With the annual all-star game’s future in doubt, a look back on the most famous play in Pro Bowl history.
In late May, when news broke that the NFL was considering axing its annual snoozer of an all-star game for good, the man on the receiving end of the most famous play in Pro Bowl history found himself fielding yet another round of calls and texts about the time that the late Washington safety Sean Taylor decked him into a different dimension. “I always say it’s the 15 seconds of fame that keeps on giving,” Brian Moorman says. “Now it’s gonna finally run out.”
Then again, what football fan could possibly forget? Back deep to punt just shy of midfield in the third quarter of the 2007 Pro Bowl, Moorman, then with the Bills, snared the snap and sprinted toward the right sideline on a scripted fake. Following two blockers, he spied a sliver of daylight and instinctively cut back inside, hoping to reach the first-down line. It proved to be a life-changing mistake, as Taylor arrived with a full helmet of steam, stuck a shoulder into Moorman’s chest and—boom—blasted the 6-foot, 174-pound punter off his cleats.
“It was clean,” Moorman says. “Now, most people say he should’ve never hit me like that in the Pro Bowl. Well, I ran the ball. I only wish I would’ve gotten the first.”
At first Moorman remained motionless on the turf at Honolulu’s Aloha Stadium as he performed what he recalls as a “quick assessment to see if my body was still in one piece …You move that hit over one inch, and my jaw’s probably still wired shut.” And while he soon bounced back up, hustling over to slap Taylor’s back in congratulations—“Hey, nice hit!”—as the safety celebrated with some NFC teammates, the sheer violence of the collision gave rise to a good bit of back-and-shoulder soreness the next morning. “I definitely canceled my tee time,” Moorman, now 46, says. “It just gives you a whole new respect for guys who take those hits every down. Here I am complaining I can barely walk after one shot.”
Fifteen-plus years later, however, the bruises having long since healed, Moorman reflects on the moment with nothing but fondness. Part of this stems from purely personal pride reasons, as the game itself marked his second consecutive Pro Bowl selection: “Making it back was even bigger than the first, because I felt like I belonged,” he says. But then there is the more somber side to the story: Later that year, when Moorman and the Bills visited Washington in Dec. 2007, instead of yukking it up with Taylor as he had hoped, the punter instead found himself watching as the home team held a halftime memorial service honoring the life of the safety, who had been shot to death by burglars at his suburban Miami home earlier that week. “Just sad,” Moorman says.
Still, the memory of perhaps Taylor’s greatest hit—or, at least, the one most reflective of his old-school, full-tilt style—endures in myriad other forms (and not just on YouTube, where at least two videos of it each boast half a million views). One example came that next season, in 2007, when AFC coach Bill Belichick approached Moorman before a Bill-Patriots game just to apologize for calling the fake punt in the first place. (Moorman’s response: “I said, ‘No need for apologies, I wanted to run it.’”) Another could be found in the countless posts that filled Moorman’s social media feeds earlier this year, contrasting the ferocity of Taylor’s hit with footage from an especially lackluster 2022 Pro Bowl in Las Vegas.
“It probably comes up every couple months, just in everyday life, whether at a charity golf tournament or a random text from somebody,” Moorman says. “Then the Pro Bowl happens and everyone’s messaging me. Then the anniversary of his [Taylor’s] tragedy comes up and I’ll get more. And inevitably a buddy wants to bring it up if I’m meeting somebody new.”
Then there is the contents of Moorman’s home office outside Jacksonville, where a handful of framed jerseys from his 14-year NFL career line the walls but only one is displayed frontwards: the tattered, stained white No. 8 that he was wearing for the AFC in Jan. 2007 when Taylor decked him. “I look at that and think how crazy it is that he ripped a hole in my jersey, and there’s some of his face mask paint left on the [right] shoulder,” Moorman says. “That adds a whole new meaning, once he was lost.”
Courtesy of Brian Moorman
It also helps explain why Moorman found recent indications of the Pro Bowl’s potentially imminent demise to be “a little bittersweet.” On one hand, hits like Taylor’s have understandably disappeared from the exhibition due to increasing safety concerns and decreasing participation. “As a player, the last thing you want to do is go and get injured,” Moorman says. “So you’ve got to take that into account and know that guys aren’t going to play that hard.” On the other, simply getting selected for the game meant so much to Moorman that he hopes the NFL can recreate the experience for current players in another way.
“You can find a way to make it something that’s—cool’s not the right word—but something guys can strive for,” Moorman says.
No matter what happens to future Pro Bowls, it’s likely that Moorman’s 15 seconds of flattening fame will never fully disappear. “But it just may come up less often,” Moorman says.
More likely, the former punter—now a real estate agent—will never stop having encounters like the one last month, in the middle of a motivational speech to a troop of boy scouts no older than 12.
As Moorman recalls, “I was just talking to them about my career, and one of them throws their hands up and says, ‘Wait a minute. Are you the punter that got hit by Sean Taylor?’”
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