An AZ Fan We Can Actually Root For

There just isn’t any circumstance that I can root for the Cardinals. Even if it was week 17 and the Seahawks needed AZ to win for a chance at the playoffs, I’d still struggle to want AZ to do well. I think it comes from the years I lived in AZ.

I have learned very recently that, while I can’t root for the Cardinals, I can root for certain Cardinal fans, especially one Jason Taylor. (No, not that Jason Taylor. You’re thinking of the wrong guy.) A couple weeks ago, I ran across this column by Peter King of Sports Illustrated, who tells Taylor’s story extremely well. I decided to wait until this week’s, and the game with AZ, to share it with you all. I hope you don’t mind.

"Just after midnight on the morning of March 26, Taylor, a speaker and recruiter for a Phoenix college, walked out of a bar in Glendale, not far from the Cardinals stadium, to hail a cab, leaving Mandy inside. Outside, he met two men smoking cigarettes, and he made small talk with them. They were talking about serving in the military. “I always wanted to do that,” Jason said, but life took him on another path. If he ever did serve, he said, he’d have wanted to be a Marine, because he so admired their ideals.At that moment, one of the men pulled out a pistol and shot Jason Taylor in the head."

"“WHAT HAPPENED?” Taylor wrote.Mandy told him the whole story. She told him how long he’d been out, and what the doctors did.Then he asked for board again.He wrote: “APRIL 15 — DEADLINE FOR CARDINALS TICKETS!”“He put an exclamation point on it,” said Mandy. “When he did that, my family thought, ‘Oh, he’ll be just fine.’"

Please go and read the rest of King’s article. You wont be disappointed, and Taylor’s story needs to be told.

Home/Seattle Seahawks News