The demons chased Lawrence Taylor the way LT chased quarterbacks, relentlessly and mercilessly. They chased him off the field during and after his Hall of Fame career, turned Taylor into a sex- and cocaine-addicted monster who sneered at the consequences, as if he were forever this Big Blue tornado clad in No. 56, cutting a swath of destruction not through NFL offenses, but mostly through his own life.
No one could stop LT — least of all, Lawrence Taylor.
“Of course there’s a lot of things I wished would not have happened,”
the voice belonging to Lawrence Taylor was saying on a conference call to promote the Showtime documentary “LT: The Life and Times,” which premieres Friday at 8 p.m. “But if I had to do it all over again …
and if some of the people that have really touched my life wasn’t in my life since I did it a different way, then I wouldn’t have done it a different way, I would have kept it the same way.
“I don’t regret what has happened in my life, and I don’t apologize for it. It is what it is, that’s the way I look at it.”
Perhaps, even at 54, he is either too proud or too stubborn to admit to regret losing a good woman like his first wife Linda, or for getting caught in a Montebello, N. Y. motel room two-and-a-half years ago with an underage prostitute, or for this, or for that.
Or perhaps it is much easier and far less painful for him not to look back and think about what might have been, or what others thought he could have been.
“[People say] ‘You could have been another Michael Jordan,’ I don’t even want to look at that,” Lawrence Taylor said. “But during this process, during this interview, you were forced to look back at certain things, and I said, ‘Wow, I could have been here, and I could have been there.’ But this person wouldn’t have been in my life, this person wouldn’t have been in my life, these friends over here, I would have never met, and things like that. I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate certain things.
“I got my health, my family, I can pay my bills. … All in all, I got a pretty good life.
“Why the hell would I doggone want to change?”
He should consider himself lucky he is still alive, much less have his health. There was never a need to change for Lawrence Taylor, the loyal, good-hearted, funny man the public rarely ever saw. But there doggone was a need for LT, the mean, arrogant, raging, defiant, above-the-law scoundrel to change.
“I’m at a stage now I’m not really going to mind talking about some of the things that happened in my past because it’s all in my past and I don’t worry about it,” Lawrence Taylor said. “I’m at a different stage than I would have been 20 years ago or 15 years ago.”
He lived life on the edge, and then over the edge.
“People already have a perception on how I am or what I am or what type of man,” Lawrence Taylor said. “I’m not going to change that, not am I going to try to. I don’t give a rat’s ass.
“But the thing about is that … people don’t know me. They don’t know me. They know of me, or they’ve heard of me. They don’t know me. They don’t know what makes me cry. They don’t what makes me scared. They don’t know what makes me anything. They don’t know me.
“I’m hoping that maybe after this is all said and done, they know, because of the trouble or problems that I do have or I’ve had, what makes me tick. Where my mind is, what am I thinking about, or what’s my mentality when I step outside my door and drive outside my gate?
Basically what’s on my mind? Other than golf.”
His Giants teammates, and coach Bill Parcells, loved both personalities — Lawrence Taylor would give you the shirt off his back, often had them in stitches; LT would win games by himself, once with one arm, and help make some of them two-time Super Bowl champions.
So in his many desperate hours of need, they lined up to get him help, from Wellington Mara to George Young to Parcells to Harry Carson and George Martin, whether he wanted it or not. Only one Lawrence Taylor.
And, for better and for worse, only one LT.