It was the type of violent injury normally associated with the mayhem of the highway or the football field. Not a baseball park.
A young man plays all his life between the green grass and the blue sky. He chases a thousand and more baseballs with no thought other than to make the catch, never imagining a worst case as bad as this:
A line drive in the gap between left and center. Georgia’s Johnathan Taylor got a quick jump, going from zero to full-out in a flash.
From center field charged Zach Cone, 7 inches taller than the fireplug Taylor, 20 pounds heavier, with the same single-minded intent. Normally, two players would not be able to converge on such a sharply hit liner. But these two outfielders cover more ground than most. They both dove headlong, with no time for one to call off the other.
Cone made the catch, but remains uncertain as to exactly how. “I remember diving and walking off the field. I don’t remember anything in between,” he said days later.
He was dazed — with a slight concussion — and slowly made his way off the field.
Taylor, a junior from Acworth, didn’t move. Not a bit.
“There are collisions all the time in baseball,” said Georgia coach David Perno. “You get broken arms. You get broken legs. You get hip pointers, get all kinds of stuff. But nothing to this extent.”
Quiet impact
Friday, five days after he suffered a broken neck in the collision, Taylor was moved from Athens to the Shepherd Center to begin a long, difficult rehabilitation. He will spend his 21st birthday (March 21) in the Atlanta facility that specializes in traumatic spinal injuries and will remain well afterward.
He has movement in his upper body. Taylor’s mother, Tandra, did not comment on the condition of his legs, other than to say, “We’re very optimistic about everything — nothing negative.”
“The doctors keep telling him, ‘J.T., it’s up to you now,’” she said.
“And he’s telling them, ‘I’m ready, I’m ready.’”
It has been a devastating week for Taylor, his family and his teammates.
Last Sunday night, a stunned Perno and Cone visited Taylor in the hospital. Too recently they had faced a similar situation. This was the second serious spinal injury a member of the Bulldogs baseball team had suffered in 16 months. In late 2009, freshman Chance Veazey was paralyzed from the waist down when the scooter he was driving collided with a car near campus.
Perno said they asked Taylor what he wanted the team to do. “It was tough,” the coach recalled. “There was talk of possibly canceling games.
“He looked at us and said go win some games.”
Taylor then told Cone he intended to be back with the team to support it during the SEC tournament (beginning May 25).
As Taylor was undergoing surgery Monday to stabilize his spine, the baseball team held a two-hour team meeting in which players talked about Taylor and how to proceed. It was decided to play on, and by Tuesday, the Bulldogs were back on the field, traveling to Macon to face Mercer. The pitchers who weren’t going to be needed that night went to St. Mary’s Hospital to listen to the game on the radio with Taylor.
There was little time to wallow. The Bulldogs played through the rain Wednesday night against Alabama in Lawrenceville, then flew out to California the next day for games at Dodger Stadium against UCLA and USC. Perno packed an 8-by-10 framed photo of Taylor, one that will be displayed in the Georgia dugout the rest of the season.
“He’s the energy of this team,” said Curt Powell, who assumed Taylor’s leadoff spot in the lineup against ’Bama.
“If there is one guy who is truly connected to every person on our team, it’s [Taylor],” Perno said.
Back at the hospital, the Taylors were just beginning to comprehend the reach of Johnathan’s story. Braves outfielder Jason Heyward called him from Florida to offer encouragement. Hundreds upon hundreds of people — friends from back in his days at North Cobb High School, Georgia supporters, college baseball fans around the south, even a few pro scouts — sent messages of support through www.caringbridge.org/visit/johnathantaylor. Tandra began reading them to her son Thursday night.
“For such a quiet boy, he’s had an impact on a lot of other people’s lives,” she said.
A fund was established to help offset his medical expenses: The Johnathan Taylor Fund, First American Bank & Trust, P.O. Box 1688, Athens, GA 30603.
‘Always played hard’
Taylor’s style of play tended to spark fan interest. Despite the fact that he was the smallest player on the field — Georgia generously lists him as 5-foot-8 — Taylor was hard to overlook. Perhaps because of his stature, he played with a singular kind of energy and charisma.
Already this young Georgia season, he had made a play or two in the outfield that press-box observers classed among the best they had ever seen.
“He always played hard, and that’s one thing you don’t see, even out of the elite players,” said Steve Smith, a New York Mets area scout who caught many of Taylor’s games for North Cobb High and the East Cobb Baseball program. “When he went on the field, he was going to prove something to everybody.”
“He was told he was never going to play Division I baseball [because of his size], but he had his mind made up,” said his mother. “He’s driven that way.”
North Cobb baseball coach Tom Callahan always told his players they could stay at the park as long as they wanted after a game to take extra hitting — and he would stay there. Taylor almost made him rethink the policy. “He’d go 2-for-4 and still stay in the cage until 10:30 [p.m.],” Callahan said.
Full scholarships are rare in baseball, and as Taylor entered his senior year at North Cobb, he knew he would require some help from the HOPE scholarship to make his dream of playing at the Division-I level more reachable. Needing a big push to qualify for the HOPE, Taylor finished up with seven As and a B, Callahan remembered.
A consumer economics major, he was a member of the UGA Athletic Director’s Honor Roll (3.0 GPA) last year.
Taylor has played in 117 games with the Bulldogs, starting 91 of them, and for his career hit .312 with 41 RBIs and 36 stolen bases.
While he is lost to the Bulldogs on the field, they hope to be able to borrow from Taylor’s example in their attempts to improve last season’s 16-37 record. They were 6-8 heading into Saturday’s game against USC.
“If we can grab hold to his personality and the way he played the game and take that approach, that’s going to really help us,” Perno said.
Those who know Taylor describe his relationship with baseball like a first love. He doted on it, respected it, never took it for granted for a moment.
No one ever could have seen baseball hurting him like this in return.
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