Posted by Teddy Panos, Sun Staff
This one comes from Bill Belichick’s “day after� press conference (Monday). Other than a little “dodgeball� session over the Richard Seymour injury, this one was your typical ho-hum affair until the coach started discussing a famous Lawrence Taylor play:
BB:"I still think back to the Lawrence Taylor play in ’82 against Detroit. It was on Thanksgiving Day. They were down on the goal line on about our two or three yard line and they threw the ball out in the flat and he intercepted. The guy who he was throwing it to who was behind him, down on the play. So when Taylor intercepted it and the guy who was out there fell down, there was literally nobody…once he started running, there was nobody within 50 yards of him. He was running down the sideline and he looked over his shoulder and he saw the shadow. Of course it was his shadow, but he thought there was the guy right there, so he kept running and he looked and he kept running. He's literally running as fast as he could run and there's nobody within 50 yards of him. As he gets to the end, like about the 20 and the 10, and then he dives and loses his balance kind of going into the end zone and half of their team was walking off the field like, ‘Okay, he's going to score,’ and they’re kind of walking off the field. Honest to God, he thought there was a guy like two feet away from him. So it was a pretty comical play, but when you're out there and it's happening, sometimes it's a lot different than what it looks like to us on the sideline or if you're up in the press box where it's so obvious. We looked at the play on film the next day. The team was rolling on the floor. It was ridiculous. He really thought they were breathing down his neck."
Q: So he was literally running away from his own shadow?
BB: "He was running away from his own shadow and I'm telling you, there wasn't anybody within 50 yards of him. Maybe more than that. I don’t even think they were at midfield because they saw they had no chance. He was already way out there, but he never even slowed down at all. It was truly the 100-yard dash."
LT was seeing shadows, huh? Now why doesn't that surprise me one bit? "I was set-up like a mutha-*%&^@*%"