemask-taping was shared in the NFL Networks’s excellent Sean Taylor: A Football Life. It started one week when Taylor and his former teammate at The U, Clinton Portis, wore striped socks for a big game against the Philadelphia Eagles, earning big fines from the NFL. The team’s defensive coordinator, Gregg Williams, explained what happened next (with assistance from Dan Steinberg of The DC Sports Bog has the pertinent transcript, as usual):
“[The fines] did, quite frankly, piss me off,.“I confronted him about it. And he goes out the next week and took 40, 50 pieces of tape, and just taped up his face mask, which you can’t do. And I told the equipment manager, ‘Take the face mask off, get it off before he goes out there [and] gets another fine.’
“So they put [the taped up face mask] in my locker. And I’ll be damned if he didn’t go ahead and tape up the one they put on anyway. And he still went ahead and got fined.”
Williams still has that facemask.
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