NFL Network’s Sean Taylor film attempts to provide ‘a full picture of Sean’s life’

Near the end of NFL Network’s new film about Sean Taylor, an image appears of fans silently holding commemorative “21″ towels during that unforgettable 2007 game against the Bills — Washington’s first after Taylor’s death. No one who was at FedEx Field that day, I imagine, will ever forget the atmosphere: The mixture of silence and cheers, the pregame video tribute, the weird manner in which ordinary NFL sights — beer, hot dogs, jerseys, applause — were jumbled together with the somberness and discomfort of a funeral. That image stays on the screen for a full five seconds, and that’s no accident. Those fans and their “21″ towels were one of the main inspirations for the entire project.  Erik Powers, now a producer in his ninth season with NFL Films, was in his early 20s when Taylor died, with just the cursory NFL fan’s familiarity with the Pro Bowl safety. He had heard some of the national media chatter — that Taylor’s death was not terribly surprising if you considered how he lived his life — but that account seemed incongruous with the reaction at FedEx Field.

“That image just sort of stuck with me,” Powers said this week. Taylor “was a man who you didn’t really hear from. He didn’t give interviews. And yet he had this bond with Redskins fans. There were just so many full-grown adults moved to tears, holding up those towels. It just stuck with me.” Two years ago, Powers started pitching the idea of a film about Taylor, as part of NFL Network’s “A Football Life” series. A year ago, he and NFL Films senior producer Chip Swain began laying the groundwork by interviewing Taylor’s father, and by last March, they were working on the project full-bore. They interviewed about 40 people — friends, relatives and teammates of Taylor’s — leading to around 50 hours of footage. They secured grainy highlights from his high school days. Powers watched every network broadcast of every NFL game Taylor played in, identifying the biggest hits, the game-changing turnovers, the athletic wonders. And Powers and Swain wound up with a 44-minute piece that tells a story familiar to many Washington fans, but likely less so outside this market: that Taylor’s public image did not mesh with the private man. The message of the film — which premieres on NFL Network on Friday at 9 p.m. — is thus “fairly obvious: that you really can’t judge anybody based on isolated incidents,” Swain said. “It would be really easy to judge him based on the things that you heard or you read, [because] he never really said anything about it or defended himself or told the real story. Yeah, those events were part of his life, but I don’t think they are what defined him, at least not to the people he knew.”

“Those events” — an arrest for DWI, a plea of no contest to misdemeanor assault and battery charges after a confrontation in Miami, an ejection from a playoff game for spitting, a hefty fine for leaving a mandatory rookie symposium — are included in the film. But they’re balanced with a different story told by family and friends: of a kid who never recovered from being separated from his mother and siblings, whose football career was predicated on a desire to reunite his family. Of a player so devoted to excellence that he would join three separate workout groups at Redskins Park, would leave his car at the park and run home after practice, would do sprints by himself before the rest of the team arrived. Of a father who imprinted his newborn daughter’s footprints on his T-shirt in the delivery room, who was so protective that he blanched at letting even family members hold his young child. And, of course, of a football player with few peers. “Even though all of us were top-flight athletes, there was something different about him, and it separated him from the rest of us,” Fred Smoot says in the film.  “First game in the NFL, he was the best player on the field,” Chris Cooley adds. “Every game, he’d do something to let you know that he wasn’t from this planet, and all of us were,” Ryan Clark says.

“God made certain people to play football, for sure,” Joe Gibbs tells the filmmakers. “He was one of them.” Like much of Taylor’s story, the fascination with his football prowess has only grown because of his premature death. And the film spends time on that, as well. Taylor’s fiancee Jackie Garcia Haley, who has been reluctant to do many media appearances, spoke at length to the filmmakers, even discussing the day Taylor was shot. So did his father and several friends and relatives who were in the hospital during Taylor’s final days. Those passages are not easy to watch, nor were they easy to edit. “There weren’t many days when I wasn’t breaking down at some point,” Powers told me. “With everyone opening up about something that still hurt so much, this is the most emotionally difficult project I’ve ever had to work on.”