So what if Taylor has an agenda. Is he right?

Who doesn’t love a good legal thriller? A riveting courtroom drama?

I’ve watched enough movies like Presumed Innocent and The Insider and TV shows like L.A. Law and The Good Wife to know that one of the staples of the courtroom drama is how the lawyers will try to pick apart a witness. Not their testimony, but the witness themselves. Point out their flaws; question their ethics and suddenly their testimony lacks credibility because they lack credibility.

In this regard, I can’t help but to think of Jose Canseco and now former ASU receiver Kerry Taylor. More on Canseco in a moment. First Taylor.

I don’t know the man. Never really talked to him at great length outside of a quickie interview here and there. But when news leaked (if you count Taylor tweeting out the news himself as a leak) that Taylor took a bazooka to his former head coach Dennis Erickson, I found out all sorts of things about him.

People said he had an axe to grind. That he was jealous. Mad that he didn’t have a better college career at ASU. Most of what I read about Kerry Taylor had nothing to do with the message; it had to do with the man. And I bought into it. I was that juror who saw the witness reduced to rubble right in front of me. He must have an agenda, right?

And then I thought of Canseco.

His book Juiced provided all the sordid details of not only his steroid use but that of some of the biggest names in the game. Every day was like Halloween, but instead of Snickers and M and M’s, grimy trainers were handing out HGH, the cream, and the clear. Canseco was publicly flogged.

A fraud. A hack. A liar. A guy looking to make a quick buck by dragging half of baseball into the muck with him. Maybe all those things were true. But wouldn’t you know it….he was right. So right that book rightfully deserves credit for exposing the pervasive nature of the problem. So right that his next book, the one nobody read, was called…..Vindicated. For one bewildering moment Jose Canseco was the only person in the whole damn world of baseball who could be counted on to tell the truth. How twisted is that? So, back to Taylor.

Is he jealous? Mad? Maybe. Perhaps we’ll know more when the full interview airs Sunday night on Channel 3. In the meantime we have this morsel from Tim Ring I think the more important question becomes, is he right?

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