KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In a more just version of his journey, Otis Taylor would have been in prominent view over this fourth quarter of his life instead of sight unseen.
We’d routinely have seen him around Kansas City or out at Arrowhead Stadium, like so many other legendary Chiefs. He would have retained a measure of his uncanny command over a frame that was 6-foot-3, 215 pounds in his prime — when he was a revolutionary force in the influential glory days of the Chiefs and thus an essential figure in the rapid rise of the modern game itself.
Befitting those credentials, he also would have been in the limelight every year as an enshrinee in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, where he surely would have roamed resplendent in a coveted gold jacket and signed autographs embellished not with his jersey No. 89, but with “HOF” and the year he entered.
