From small town kid to superstar, Colts rookie Jonathan Taylor has been driven to big things

INDIANAPOLIS — The town has been there forever.

Or at least it feels like it. Salem, N.J. has been around since 1675, the Old Salem County Courthouse in operation since 1735, nestled in south Jersey near the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

The place has never been big. Not in comparison to Philadelphia, 45 minutes to the northeast, or Wilmington, Del., 20 minutes away. The city of Salem covers only a mile or so, the seat of a rural county, a chunk of New Jersey full of farmland, the kind a driver has to keep an eye out for deer on the road.

But there was a time when Salem was thriving. A slice of small-town America, powered by industry and a sense of history, full of generational families that had been there for years.

“Salem used to be a wonderful town,” high school football coach Montrey Wright said. “There were a lot of things that happened. Like the recession, we really got hit by it. Our town had warehouses shut down. People didn’t have jobs. The taxes have been pretty high; a lot of companies leave.”

The J.C. Penney closed 20 years ago, right around the time the Heinz Tomato plant shut down. Anchor Hocking Glass used to have a plant in Salem. DuPont in the next town.

The jobs left, and the population started to drop. The 2010 census counted 5,146 people in Salem, but that was the sixth consecutive census revealing a population loss, and it’s dropped now again. Some say to 4,500 or so; others as low as 3,000.

The people, the families still there, are great. Everybody knows everybody else. None of this is their fault. Salem’s like hundreds of small towns across the country, caught in an economic storm of somebody else’s making, and as the businesses kept leaving, so did the money.

Salem lost the IGA, its only grocery store, four years ago. The community center just closed down.

“There’s an industrial park that’s about 20 minutes away that a lot of people go and work, but really, in the town, besides the small businesses, there’s not a whole lot of blue-collar jobs or white-collar jobs,” Salem High principal John Mulhorn said. “The school system is the biggest employer in the county.”

This is the place that produced Jonathan Taylor.

On a mission

Taylor was always driven.

Bright and committed. Raised by a mother, Elizabeth Taylor, who made sure her son’s focus never wavered, and a father, Jonathan James, a former college basketball player who pushed his son as an athlete.

“We went to the same church. I’ve known him since he was 5 or 6 years old,” Wright said. “He was always on a mission.”

A mission that was only partly focused on football.

Sports had always been the road out of Salem, on to bigger and better things. Legendary Baltimore Colts running back Lydell Mitchell is from Salem; a handful of other players made it to the NFL.

But an NFL life seemed far from guaranteed.

“I was a kid who loved learning, loved going to school,” Taylor said. “I tried to push myself on and off the field, because I didn’t know. Coming in as a freshman in high school, I’m not thinking, ‘Oh, I’m definitely going to play in the National Football League.’”

Taylor was a backup as a freshman, shared time as a sophomore with a running back bound for the University at Albany. Following in Mitchell’s footsteps, let alone establishing himself as one of the best college running backs of all time, seemed a long way off.

If he hadn’t blossomed the way he did athletically, Taylor had other options. Salem High is small, but Mulhorn and the school board have worked hard to make sure kids have plenty of ways to prepare themselves for four-year universities, and Taylor, an honor roll student interested in astrophysics, enrolled in the difficult International Baccalaureate program.

But the plan was always to play football.

Taylor had seen other good athletes in Salem, guys he believed were just as talented as him, lose focus in high school, fall off the track. He’d watch Wright go to their houses, try to keep them working, help them turn their time in Salem High sports into an opportunity. Taylor saw too many come up short.

He wasn’t about to let that happen.

“I question how many more guys, either on or off the field, could have done big things,” Taylor said. “It hits you in a certain place, because if he’d stayed focused, he definitely could have been here, doing this.”

Wright didn’t have to go to Taylor’s house. The kid worked every day of the week, kept getting bigger, kept putting muscle on a 215-pound frame. Taylor rushed for 1,383 yards as a junior and started getting recruiting interest from places like Albany and Rutgers.

He had his heart set on a different school.

Following Ron Dayne, Corey Clement

The NCAA’s all-time rushing leader, Wisconsin Heisman Trophy winner Ron Dayne, played at New Jersey’s Overbrook High, an hour away. Four years ahead of Taylor, a running back from Glassboro — just a half hour’s drive from Salem — named Corey Clement had set the New Jersey single-season rushing record, caught the attention of the Badgers and headed to Madison to star in the Big Ten on the way to the NFL.

“I was like, hey, if a guy from south Jersey can do that, right over there in Glassboro, we play them every single year,” Taylor said. “That kind of jump-started me my sophomore year of high school to increase and enhance my work ethic, because if he can do it, why can’t I?”

The first time the Badgers sent a recruiter to Salem High to talk to Taylor, the running back was wearing a Wisconsin hoodie, even though he hadn’t known Mickey Turner was coming.

The Badgers didn’t offer right away.

Taylor wasn’t surprised. A small-school kid like him had to prove he had athleticism far beyond his competition, had to grab the attention of a Power 5 school and refuse to let it go. Every time a recruiter came to Salem, Taylor would always ask the same question: What did he need to do better to lock down a scholarship?

Hard to believe now, but Wisconsin running backs coach John Settle wanted to see more breakaway speed.

“I didn’t have a lot of film on me breaking away from guys,” Taylor said. “I had some long touchdowns, but on the film, it wouldn’t look like I was pulling away. That just motivated me.”

Taylor had started running track as a sophomore.

Armed with Settle’s criticism, he threw himself into the sport as a junior, soaked up the techniques, figured out how to fly.

Taylor won the 100-meter state title as a junior, then broke Clement’s record by rushing for 2,815 yards as a senior, leading Salem to a season so impressive that Mitchell, the Colts legend living in Baltimore, started calling Mulhorn to ask about Salem’s new running back then drove up to watch Taylor play and talk to the team.

Originally committed to Rutgers — and heavily recruited by Harvard to play football and test his considerable mind — Taylor finally got the scholarship offer he craved on Nov. 1 of his senior season.

At the time, he was only a three-star recruit.

“Hard to believe, right?” Wisconsin head coach Paul Chryst said. “We were excited when we started to recruit him, and it just got better and better.”

First touch touchdown

The first time Taylor touched the ball in a scrimmage at Wisconsin, he was a relative unknown outside of the Badgers’ coaching offices. Asked to leave Salem early and enroll in Madison for spring practices, Taylor had been forced to decline. He had to finish the International Baccalaureate program back in Salem.

Up until that handoff, Taylor had been playing at less than full speed in practices.

“In camp, you never want to beat up on your guys,” Taylor said.

The scrimmage was a different story. Under the lights, an electric atmosphere, players in full Wisconsin game-day jerseys. Chryst told his players the rules were live, American rules football.

Taylor’s first touch with the No. 2 offense went for a touchdown. A little bit later, he was given a chance with the starters, and Taylor took a screen pass 70 yards to the end zone.

“Then he became the starter,” Chryst said. “He had the shortest scrimmage career of any guy who’s ever been here.”

The rest has been well-documented. The way the kid who’d never played in front of a crowd of more than 1,000 fans in Salem immediately grabbed the hearts of 80,000 fans at Wisconsin’s Camp Randall Stadium by ripping off 87 yards against Utah State and 223 yards against Florida Atlantic in his first two collegiate games.

The three seasons that followed. The 6,174 yards, sixth-most all-time despite not playing his senior year. Two Doak Walker Awards as the nation’s best running back. Big performances on big stages at the Big Ten Championship, Rose Bowl and Orange Bowl. Three straight runs at Heisman Trophy consideration.

But that’s not the stuff that comes to Chryst’s mind when he thinks about Taylor.

“The level at which he does things, and who he is, how he carries himself, the level of awareness he has for people,” Chryst said. “It’s more impressive when you’re around him.”

The stuff Chryst remembers is the way Taylor treats people.

The way he walked into a press conference after rushing for 321 yards and three touchdowns, including a tackle-breaking game-winner in overtime vs. Purdue, as a sophomore and immediately started talking about the Badgers’ senior class. The humility, the way Taylor would ask how somebody was doing, then actually wait for the answer. The intelligence, the way he approached not just the work in the classroom — the way a potential Harvard student might — but everything from the Badgers’ scheme to the way he handled his body.

When he was home during college, even after he’d become a superstar, Taylor would come home and work as a custodian at Salem High, according to Mulhorn. Taylor would help band members unload their instruments and never say a word about his celebrity, not even to the kid wearing the Wisconsin shirt.

“He approaches it the way we’d all like to approach everything,” Chryst said. “He’s a great example for every one of us. Not just his teammates, but his coaches. I think that’s one of the best things about him, you keep learning from him.”

The stuff Taylor carried over from Salem.

As big and fast as Taylor is, one of the most remarkable parts of his three seasons at Wisconsin was his remarkable durability, handling 926 carries without missing a beat.

The secret was something he learned back home. When Taylor was in high school, Wright taught him to get right to work on recovery after a game. He’d find a garbage bin, wash it out with Clorox, fill it with ice and sit in the cold tub.

“I’ve always been the last guy in the locker room after the game,” Taylor said. “In high school, it was more that I’d just take a long time to take my stuff off and get ready to leave.”

At Wisconsin, Taylor stuck around with purpose.

Even as his teammates headed out to celebrate.

“Guys are leaving quick,” Taylor said. “It was kind of new to me, I was like, ‘Man, guys are getting out of here.’”

Not Taylor. He’d stick around, stretching, doing yoga in order to help himself recover, jumping into the cold tub. He’d be back in the facility again the next day, doing a short workout, sometimes a body-weight circuit in the weight room to get his muscles on the road to recovery.

“He has a natural thirst for knowledge, and he has the maturity to apply it,” Chryst said. “A lot of us know, but we don’t apply all we know or should. That’s where he’s disciplined. He gives himself the best chance because he’s disciplined and smart enough to do all the little things.”

Giving back

Taylor hasn’t forgotten his hometown, a place that is watching his every move, that will be paying attention intently when he takes the field for the Colts in his NFL debut on Sunday.

He grew up watching people like Wright and Mulhorn fight against the shifting economics of the time.

Taylor wants to do what he can to help.

“I’ve heard stories about what it was,” Taylor said. “We’re trying to make it where Salem is climbing back toward that peak.”

Before Taylor’s rookie season in Indianapolis began this August, before he started wowing coaches and teammates alike with his size and vision and speed in practice, he took the newfound wealth he’d accumulated when the Colts picked him in the second round of April’s draft and earmarked some of it for Salem.

For kids who might not realize the opportunities they have at their fingertips.

“One of the challenges is trying to get kids to believe that if they work hard, things can change for them,” Mulhorn said. “When you’re talking about generational poverty and you’re talking about situations where it really seems hopeless, it is really difficult for kids to start believing in themselves.”

Taylor is trying to help kids in Salem see themselves in him, the way he once saw himself in Corey Clement, and not just on the football field.

Over the summer, he established a scholarship program in his hometown, a “Be The Change” program for Black athletes from Salem High, to help more of them discover the rest of the world.

“You can make it out of that town and be larger than life, even if it’s not sports,” Taylor said. “People talk about it, and they think things aren’t going to happen. If they’re not getting a bunch of Division I schools coming to recruit them, they think it’s over. But it’s not.”

Not if a kid from Salem takes aim at a goal, sets his mind on it and keeps working.