SUPER BOWL XXIV : DENVER BRONCOS vs. SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS : 49ers’ Taylor Doesn’t Talk a Good Game, He Plays It

Look who’s talking.

John Taylor showed, sat and spoke.

Stop the presses.

At the Super Bowl, this is news.

The sight of San Francisco’s Taylor doing an interview is something you don’t see every day. It’s as rare as an out-of-state license plate in Hawaii. It’s as strange as a movie in which John Wayne drives a car.

Why is Taylor so reluctant?

“I figure the less I say, the less anybody can quote me,” he said. “The less people hear about me, the less they know. Out of sight, out of mind.”

So, why talk now?

“They came and drug me out here,” Taylor said.

In a survey of Bay Area media people by a Palo Alto paper, a survey that determined 49er leaders in categories ranging from Most Intelligent (Spencer Tillman) to Most Boring (Mike Cofer) to Funniest (Matt Millen) to Mr. Nice Guy (Jamie Williams), the hands-down winner in the voting for Mr. Uncooperative was the hands-up wide receiver, Taylor, who would ignore requests from reporters without so much as a grunt, walking right past them.

So, on one side of the 49er offense we have Jerry Rice, the wide receiver who complained after winning Super Bowl XXIII most-valuable-player honors that he doesn’t get the publicity he deserves.

On the other side we have Taylor, who wants publicity about as much as he wants a toothache. “If it costs me recognition or money, well, then it’s money I never saw,” Taylor said. “I don’t care.”

A member of the 49er public relations department asked Taylor to do an interview as a personal favor to her.

“I would have just stayed in the locker room until the team picture,” he said.

He is a widely popular wide receiver in San Francisco’s camp, who is gaining fame week by week, like it or not. Taylor just signed a two-year contract worth $1.4 million, after having earned $200,000 this season.

It may not be the four-year, $15-million monster deal that Will Clark was inking with the San Francisco Giants at virtually the same hour, but it’s not bad, not bad at all for a guy from Delaware State who never caught a pass in high school.

It’s also not bad for a guy who, in 1988, drew a 30-day suspension for failing a drug test. Taylor reportedly is still considering legal action against the league for that suspension. All he will say for the time being is, “You get dealt a hand, you play it.”

Taylor caught only four touchdown passes in 1988 but all went for 65 yards or more. That’s his specialty. This season, his 10 touchdown catches included the back-breakers of 92 and 95 yards against the Rams on Dec. 11 at Anaheim Stadium.

More and more, people started talking less about just “Jerry Rice” and more about “Rice and Taylor.”

“I’m just getting the ball more,” Taylor said, shrugging as though to say there’s no mystery to it. “There’s only so much you can do without the ball.”

It was suggested, good-naturedly, that it’s as if the 49ers had Jerry Rice cloned.

“I’m a clone of myself,” Taylor said indignantly. “I’m no clone of anybody.”

Clearly, here’s a guy who would rather be anyplace but here.

Taylor prefers the peace and quiet. He and his brother, Keith, spent part of their childhood outside Philadelphia playing football in a local cemetery, where it was nice and quiet. Besides, Taylor said, it was the only place in the neighborhood with grass.

Out of Pennsauken (N.J.) High, Taylor enrolled at a predominantly black institute in North Carolina called Johnson C. Smith University, where everyone knew him as Jake.

He was getting an education, but he was a long way from getting to a seven-figure contract playing pro football.

Transferring to Delaware State, he abandoned baseball and went out for football for reasons that were obvious to him. Taylor, a man of few words, put it as simply as it could be put: “I figured if I can catch a little ball, I can catch one four times the size,” he said.

Guess so. He was three-time all-conference, snagged 33 touchdown passes and broke four punt returns for scores.

Before long, he was making leaping catches as a 49er and doing the sort of broken-field running that separates the big-play receivers from the rest.

Taylor’s second catch as a Niner was the last of Joe Montana’s record-breaking 22 completions in a row.

Quietly, he went about his business. He didn’t even tell anybody last summer that he was dedicating the 1989 season to his mother, Alice, who died on the Fourth of July of a brain aneurysm.

Just talking about it now chokes him up.

“I was happy the way I played for my mother,” Taylor said. “If the spotlight comes my way, fine. If it doesn’t, I know inside myself what I’ve done. It will make my mother proud of me, and that’s all that really matters.”

That says a lot--about her and about him.