Honor

This one may offend some of you as callous, but it's honestly callous, for whatever that's worth.

Last Sunday in Washington, the Redskins inducted Sean Taylor into their Ring of Honor, then went out and got themselves stomped by the disturbingly efficient Giants. Don't worry, there will be (more) jokes about the won-loss record of Sean Taylor's Ghost in other posts.

Now, I get that the Taylor Tragedy was a John Lennon Killed moment for 'Skins Fan, and that he was many people's favorite player, given that he was large, fast, and hit people hard.

But there's a lot of difference between a fan favorite who died and a truly great player. Taylor made too many coverage and judgment mistakes to be the latter. When they field the all-time 'Skins team in Gridiron Heaven, he's probably on special teams until he can be coached up.

Tangent time that isn't really... when I was but a very wee Shooter, I watched hockey, in that it was a sport that had a professional Philadelphia team, and hence had to be watched and rooted for with abandon. (Yes, even indoor soccer. Moving on.)

One bright spring day, I found my folks sitting outside watching the Flyers on a black and white television off an extension cord in the backyard, as the weather was beautiful. The game started, but there was a long somber moment of silence and a banner being raised to the rafters. A Flyer I didn't really know very well, in that my childhood hockey fandom consisted of guys who scored, fought, and goaltender Bernie Parent, was being given the Ultimate Honor of having his jersey retired.

His name was Barry Ashbee.

When I asked my mom what was going on, she told me he had been a good player, but he was dead now, and didn't say how, in that talking about death with your very little kid tends to be a rathole of conversation that leads to nowhere pleasant. So no one was ever going to wear the number four again.

Wikipedia tells me that Ashbee was a second-team NHL All-Star on defense, and a member of the first Flyers' Stanley Cup team. After a gruesome eye injury in a playoff game (he took a slapshot straight on), and was forced to retire. I'm guessing that it was one of those things that more modern medicine might have helped with, but I'm sure it was horrible.

He was given an assistant coach's job, which he held until he received a terminal diagnosis of leukemia in 1977; he died in a month. The Flyers retired his jersey and have given an award to the team's best defenseman in his name, every year, ever since.

Now, Ashbee seems to have been a pretty good player; definitely not a goon by the penalty numbers, and a +52 in the first Stanley Cup year. He also seems to have been a genuinely good guy, having toiled for eight years in the minors until expansion opened up a slot for him in Philadelphia. He was tough and popular, in an era where the fans bonded more with hockey players from the lack of helmets and visors -- and yes, maybe the injury was one of the reasons why helmets became the rule fairly soon afterward. One suspects that Philly Fan loved him most for striking a ref on purpose, and getting suspended for it. Maybe older folks remember him for more than that, but I kind of doubt it; he didn't have the offensive or penalty numbers to be terribly memorable.

However, it's probably pretty safe to say that a guy who only played four years for the franchise, and probably didn't miss too many of the best days of his career. The eye injury happened when he was 34. Until it happened, I'm sure he wasn't really on anyone's short path to having his jersey retired.

Tragedy made Ashbee honored, and on some level, he knew it. He initially turned down the coach's job because he thought the Flyers were doing it out of pity.

Now, what teams do with their Rings of Honor and retired jerseys is their business, and if it helps their fans get on with the grieving process, there's something to be said for that.

But one assumes that these franchises are going to go on for a very long time -- honestly, it's hard to imagine a world in which someone isn't making money off pro football, and the Washington franchise doesn't exist.

It's also hard to imagine that tragic events aren't going to happen to players on the team. It is, after all, what happens, and what has always happened. You are going to see triple-digit jersey numbers eventually, or posthumous exhumations of guys like Taylor and Ashbee in 50 years.

Finally, this. Does Flyer Fan look up into the rafters and remember Barry Ashbee for anything more than being the name of the award that they give to the top defenseman every year, and that he has a memorial fund to fight leukemia?

And in 20 to 30 years, will Redskins Fan see Taylor's name and think of anything more than a botched home invasion?

Epic Drop: Top 10 NFL People Who Are Suddenly Impossible To Find

Your list is here, and on some level, and on a personal note, my fantasy football season ended by losing to a team that didn't start a quarterback. Clearly, my conversion to Masstermind status happened several months too late...

Perspective

Last year at just around this time, I worked with a bright and very personable 24-year-old guy. We weren't in the same department, but I knew him, liked him, and tapped him for information on a fairly routine basis. He was a kid from Canada who had moved to New York City at the request of our employer, and he utterly loved NYC. He also loved partying, and went out a lot during the week, to the point where you could tell when he was dragging at the office. But he worked long hours and got his stuff done, so no one really noticed or thought too much of it, other than the occasional jibe about him not sleeping in the six months since he came to New York.

Then he turned up dead, and no one knew how or from what.

A year later, I still don't know the circumstances surrounding his death, but the most likely story was an accidental overdose, or someone killed for being with someone he shouldn't have been with. The choice to not spell out what happened was the choice of his parents, and given the magnitude of their loss, so be it.

The office was more or less shut down for the better part of a week, both in New York and in our other locations, because people were just that wiped out by the loss. The body was flown back to his hometown, and over 1500 people were at the funeral, so it's not like he was just popular in the office. A week later, there was a memorial service in which the entire New York office was gathered together to light candles and talk for an hour about everything he meant to us. It was nice, and I guessed it helped some people, especially the younger folks in the office who worked with him on a daily basis.

A month after that, my department was laid off and given severance packages that you would have considered insulting if they weren't so clueless. It was the third round of such happy fun in the first (and last) six months of my employment there, and as far as I know, it wasn't the last. I scrambled, found another gig in a week and a half, and a better one than that four months later. The clueless company is still around, still in turmoil, and in one of those twists that just make me more convinced of the existence of the Beavis God (i.e., a supreme deity that has the taste and refinement of the dumber of the two geniuses from the old MTV cartoon), I have the privilege of working with them at my new gig. Nothing like having to be a professional.

The reason why I bring this all up is, of course, Sean Taylor. And the fact that his passing made me remember the coworker, who I really haven't thought of for, oh, 10 months.

The death of the required by sportswriter law to somehow include the word troubled safety of the Washington Redskins is making a lot of people wax philosophic, and others to try to spin it into a greater narrative of What's Wrong With People In The World Who Aren't Like The Speaker.

I'm going to be very rude and very blunt here, and ask just about all of these people to stop talking in front of microphones, and for the media to stop giving them that opportunity. Not out of respect for the dead, but out of respect for the process.

Grief is personal. It's also contagious. And given the more than occasional deaths of pro athletes, not unprecedented. When the Eagles lost Jerome Brown, it became a year-long motivational speech of questionable taste for a defense that played with constant emotion; one expects the Redskins will do something similar. And in a year or two, or more likely a few more weeks, the Skins will have moved on, because that is what the living do.

Sean Taylor's death was tragic and senseless and sad and no worse, really, than the death of my coworker a year ago, or the death of anyone that you've ever known. His passing is no more meaningful, or less, than that. The vast number of people who are now talking about it don't need to make more out of it than that, but given who they are and the public nature of what they do, such tact and decorum isn't going to happen.

They also really don't need to tell me about how Taylor's coworkers are all going to be fine, because Taylor's managers are like family. My old company was just like a family a year ago, while we all held candles and remembered our guy for who he was, not how he ended. It didn't stop people from being canned, because that's the way the world works. Your family is your family. The people that you work with are not, even if they are young and fast and strong and possessing of the great attributes necessary to perform in sports.