Dwarfing a Giant

The NFL is getting ready to bestow its highest honor on one of its most dominant players of all time, but you get the sense that all anyone wants to do is just get it over with.

Instead of savoring Lawrence Taylor’s entry into the Pro Football Hall of Fame today at Canton, Ohio, it’s as if the subject is being tiptoed around. Don’t talk about it and we won’t have to talk about, well, you know.

Granted, football’s Hall of Fame doesn’t hold the same mystique as its baseball counterpart. But not even the NFL seems to be excited about today’s ceremonies.

The lead item on the NFL’s Web site the other day was a preview of today’s exhibition game between the Denver Broncos and the San Diego Chargers in Australia. The enshrinement of Taylor--the New York Giant great-- Eric Dickerson, Tom Mack, Ozzie Newsome and Billy Shaw was second. If the NFL can’t make the Hall of Fame ceremonies a priority, why should anyone else?

OK, let’s get this over with: Lawrence Taylor has a drug addiction. It has got him in trouble with the law.

There, we said it.

That doesn’t mean we can’t, on this most appropriate of days, stop to reflect on the greatness of his career. There are two sides of the ball, and no one who ever played on Taylor’s side had a greater impact on the game than he did.

The raw numbers--the 132 1/2 sacks, the 1,088 tackles, the 33 forced fumbles--don’t even begin to tell the story of a career that redefined the linebacker position. The real tale can be found in the extra hours put in by offensive coordinators trying to devise some way, any way, to stop him. It can be seen in the shifting, pointing and talking among offensive linemen trying to account for Taylor’s whereabouts, because their entire game plan centered on him.

If there was one play that summed up his dominance and confidence it was the time he swooped in for an almost-too-easy-sack of Ken O’Brien and then uttered the best line ever recorded by NFL Films: “Son, y’all got to do a lot better than that.”

But the career doesn’t tell the complete story of Taylor, whose self-destructive ways tarnished his image.

And after having spent the summer celebrating the good guys (and gals) in sport--the U.S. women’s soccer team, Lance Armstrong, Mark McGwire and Tony Gwynn--maybe nobody’s in the mood to delve into the darker side of athletes.

So don’t. This is not the time. A hall of fame or greatest-ever list is not like those exercises in which historical figures you would invite to dinner or which people you’d like to have around if you were stranded on a desert island. It’s about recognizing what people did in and for their sports.

Taylor cracked the top 50 in ESPN’s list of the greatest athletes of the century, but most of the half-hour episode devoted to him focused on his problems, rather than his successes. It told such a sad and sordid tale it could have been an episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music.”

The folks at ESPN wouldn’t have been doing their journalistic duty if they hadn’t spent some time talking about what Taylor did wrong. But if Taylor’s mistakes were what defined him, he wouldn’t have done enough to merit a place on the list in the first place.

Hey, No. 37 Secretariat wasn’t a great human being either. He was a horse. So if his inclusion was based on the criterion that this was a list of athletic accomplishments, that ought to have established the ground rules for what really matters in this discussion.

If you look at Taylor’s on-field conduct, it didn’t violate the game. Even in the moments after he delivered one of the most savage hits ever recorded, the sack that snapped Joe Theismann’s leg, Taylor adhered to the right protocol. He wasn’t celebrating while Theismann lay in agony, he was motioning for the trainers to come to Theismann’s aid.

Taylor’s transgressions did not affect the integrity of the game. His abuses hurt primarily himself--although it would be a healthy step forward if he made some admissions himself.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame has enough catching up to do in the public eye. Today’s ceremonies will be carried on ESPN2. Not on the big daddy ESPN, the way baseball’s inductions were.

“Baseball has a unique place in American imagination the way other sports do not,” sports author Leonard Koppett said.

He said the mystique of baseball’s Hall of Fame dates back to its first class, which included Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. “Pro football was nothing in 1936; that’s partly simply historical development,” Koppett said. “The baseball Hall of Fame is much more closely focused on the great players. The number of entries each year is much smaller. The nonplayers are sort of an afterthought, and it’s strictly major league baseball. The basketball Hall of Fame is worldwide, college, women.”

And yet there probably isn’t a bigger collection of sporting scoundrels than can be found in the baseball Hall of Fame, particularly the early entrants.

You don’t hear the baseball people apologizing for or fretting about the various moral shortcomings of its members, so why should the NFL be ashamed of Taylor?

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J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com.