He Held Court With Kings

If it were baseball, he would have been known as “Old Reliable.”

If he had been in movies, he wouldn’t have been the star, he would have been the star’s best friend.

In football, he would have done the blocking. In basketball, he’d set the pick. In the Old West, he’d be the sidekick.

He was as easy to overlook as a doorman. He was the kind of guy who would have batted .298 or .301 every year and driven in 95 runs but would have been in an outfield with Mays or Mantle. In football, he’d catch all the passes over the middle but someone else would get the bomb. He did what he did steadily, dependably, predictably, but not flamboyantly. The sort who, when his career was looked back on, they would say, “Wow! He did that? I didn’t realize!”

On the ice, he seldom made a mistake or busted up his own team’s play. Dave Taylor on skates was like Joe DiMaggio in center field. When the ball came down, so to speak, he was under it. He was where he was supposed to be.

You get a measure of Dave Taylor when you know that he played that fast and furious game 17 years--and remained on the same club the whole time. Only the great ones do that. You don’t trade the super values. Only a handful of greats stay untouchable--Musial, Gehrig, DiMag--and Taylor was one of them.

His job on the Los Angeles Kings was to go into the corners and dig out the puck and deliver it to the club’s cleanup hitters. For years, this was Marcel Dionne. Then, for a few years, it was Wayne Gretzky.

Not that that’s all Taylor did. What he did along the way was drill in 431 goals--47 one season--serve up 638 assists and break up enough opposition power plays to get a broken nose, some new front teeth, an arthroscoped knee or two and some cerebral bleeding. Hockey is not for the squeamish.

Other sports measure their glamorous units in terms of the Four Horsemen, the Dream Backfield, the Gashouse Gang. In hockey, it’s the scoring lines--center and two wing men--that get the glory. Some famous ones were the Punch Line of Toe Blake, Elmer Lach and Maurice Richard with the ’45 Canadiens and the Dynamite Line of Dit Clapper, Cooney Weiland and Dutch Gainor of the early-day Bruins.

The Kings’ trio of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s was so overwhelming that the club held a contest to find a nickname. The Triple Crown line was adjudged the most suitable. With the speedy Dionne at center and Taylor and Charlie Simmer at the wings, the line scored 161 goals and 352 points--goals plus assists--in 1981 and laid waste to the league. It should have been called the Red Light Line.

You measure success in the NHL by a yardstick of 400 lifetime goals, 600 assists and 1,000 games played. Taylor qualifies in each category. He has had a productive career. He won every award the game has to give except the Lady Byng, given annually to the player who displays the most sportsmanship.

“I miss out on that by the second game of the season,” Taylor says, laughing. “They don’t give that to guys who get 148 penalty minutes a year.”

Of course, it is also the job of the sidekick to suck up the fouls for the star player. Taylor used to post 130 minutes in penalties, Dionne 22-42.

It has not been without its price. Going into the corners with the likes of the Broad Street Bullies--the Philadelphia Flyers of the ‘70s--was like walking through Central Park at midnight wearing a Rolex. Dave Taylor’s knees are so banged up he not only can tell when it’s going to rain, he can tell when the fog is going to roll in.

Concussion is one of the dread words in the language. It’s usually associated with sacked quarterbacks or KOd boxers. But hockey is a game in which angry men are allowed to carry sticks. Slamming an opponent into plate glass is acceptable, even encouraged, behavior. They didn’t even wear helmets in this game till one guy didn’t get up one night in Minneapolis.

You can deal with knees and teeth and elbows, but headaches and dizziness are less easily dismissed. No one has ever devised a crutch for the brain. The mind is a terrible thing to waste all right--particularly on the end of a hockey stick too.

So Dave Taylor, after 17 years, is skating off into the sunset. He has never played less than his best.

“I took the check,” he agrees. “I went into the boards.”

His conduct was exemplary, his achievements monumental. He conquered a chronic stutter as determinedly as he perfected his wrist shot.

The game needed its Great One and its Flying Frenchman, but it needed its custom Taylor too. When things would go wrong, Dave Taylor would be standing there with a wrench. He was hockey’s version of the indispensables--Gehrig, Enos Slaughter, Gil Hodges.

Class is an overworked word in our business. Not when it’s applied to Dave Taylor.