WildcatRick
06-05-2006, 11:08 PM
BEAUFORT, N.C. – As a gift to himself, Brien Taylor bought a black Mustang 5.0 when the New York Yankees gave him the largest signing bonus ever offered to an amateur. Taylor still drives that car, to work in the morning and by the ocean at night, around the sleepy backroads where he was born poor and the bourgeois streets downtown. He toyed with the engine and souped it up and now it's running at least 500 horses, and best of all, it's street legal, says his mama, proud of her son today as she was 15 years ago.
That's when Brien Taylor, a 19-year-old born with a left arm that launched baseballs like a Howitzer, changed modern baseball. Drafted No. 1 overall by the Yankees, Taylor, on the advice of his mama and his agent, kept refusing lowball offers and turning down more money than he could fathom. Taylor and his family lived in a trailer with one light bulb. He could buy a lot of light bulbs with what the Yankees were offering.
Pride intervened. Growing up impoverished, pride is currency. Pride is what got Taylor's bonus to $1.55 million and has since allowed hundreds of other obscene baseball bonuses, and pride is what slew Taylor's career, and pride is what brought him back here, back home, a year and a half ago.
Taylor moved to his parents' house, on Brien Taylor Lane, for the time being, at least. It's at the end of an unpaved road, past a clothesline where the afternoon wash dries, eight miles from the Piggly Wiggly. In the back yard, mosquitoes attack like kamikazes. There are three smashed-up cars, one with an open, rusted toolset on top – a job unfinished. Riding lawnmowers hide in the overgrown grass, and the wind chips more paint off an ATV, and the bottom of a boat that looks like it hasn't been used in years corrodes.
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=jp-taylor060506&prov=yhoo&type=lgns
That's when Brien Taylor, a 19-year-old born with a left arm that launched baseballs like a Howitzer, changed modern baseball. Drafted No. 1 overall by the Yankees, Taylor, on the advice of his mama and his agent, kept refusing lowball offers and turning down more money than he could fathom. Taylor and his family lived in a trailer with one light bulb. He could buy a lot of light bulbs with what the Yankees were offering.
Pride intervened. Growing up impoverished, pride is currency. Pride is what got Taylor's bonus to $1.55 million and has since allowed hundreds of other obscene baseball bonuses, and pride is what slew Taylor's career, and pride is what brought him back here, back home, a year and a half ago.
Taylor moved to his parents' house, on Brien Taylor Lane, for the time being, at least. It's at the end of an unpaved road, past a clothesline where the afternoon wash dries, eight miles from the Piggly Wiggly. In the back yard, mosquitoes attack like kamikazes. There are three smashed-up cars, one with an open, rusted toolset on top – a job unfinished. Riding lawnmowers hide in the overgrown grass, and the wind chips more paint off an ATV, and the bottom of a boat that looks like it hasn't been used in years corrodes.
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=jp-taylor060506&prov=yhoo&type=lgns