Word: ums
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...also felt tragically familiar. Taylor, 24, a standout safety for the Washington Redskins, was an equally stellar defensive back for the University of Miami Hurricanes. And his untimely death was just the latest in what has become an unsettling succession of violent ends for active and former UM players...
...nation's most brashly successful (five national championships since 1983) but controversial big-time college football programs, one that has long seemed a magnet for guns and trouble. "Miami's problems are hardly isolated among large college football programs, but unfortunately these incidents do seem a reflection of [the UM football] legacy," says noted sports sociologist Richard Lapchick of the University of Central Florida in Orlando and author of the just published The 100 Pioneers: African-Americans Who Broke Color Barriers in Sport. "It's a reminder that their goal now has to be to build a new legacy...
...roll call of the past couple of decades is mournfully striking. A year ago this month senior Hurricane defensive lineman Bryan Pata was shot in the head and killed outside his apartment near UM's Coral Gables campus shortly after a practice. Four months earlier safety Willie Cooper was shot in the buttocks outside his Miami home. A year before that, former defensive end Jerome McDougal was shot in the abdomen in Miami in his new Mercedes just weeks before reporting to training camp for the Philadelphia Eagles. (Cooper and McDougal survived.) In 1996, linebacker Marlin Barnes was bludgeoned...
...Blades, 26, a former UM safety, was killed when the car he was riding in - and which witnesses say was racing another at high speeds - crashed into a Miami canal. A year before that 'Canes linebacker Chris Campbell, who had just finished his last UM season, was killed when his speeding car struck a tree in Coral Gables...
...UM boosters are quick to point out that theirs is hardly the only football team to suffer such losses, which is true. But because this is the University of Miami - whose football team's outlaw reputation prompted Sports Illustrated 12 years ago to call for the program to be shut down amidst a corruption scandal totaling more than $600,000 - it's hard not to ask if the tragedies somehow stem from the reckless culture that coaches and administrators have too often indulged. The team rocketed to prominence in the 1980s by showcasing what fans and critics alike called thug...