1/2 Man + 1/2 Beast = Meast

It’s been a while since I’ve nominated an asshole of the day, so I’m going to make up for it with an asshole of the year. This year’s asshole of the year is the motherfucker who shot Sean Taylor.

If I may, a short anecdote:

Over two years ago, lets say 26 months, my friend and I were living in post-apocalypse New Orleans, working (semi-) steady jobs, relatively care-in-the-world-less. We’d usually spend about 25% of our paycheck on food and the rest on alcohol, which, you may or may not remember, was hard to do, considering there was 2am curfew in effect back in those days. Anyways, we both liked to play poker, and playing against each other had lost all of its appeal, so we decided to go to the only open casino on the gulf coast, Boomtown. It was about a 30 minute ride to the west bank and Boomtown from our little slice of post-apoc paradise, which duration will become (slightly) relevant momentarily.
So we roll up to the casino and, acting like gangsters, we ask for seats at a poker table. We’re told it could be as much as a two hour wait for a seat, so we meander around the casino a little bit and end up at the blackjack table. I proceed to lose about a hundred bucks in less than a half hour, and my buddy goes down to two chips, a five and a ten. We decide we can’t lose anymore of our hard earned drinking money and that we should have just stayed home and played Omaha HiLo against each other. As we’re walking out the door, the voice comes on the PA saying that our seats are ready. We weigh the cost of the trip already versus the risk of rehitting the ATM and playing poker, and decide that we’ll play the last of the chips on the roulette table and let fate decide for us. My friend puts his $10 chip down on his high-school hockey number and asks me to pick a number for the five. I had spent a portion of the afternoon watching Sean Taylor highlight reels and feeling it, chose 21. At this point you can probably guess the rest of the story, so I won’t flower it up any, I’ll just summarize. 21 hit, at 35:1 X 5 = $180 effectively erasing our blackjack losses, we went upstairs and terrorized the wanna-bes at the poker tables for about $400 bucks and went to the Bulldog, which was one of the only places you could eat dinner after 8pm.

I never met Sean Taylor, I never watched him play in person, but I loved to watch him play. I watched many of his college games, and he was one of the few exciting players on a few unexciting Redskins teams. The hit in the post below from the Pro Bowl will serve as his legacy; he was likely the most feared safety since Ronnie Lott. At 6’-2” 236lbs, he may have been the biggest person to ever run a 4.4 40, born to play football, he died too soon.