[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 19]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 25376-25378]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        BRIAN TAYLOR RECOGNITION

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. DANA ROHRABACHER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, October 21, 2009

  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, I would like to bring to the 
attention of my colleagues the inspirational and uplifting story of 
Brian Taylor from the November 2009 issue of SLAM magazine. Brian 
Taylor is a true modern hero and example to the youth of America. Brian 
was a superstar basketball player at Princeton University and in the 
ABA and NBA. He had a great 10-year professional career, after which he 
became a teacher. He is now Head of Schools for View Park Schools, a 
charter school network in the inner city of Los Angeles, CA. View Park 
graduates 100% of its high school seniors, all of whom go on to 
college! Brian's personal story and the success of his charter school 
is a real life example of what can be accomplished with hard work, 
perseverance and commitment to excellence. I salute Brian Taylor and I 
urge my colleagues to read and be inspired by this tremendous story.

   Higher Learning: Former ABA Star Brian Taylor Is Now Committed to 
                      Educating the Youth of L.A.

                           (By Chris Warren)

       Brian Taylor creates a stir when he walks the halls of View 
     Park Prep Middle School in south Los Angeles. One young 
     teacher's face lights up when he spots Taylor and, making his 
     way through the throngs of African-American students changing 
     classes, he crows about a Laker's narrow Playoff win. As he 
     continues down the hall, Taylor--who at 6-3--towers over the 
     young kids who attend this charter school located in an area 
     known for its deep-seated problems with gangs, violence, and 
     failing schools--is approached by a succession of students. 
     Some just say hi, some want to talk about their classes and 
     others angle for a pat on the shoulder or a hug.
       One subject that isn't broached, at least on this day, is 
     Taylor's highly successful career in the ABA and NBA. Not 
     that there isn't a lot to talk about. After a standout tenure 
     at Princeton, where he led the Pete Carril-coached Tigers to 
     the NIT Tournament and wins over Bobby Knight's Indiana and 
     Dean Smith's UNC Tar Heels (``Bob McAdoo is still in 
     denial,'' he says), Taylor was lured to the pros after his 
     junior year in 1972, one of the first athletes to make the 
     jump early--so unusual at the time that Howard Cosell did a 
     story about it for ABC Sports. In a decade-long career in the 
     pros, Taylor rolled up a Rookie of the Year award and two ABA 
     championships with the New York Nets, where he played great D 
     and dished the ball to Dr. J, Larry Kenon and John 
     Williamson, before going on to stints with the Kansas City 
     Kings, Denver Nuggets, and the San Diego Clippers in the NBA.
       Taylor isn't interested in rehashing past glory, though 
     sometimes he can't avoid it because zealous fans still track 
     him down and send him items to autograph. These days, Taylor, 
     who is head of View Park Prep Schools and senior vice 
     president at the Inner City Education Foundation (ICEF), 
     which runs 13 charter schools in south L.A., including View 
     Park Prep Middle School, would much rather talk about the 
     challenges and triumphs of providing a top-notch education to 
     minority students who typically have few, if any, good 
     options when it comes to schools.
       Taylor certainly has a great story to tell. Since their 
     founding in '94, ICEF schools have emerged as an educational 
     powerhouse in an area of Los Angeles where only 9 percent of 
     freshmen who enter public schools eventually graduate from 
     college. By stark contrast, ICEF schools have not only 
     routinely registered top scores on California standardized 
     tests, often besting much wealthier areas, but have a goal, 
     so far attained, of sending 100 percent of their graduates to 
     college. Taylor needs to tell this story as a way to drum up 
     support amongst parents, politicians, donors and neighbors, 
     because their support is vital for ICEF to flourish and 
     expand; their goal is to eventually operate 35 schools in 
     south L.A., ultimately serving 10,000 students and producing 
     2,000 college graduates per year.
       ``My job is to help the outside world understand what we're 
     doing and why and how we are achieving at a high level and 
     get their support and their understanding,'' Taylor

[[Page 25377]]

     says, ``Us being here has affected people's lives--there are 
     more kids and more traffic and it has affected people's lives 
     in the community--and my job is to have them understand that 
     it's worth it for the kids.''
       By experience and connections, it's hard to imagine a 
     better spokesperson. Not only is Taylor a Princeton grad, 
     which speaks volumes about the value he places on education, 
     but he was one of the founding board members and treasurer 
     when ICEF was nothing more than an idea and later left a 
     position at one of L.A.'s most prestigious private schools to 
     become principal of View Park Middle School before starting 
     his current job. Taylor's network is wide and he uses it 
     well; he has coaxed former professional ballplayers to come 
     work at the school and got Lakers great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 
     to speak to the kids about black history; while I'm with him, 
     he misses a call from President Obama's Secretary of 
     Education, Arne Duncan.
       Given all that, it's still Taylor's temperament that is 
     arguably his most effective tool in garnering support for 
     ICEF's mission to provide an elite private school quality 
     education to traditionally underserved, forgotten African-
     American children. ``Brian is the most modest person I've 
     ever met,'' says ICEF founder Mike Piscal.
       As Taylor, whose playing days were ended by an Achilles 
     heel injury in '82, leads a tour around the school, he is 
     continually deflecting attention away from himself. 
     Introducing Dwight Sanders, View Park's current principal, 
     Taylor calls him one of ICEF's ``rising stars,'' and says 
     that students already like Sanders better than him. Every 
     teacher we meet is doing something extraordinary, he says, 
     and I really should be talking to them, not him.
       Taylor would be the first to say that he's in a position 
     today to make a huge difference in thousands of young lives 
     largely because of basketball. Growing up in the housing 
     projects of Perth Amboy, NJ, Taylor had two distinct 
     advantages over his peers who were never able to rise above 
     their tough environment: family and sports. His father, 
     ``Big'' Steve, a former semi-pro football player and the 
     family disciplinarian, worked as a laborer at the Raritan 
     Copper Works, and his mother, Maude, was a homemaker. ``Even 
     though we had a small place, it was the place to go to get 
     home cooking and a lot of loving from my mom,'' he recalls. 
     Along with a secure and loving home life, the Taylors were 
     also awash in athletic talent. Big Steven was a skilled 
     athlete and Brian's older brother, Bruce, was a standout 
     football player who went on to become a Pro Bowl cornerback 
     for the San Francisco 49ers. For his part, Brian excelled at 
     everything he tried--he says baseball was his first love--
     becoming a three sport letterman all four years of high 
     school, leading his basketball team to one state championship 
     and a second-place trophy.
       Fortunately for Taylor, he also had a football coach, Bob 
     Estok, who stressed education. ``After my freshman year in 
     high school, he says, You're a good enough student, you have 
     a profile here that if we get you moving in the right track, 
     you'll have tremendous opportunities to go anywhere in the 
     country for college,'' Taylor says. For Estok, that track 
     meant making sure Taylor spent two summers taking academic 
     enrichment courses at an elite private school and maintaining 
     an A-minus average in his regular courses. It also meant 
     making sure that Taylor knew the dangers faced by talented 
     athletes, so Estok gave him the book, The Black Athlete: The 
     Shameful Story. ``It's a cautionary book, talking about how 
     athletes are exploited for their physical abilities and don't 
     take advantage of the opportunities they have as students,'' 
     Taylor says.
       That was never a possibility for Taylor. Even though he was 
     heavily recruited out of high school--UCLA, Cal-Berkeley and 
     Rutgers were among his suitors--it was Princeton, located 
     just 30 miles from home, which eventually won out. ``We 
     didn't recruit him that hard, I guess his mom, the last thing 
     she said was that I was the only honest guy he talked to,'' 
     laughs Pete Carril, who coached the Tigers from 1967-96. ``He 
     had his sights set on a good education and that really helped 
     us.''
       Taylor flourished at Princeton, using his blazing speed and 
     strength to break down defenses and shut down the opposing 
     team's best players. ``Brian was a terrific shooter and he 
     had great quickness and he could defend,'' says Gary Walters, 
     Princeton's current athletic director, who played point guard 
     on the school's 1965 Final Four team. ``He was one of Pete's 
     all-time most talented and gifted players.'' During the 
     summer, Taylor would train with another of Princeton's all-
     time greats, Bill Bradley. Taylor remembers how Bradley would 
     come to the gym each day clutching a notebook in which he'd 
     jotted down all the drills he wanted to do. After each was 
     completed, Bradley would methodically go back to the notebook 
     and check it off--a powerful lesson about the importance of 
     preparation and hard work in pursuing one's goals.
       Taylor's focus on academics waned when, after a wildly 
     successful junior year, the ABA came calling. ``I was like, 
     wow, I've got an opportunity to play with the great New York 
     Nets in the beautiful Nassau Coliseum and they're going to 
     pay me to do it? Or I'm going to have to write a 100-page 
     theses?'' When Taylor's father was interviewed by Cosell, the 
     sportscaster asked him what his son should do: take the money 
     and run, Big Steve said. Brian did just that, although he 
     eventually went back to Princeton and earned two degrees.
       Taylor quickly established himself in the pros, not only 
     winning ROY honors in the ABA, but helping lead the Nets to 
     championships in his second and fourth years in the league, 
     when the team came back from a 22-point deficit to best the 
     Denver Nuggets. The way Taylor saw it, his job was to do two 
     things: shut down the opposing team's best player and get the 
     ball to a certain future hall of famer. ``My responsibility 
     was making sure I got the ball to Dr. J in the right 
     position,'' he says.
       Night after long night he had to try and slow the prolific 
     scoring of the likes of David Thompson, George Gervin, Norm 
     Nixon, and Pete Maravich. It was no easy task. ``They hated 
     me because the only way I could slow them down was to do 
     anything possible: grab them, hold them, trip them, bite 
     them,'' he says with a laugh. Ron Boone, who played for 
     numerous ABA and NBA teams and is now color commentator with 
     the Utah Jazz, used to hate it when Taylor guarded him. ``He 
     was just one of those guys you wanted to get off of you 
     because he was there all of the time,'' Boone recalls. In the 
     '76 Playoffs, Boone grew so frustrated with Taylor's defense 
     that he punched him in the mouth, but the next year, Taylor 
     and Boone were roommates on the Kansas City Kings and became 
     good friends.
       Although undersized, Taylor had plenty of other tools. One 
     was speed: he was known as the BT Express. ``He was the 
     fastest guy I had seen in the league up to that point, and 
     I'm not sure if people of the ilk of [Allen] Iverson are 
     faster,'' says Kim Hughes, an assistant coach with the L.A. 
     Clippers, who played with Taylor on the Nets. Hughes says 
     Taylor and Dr. J were the smartest teammates he ever had, and 
     that Taylor duped people into making ill-conceived passes. 
     ``I heard how Bill Russell used to taunt people into blocking 
     shots. Brian was lurking, waiting for the cross-court pass 
     and he would get it almost every time.''
       Although Nate ``Tiny'' Archibald is better known than 
     Taylor, Hughes says it was a ``terrible deal'' when the Nets 
     traded Taylor for Tiny. ``I thought Brian was a much better 
     player than Tiny, even though Tiny was a much better 
     offensive player,'' he says. ``Brian was such a good 
     rebounder, defender and overall player.''
       Taylor's leadership also set him apart, remembers Eric 
     Money, a former Pistons point guard. As Money recalls, Taylor 
     didn't lead by shouting or hogging the ball, but by quietly 
     making everyone else better. ``He was always the floor 
     general,'' says Money, who Taylor lured to ICEF schools to 
     become a PE teacher and to help him coach the high school 
     basketball team. ``He was a great complementary player to let 
     guys like Dr. J have the spotlight. The leader sometimes has 
     to defer--that was one of his stronger qualities.''
       Taylor will need to draw on every bit of those leadership 
     skills in his current role. Education, especially in 
     California, has been hit hard by the economy, with massive 
     state budget cuts decimating teaching staffs, increasing 
     class sizes and dimming prospects of academic progress. The 
     challenge is particularly acute for charter schools, which 
     already don't receive as much funding as regular public 
     schools, even though their test scores and achievements are 
     often far superior, most markedly in predominantly minority 
     areas. Taylor has to work extra hard to try and drum up 
     financial resources from foundations, individuals and the 
     federal government, whatever it takes to keep the ICEF 
     schools performing at a high level.
       Taylor's motivation is intensely personal. His two youngest 
     children attend ICEF schools (an older child, Bryce, was a 
     standout player at the University of Oregon and, after 
     playing a year in Italy, is looking to sign with an NBA 
     team), the symbolism of which is not lost on anyone. ``It 
     does send an important message, because it tells you he has 
     faith in us and the system,'' says Sanders. ``That says a lot 
     about what he's building and what his belief is in our 
     system.'' In fact, Taylor says he got into education after 10 
     years as a successful businessman in larger part to emphasize 
     to his kids how important it is.
       Even if his weren't here, it seems clear that Taylor would 
     be. He says he sees himself in the children who attend ICEF 
     schools, growing up in the inner city where bad influences 
     are all too common. What he wants them to understand is that 
     academics lead to a better life and that it's within their 
     grasp. But the job gives him plenty in return, including an 
     opportunity to coach his son, Brendan, who is developing into 
     an excellent player himself. It might not match the immediate 
     thrill of a roaring crowd, but it can be far more gratifying, 
     he says.
       ``What can you do that is going to give you the thrills 
     that you had as a ballplayer? Probably nothing, but what is 
     my purpose thereafter?'' he says. ``I feel coming here I 
     found my purpose in life. And my purpose in life is to give 
     back.''

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