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.
Instead, alas, Taylor has been invisible to the public and virtually unable to move or even be engaged for more than 15 years since the piercing descent of his health, which his family in a 2012 lawsuit against the NFL attributed to Parkinson’s disease and associated dementia that initially was diagnosed in 1990.
Cruel enough that he has long been marooned in what the Hall of Fame’s senior committee laments as “the abyss,” where the righteous causes of scores of stars of yesteryear are often left languishing because the backlog is so clogged.
But it’s truly heartrending that Taylor, 79, has been stranded so long in a form of suspended animation, kept alive through breathing and feeding tubes, the tender nursing care of his sister, Odell, and the loving support of his wife, Regina, and son, Otis III.
Several weeks ago, friends expressed concern that Taylor’s health had taken a dire turn. That left us reflecting on his legacy even as we hold out hope that Taylor will be on the Hall of Fame’s 25-man senior semifinalist list to be released next week.
Up to three senior players could be nominated for induction by the 12-man senior committee.
Since I became one of the 49 members of the overall selection committee last August, this is my first time through the cycle. So I also felt compelled to nominate Taylor anew (among others) and make the case largely based on this premise:
You can’t tell the story of pro football without the Chiefs of the late 1960s (not to mention the current version). And the story of those Chiefs, even those times in the evolution of the game, is entwined with Taylor.
So ... you can’t tell the story of pro football without Taylor’s multifaceted and momentous role, starting with the eye test of a man who embodied the changing times in the nature of the game.
Because before Taylor was out of sight, he was what in his heyday they called outasight.
That was literally, at first, when he was at the epicenter of the NFL-AFL signing wars and sequestered in a hotel near Dallas by so-called NFL hand-holders. In a cloak-and-dagger clash with the Philadelphia Eagles to sign Taylor, who had been drafted by both teams, Chiefs super scout Lloyd Wells posed as a sportswriter to visit him but was rebuffed by security … only to ultimately lure him out a back window with the enticement of a red Thunderbird awaiting him in Kansas City.
That promise proved true and was a tremendous investment for the Chiefs, who signed Taylor for $15,000 and a $15,000 signing bonus … and the T-bird.
That was the beginning of Taylor being part of a pivot point at several notable crossroads.
Amid a groundswell of civil rights activism, for instance, his signing reflected a socially significant movement by the Chiefs and owner Lamar Hunt to recruit African American players, including from Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
That pioneering mindset led to the 1969 team becoming the first in the history of pro football to have more than 50% of its starters be Black. That emphasis even accounted for some meaningful progress in race relations and social change in Kansas City, albeit haphazardly, as Bobby Bell’s endless house-hunting testified.
(As late as 1971, Taylor told The Kansas City Star, “I’m a Black man. I can’t talk. I can’t express myself. I can’t do anything.” Noting his lack of endorsement opportunities, he added, “I haven’t even done a dog food commercial, and that’s pretty sorry for a guy who’d be so happy to do one he’d eat the dog food.”)
Most visibly, Taylor became instrumental in the Chiefs’ surge to two of the first four Super Bowls as the AFL compelled a merger with the NFL, punctuated by the team’s Super Bowl IV victory over Minnesota.
As great as the Chiefs of that time were, Taylor was indispensable.
“At that time, I was desperately looking for a new dimension for our receiving,” legendary coach Hank Stram told The Star in 1971. “When I saw Otis, I knew I had it.”
He also had the prototype, even forerunner, of the modern receiver.
Never mind that his statistics by today’s standards aren’t glitzy: He had 410 receptions for 7,308 yards and 57 touchdowns in an 11-season career.
That was in an era when the regular season was 14 games and the passing game still was largely a subordinate of the running game, even for a forward-thinking team like Stram’s Chiefs.
By way of example, Len Dawson threw 188 passes in eight career postseason games (23.5 a game); Patrick Mahomes has thrown 423 in 11 (an average of 38.5).
As my friend and eminent author Michael MacCambridge put it in his book, “‘69 Chiefs, A Team, A Season, And The Birth of Modern Kansas City,” Taylor was “the focal point, the one player on the offense who could be, in the coach’s parlance, a ‘difference-maker.’ His body and skills were like a message from the future.”
Fifteen years later, MacCambridge added, “when the venerable personnel man Don Klosterman saw Jerry Rice for the first time, he said the person he thought of was Otis Taylor.”
In a far more sophisticated age of the game, Rice became the NFL’s career receptions and yardage leader with statistics (1,549 receptions for 22,895 yards) that geometrically eclipsed those of Taylor’s time.
While Taylor’s statistics were outstanding in the context of the times, though, The Star was more right than it could have known in its report on his four-catch, 57-yard performance at Houston as a rookie.
“The statistics are not staggering,” the paper wrote then, “but the ways Taylor compiled them are.”
So they were, something you can only truly appreciate with a little bit of age and an incredible memory … or video highlights like the one produced by Red Tribe Cinema that you can find on YouTube.
Between that and other highlights you can search for online, you’ll see an astonishing skill-set that features Taylor hurdling, stiff-arming and tip-toeing down the sidelines.
You can find him catching the ball on his fingertips or one-handed while being held or leaping up and over a would-be defender. You can see him peeling out or accelerating into a cut and see how many times it takes multiple tacklers to haul him down.
Not to mention another sort of rugged moment that was elemental in Chiefs history and testament to his passion … if not impulse control.
On Nov. 1, 1970, he hurried to avenge after Oakland’s Ben Davidson speared Dawson’s back when he was down late in a game the Chiefs led 17-14. What might be considered admirable retaliation led to fisticuffs and benches clearing and offsetting penalties that negated a game-sealing first down ... and ultimately led to a tie that proved costly to the Chiefs’ playoff hopes.
Though that episode now seems best understood as both an ill-considered valiant deed and part of the DNA of the Chiefs’ rivalry with the Raiders, Taylor was wounded by fan criticism at the time. In a revealing interview with The Star a year later, he said people keep saying, “ ‘You made us lose that game.’ … It makes me sick.”
Far more often, though, fans knew he was paramount in making the Chiefs win. That included his knack for making the biggest plays at the biggest moments, as emblazoned in the Chiefs’ postseason run in 1969-70.
As a marvelous defense with six future Hall of Famers was mounting a goal-line stand for the ages in a divisional-round game against the defending Super Bowl champion New York Jets, Taylor was on the sideline drawing in the dirt a tweaked version of a play for Dawson to consider.
As they took the field together after a Jets field goal tied the score 6-6, according to MacCambridge’s book, Taylor said, “You gonna call the play now?”
To which Dawson said, “No, I’m not gonna call the play now.” Then he looked at Taylor playfully and added, “I’m going to wait until we get in the huddle, so everybody can hear, and then I’m gonna call the play.”
On the crossing pattern against the single coverage Taylor had anticipated exposing, he burst free for what became a 61-yard gain. That set up the game-winning touchdown one play later on Dawson’s 19-yard pass to Gloster Richardson.
A week later, in the AFL title game against the Raiders, Taylor again was pivotal in the crucible.
With the Chiefs facing third and 14 at their own 2-yard-line, Dawson retreated nine yards deep in the end zone before heaving a ball down the right sideline to Taylor — who had Hall of Fame cornerback Willie Brown and star safety George Atkinson draped over him.
Like about everyone else afterward, even Taylor wasn’t sure how he made the catch for a 35-yard gain that sparked a touchdown drive to put the Chiefs ahead for good in a 17-7 victory: “I don’t know if I caught it over my head or on what side of me,” he said, according to a 1970 Associated Press account of the game.
Then there was the moment that basically put away Super Bowl IV: Dawson’s third-quarter hitch pass to Taylor, who caught it about six yards downfield. He shrugged off Minnesota defender Earsell Mackbee and whirled away all alone before juking Karl Kassulke and high-stepping into the end zone.
The 46-yard touchdown made it 23-7 Chiefs, which proved to be the final margin in a game underscored by the mic’d-up Stram and 65 Toss Power Trap and that smothering defense and three Jan Stenerud field goals.
But this moment also was the harbinger of a tectonic shift in the game, not only because of the NFL-AFL merger to begin in full the next season, but also as the impetus for a new wave described in a Sports Illustrated’s 1970 NFL season preview story by the renowned Tex Maule.
The core of it was how Stram’s offense had launched the Football of the Future after the Chiefs had “dazzled the Vikings with their footwork and, because they succeeded, pro football has probably left the Lombardian block-and-tackle era and moved into a new decade that may well be dominated by” more modern concepts.
A good portion of that notion was animated and enabled by Taylor.
No wonder he’ll be enshrined forevermore in the lore of the Chiefs.
But that’s just part of a profile that is so entwined with pivotal NFL history. We can only hope a different form of enshrinement might still await in Canton.
In hindsight, it’s hard to understand why Taylor never was a finalist before he entered the senior pool. Now it seems circumstantial.
For a while, there was an anti-AFL bias. Then, gradually, the pendulum swung to a point where there were ultimately eight Chiefs from that time (six on defense, along with Dawson and Stenerud), as well as Hunt and Stram, inducted … and maybe that suddenly seemed like a lot of Chiefs.
Various other reasons, including overall exposure and market size, likely account for why some from that era with comparable or lesser statistics are in but Taylor is not.
Still, there remains plenty of campaigning for him to be recognized in Canton, where the Hall of Fame recently announced it had amended its bylaws for the next three voting cycles to allow for up to three seniors per year.
The movement includes a petition being circulated by The Derrick Thomas/Neil Smith Third and Long Foundation and a drive by graduates of Prairie View A&M (Taylor’s alma mater) that has taken form in Jason Watkins’ “Way Past Due” podcast series on Taylor’s behalf.
One episode featured an interview with Hall of Fame safety Ken Houston, who called Taylor the best he played against, said he could match up with anybody right now, and simply concluded, “He was impossible.”
Could be that his Hall of Fame candidacy is impossible, too. Anguishing as that might be, the true measure of his profound significance is no less self-evident.
And even enshrouded as he’s been over these last decades, let’s always remember his legacy is no less vital in the history of the Chiefs … and pro football.
