To an Athlete Dying Young

When I first read "To an Athlete Dying Young" during the brief poetry section of my 11th-grade English class, I thought it the most profound and poignant literary encounter of my life.

Athletic glory—though I had no real experience of it except in my daydreams—certainly seemed fleeting. And though I couldn't mistake the sadness in the poem, I preferred to take the romantic view. Death was not harsh or ugly, just a case of slipping betimes away. For me, the kid runner of the poem transmogrified into Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig, telling an adoring Yankee Stadium crowd, "I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."

Those romantic, teenage illusions died young too. I quickly came to understand that the death of a great young athlete doesn't immortalize the glory. There will be no such consolation with Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor, who died Tuesday morning, just 24 years old, after being shot in his Miami home. Sure, his teammates will wear a black patch or armband bearing his number 21 for the rest of the season. And lots of loving and generous words will be said and written. But if Taylor is remembered for very long by anyone more than his family and closest friends, it will not be for what his all too brief life was, but for the promise of what it might have been.

In truth, it is unlikely that even football fans, at least those outside Miami or Washington, will remember Sean Taylor for very long. The murder of a star athlete has become too commonplace, and we are becoming sadly inured to these tragedies. What was the name of that Denver Broncos cornerback who was shot to death after leaving a New Year's Eve party in the first hours of this year? I had to look up the name of Darrent Williams. Or the name of that University of Miami star defensive lineman gunned down outside his apartment last fall as he returned from practice. A computer search yielded Bryan Pata.

I'm not looking to trivialize these tragedies—only to demonstrate that life (and death) in our country has already done so. I can recall the shock I felt in 1978 when 27-year-old Angels outfielder Lyman Bostock was killed by a shotgun blast while riding in a car in Gary, Ind. I can't pretend that we were innocents back then—not after the massacre of the Israel Olympians in Munich six years before. Still, in America, star athletes died of diseases or in car and plane crashes. It was not yet open season on them.

Today a Google tour of "athletes shot to death" bears abundant fruit: a 17-year-old Albuquerque high-school baseball player, who was organizing an anti-violence campaign at his school; a University of Memphis football player, while driving on campus; a University of Mississippi track star, found in his apartment with a bullet in his head during what investigators say was a robbery; a Baylor basketball player (a teammate was convicted of his murder); a Vanderbilt running back in a nightclub parking lot in Tampa; a former Red Sox prospect, during a carjacking of his SUV outside a Scottsdale, Ariz., nightclub; a Fairfield University football player on a night out in New York City. The list goes on and on—and that doesn't count those who are wounded or targets of armed robberies (or those athletes actually doing the shooting). Pata was only the unluckiest of three Miami Hurricanes involved in shooting incidents last season.

Miami was certainly a school where, for far too long, football players appeared to revel in the thug culture. Its teams brawled on the field and embraced militaristic fashion and language. And there is certainly evidence that, at least for some of the players, there was precious little distinction between all the posturing on the field and their behavior off it. Some of the program's most famous alums, like Ray Lewis and Michael Irvin and Sean Taylor, have had run-ins with the law. The school's unsavory reputation explains why the campus and the broader football community are so eager to embrace first-year coach Randy Shannon.

Shannon, a former player and defensive coordinator for Miami as well as a key contributor to three national championship teams, grew up on the city's toughest streets. While he is a man of few, carefully chosen words, he can talk the talk and walk the walk. Shannon's father was murdered when he was a teenager. He watched as his four older siblings surrendered their lives to drugs and other urban ravages. All that dying young was indisputably sad and inglorious. So both his life experience and his Miami experience have combined to dictate a new direction for the school's football program.

His new rules, as reported in a Sports Illustrated profile, are simple: no underclassmen living off campus. No upperclassmen living off campus if they don't maintain a 2.5 grade point average. No cell phones or hats in the football offices or meeting rooms. Meeting rooms are locked at the start of the meeting and won't be opened up for latecomers. Miss class, you ride the pine. Involved with guns, you are gone from the team.

If Shannon is successful in transforming Miami's football program, that might be the most meaningful tribute to the memory of victims like Sean Taylor and Bryan Pata. But good deeds and the best of intentions have always taken a back seat to winning on this nation's biggest athletic stages. And while Shannon has preached his new ethic this season, the football team lost in what was also unprecedented fashion. It not only had a losing record, the worst other than perennially last-place Duke in the ACC, but also wound up the season losing six of its final seven games. Miami will not be going to a bowl game for the first time in a decade, and you have to go back to 1944 to find a stretch of futility for Miami that approaches its final three games, when the Hurricanes were outscored 120-28.

The hope is that Shannon pulls it all together, off and on the field. But if the "off" doesn't translate to success on the gridiron, if a new direction in Miami isn't toward the familiar turf of big victories and bowl bids, then we are likely to discover just how hollow some of those tributes to victims like Sean Taylor really are.