Bengals coach Zac Taylor's compassion after Damar Hamlin injury is familiar in Norman

Matt Robinson has seen the video of Zac Taylor on the football field in Cincinnati on Monday night.

Then again, who hasn’t?

Taylor, the Norman native, is the Cincinnati Bengals head coach, and since Monday night when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed in cardiac arrest and needed his heart restarted on the field, video of the players and coaches in the aftermath has been beamed far and wide.

But any time Robinson has watched the video of Taylor in the moments after an ambulance took Hamlin out of the stadium, Robinson sees more than a football coach.

“When I see him, I see that kid I remember from First Baptist,” said Robinson, who was the interim youth pastor at First Baptist Church Norman when Taylor was a high schooler. “The look in his eyes, that’s the same look he’s always had.

“It is special.”

Never was it more special than Monday night.

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After the ambulance left and the teams retreated to their sidelines, everyone was trying to figure out what to do next. Taylor said Wednesday during his weekly press conference, his first public comments since Monday, that officials were talking to him and Bills coach Sean McDermott about how to proceed.

“Instead of playing telephone on different sidelines,” Taylor told reporters in Cincinnati, “the decision was made to go over there and make sure we all were talking together.”

Taylor made that decision. No one told him to do it.

He knew to do it.

The first thing Taylor remembers McDermott saying: “I need to be at the hospital with Damar. I shouldn’t be coaching this game.”

That was all the clarity Taylor needed.

“In that moment, he really showed who he was,” Taylor said of McDermott, “that all his focus was on Damar and being there for him, being there for his family at the hospital.

“I really felt like Sean McDermott led in that moment.”

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You know who else led?

Zac Taylor.

His compassion and his care in a time of extreme upheaval have been widely praised. No less than Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers had kind words for Taylor.

“One person who deserves a lot of credit in this situation is Coach Taylor,” Rodgers said earlier this week. “I saw him walk across the field … and just the empathy that I saw in his face and the way that he handled that thing.”

We like to think any head coach in the NFL would’ve acted the way Taylor did. Andy Reid. Mike Tomlin. Bill Belichick. John Harbaugh. Surely, they’d have done what Taylor did on Monday night.

Truthfully, we like to think any human being would’ve done what Taylor did.

But we know what Taylor did. In a moment that left football players, modern-day gladiators, in tears and football coaches in shock, Taylor had the wherewithal to care. To see that this situation was different. To refuse to allow the muscle memory to take over.

After all, NFL football games are stopped all the time for injuries. It happens in every game every week. And after the player is tended to and taken off the field, the players and coaches know what happens next ― the game continues.

Taylor realized that shouldn’t happen Monday.

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Sitting in their Norman home watching the game on TV, Taylor’s parents, Sherwood and Julie, were stunned like everyone else as they realized the gravity of what was happening.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Sherwood Taylor, who played, then coached at OU. “I’ve been around it a long time.”

As time passed and the Taylors began to realize the gravity of the situation, Julie began to think not only about Hamlin and his family but also about Zac. She knows how much he cares for his players, his coaches and his staff, and she knew how hard it would be on all of them.

“I wish he wasn’t having to deal with this,” she said.

“No, I’m glad it’s him,” she remembers Sherwood replying, “because he’s the perfect guy to handle this.”

That he was.

Taylor was the embodiment of a Sunday school lesson. Or a Hebrew school lesson. Or an ethics lesson. He acted the way we hope we would raise our children to react in a situation like that.

Not that Sherwood and Julie Taylor ever anticipated their son would face such a scenario.

“You don’t have training for this,” Sherwood said.

“Just the way he responded to it was just typical Zac. He’s just always been that way. He’s real level-headed.”

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What Zac Taylor did required not only level-headedness but also compassion, and those who knew him at First Baptist Norman say his family cultivated that.

David Payne, who is now a senior technology strategist in OU’s athletic department, became the youth pastor at the church in the early 2000s, and he remembers how the Taylors always opened their home for a group during a discipleship weekend even though the family’s four children were extremely busy with sports and activities.

“They had this graciousness about them to invest not only in their kids but in the people around them,” Payne said.

He remembers Zac being similarly wired. Even though he was big-time athlete at Norman High ― he eventually landed at Nebraska and started at quarterback for two years ― he never acted like he was any different than any other kid in the youth group.

“He never came across the way,” Payne said. “He was really just pretty willing to be a part of the group.”

So it was when Matt Robinson was around Taylor. Once a week, Robinson would go to lunch with Taylor and two other high school boys from the youth group. Robinson tried to minister to kids by meeting them where they were, but when it came to Taylor and Co., Robinson didn’t have to encourage them.

They sought out those lunches and wanted that connection.

“He was always mature beyond his years,” Robinson said of Taylor. “There was never any ego or ‘I’m the quarterback’ kind of attitude. … The two other guys that went with us, maybe they were on the football team, but they were just his buddies. They’d grown up together, and it didn’t really matter who did what or how good you were at sports. They were friends. That’s what mattered.”

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Other people mattered to Zac Taylor then, and Monday night showed they definitely do now.

Wednesday during his press conference, Taylor praised all sorts of folks. The Bills. The officials. The medical staff who attended to Hamlin on the field. The medical staff at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center where Hamlin was transported. Even the security at the hospital got a shoutout.

Taylor also mentioned the leadership within the Bengals.

“We’re doing everything we can to support them and make them feel comfortable,” he said.

But Taylor has taken the responsibility personally. Monday night, he went to the hospital to check on Hamlin and his family. Then according to Taylor’s mom, Taylor’s wife, Sarah, took dinner to the hospital for Hamlin’s family and friends Wednesday evening.

None of that surprises anyone who knew Taylor as a kid at First Baptist Norman.

“Not to get too spiritual,” Matt Robinson said, “but I just don’t think the heart changes.”

Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at 405-475-4125 or jcarlson@oklahoman.com. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok, and support her work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Damar Hamlin injury: Bengals coach Zac Taylor's compassion on display