Tuesday morning, Redskins safety Sean Taylor passed away after being shot in the femoral artery early Monday morning. He was 24.

Responses have been for the most part sympathetic towards the former Miami Hurricanes standout, and rightfully so. Whenever a person loses their life to violence, sadness over the lost is natural.

There are some who point to Taylor’s past, wondering if it finally caught up to him. Some called him “a thug”, going as far to suggest he had reaped what he sowed. Certainly you could get that sense from reading the original AP reports of the story, which highlighted Taylor’s off the field problems in the past.

Others paint a different picture; of a man who had gone through serious life changes in the past two years. It was the story of man who had turned over a new leaf, whose daughter’s birth had brought him back from a destructive path, only to have it find him anyway. It was a story that should have had a happy ending, which makes it all the more tragic.

In a tale of two different men who both died on Tuesday, I cannot tell you which one was the real Sean Taylor. I simply do not know.

The sports world is a place that is chock full of stories. You can’t escape them. Even if you watch sports purely for joy of seeing high levels of competition, you will no doubt be subject to elaborate openings, feature pieces and more to tell you why you should care about this game more than life itself.

The end result is the development of a warped sense of perception. We begin to feel as though we know these modern day gladiators because we saw, at most, five tailored minutes into their lives. In some cases, that five minutes is broken up into multiple 15 second sound bites. Other times it is filled with outside commentary meant to shape our perceptions and enhance the storytelling aspect of the game.

Where we end up is at a place that does not feature people, but caricatures of individuals who can be summed up in a sentence or two. We think we understand them, but in reality we have no idea who they are.

Who is Michael Vick? The stories a few years ago differ from the ones today. Vick was an amazing athlete then, who was so highly thought of just eight months ago, that he was at the forefront of the Virginia Tech massacre remembrance. At the time, Vick was a highly paid athlete who, unlike his brother Marcus, had stayed out of trouble. Water bottle incidents aside (and remember, that was tossed out), Vick was a marketable individual who people respected and dare I say, loved, idolized and looked up to. His story was a positive one.

Now, Vick is a social pariah. He’s the face of the out of control athlete who has no regard to the laws of society. He is a barbarian, an inhuman animal because he brutalized and tortured dogs. What he did in the past doesn’t matter; he might have donated millions to charity and overcome a great deal. He committed a societal evil and thus he a disgrace to the human race.

But who IS Michael Vick? Is he a sociopath? Or is an average guy with a lot of money that doesn’t value animal’s lives highly? The reaction and outcry has been to a singular aspect of a man’s life that has colored him in a certain light. Michael Vick might be a thug, a wannabe gangsta. Or he might be a guy who saw nothing wrong in betting on a brutal sport, like many people do with cockfighting, bullfighting.

I don’t know Michael Vick. But I know the caricature of him.

Who is Tom Brady? Brady’s image in 2003 is certainly different than it is now. Back then he was the consummate underdog, who rose from nowhere to prominence. He was the guy who nobody wanted and became the hero everyone wished they had. He was antithesis of Peyton Manning. Manning was the hot shot, silver spoon in his mouth QB that didn’t have the moxie to win like Brady because he had never learned to deal with adversity. Brady had dealt with it ever since college; he had a heart of gold and balls of steel.

In 2007, Brady is a celebrity. The underdog tag is lurking, but not prevalent. The everyman’s tag- long gone. He has actually managed to turn Manning into the guy you want to root for. After all, he doesn’t date actresses, knock them up, then leave them for super models. He doesn’t do “Manly man” ads that portray the Californian Brady as some rugged cowboy from Texas. Brady is a man who was a featured guest at George W. Bush’s state of the union address, only to make a mockery of Republican family values.

So who is Tom Brady? Is he an everyman who worked hard? Is he a glamour boy who always had the talent but none of the exposure? Can he be considered a responsible person worthy of being looking up to, considering what we proclaim to “know” about his personal life?

I couldn’t tell you. Brady might be a great guy to hang out with, but a terrible person. He might be outwardly arrogant and a good person underneath. There are an infinite number of possibilities. Who knows which is the truth?

What do Mets fans make of Lastings Milledge? Everything he does gets a share of positive and negative feedback depending on who you are talking to. Milledge started his own rap label, saying there were things in life other than baseball. Some cheered him for stating the obvious, others lambasted him for focusing on something else when he hadn’t proven a thing in the majors. Which is right? What about when he slapped the hands of fans after his first major league home run? Arrogance or exuberance?

One day Jose Reyes is the golden boy. A mediocre half season later, he’s the guy who parties too much. That would never happen with Derek Jeter, the consummate professional, who exemplifies everything that an athlete should be. Of course the truth is about ten years ago, it did happen with Jeter as George Steinbrenner even had to rather publically rebuke him for it.

But youthful ignorance can be excused because Jeter is a better man now right? Well he also might have willfully tried to get around paying taxes. Sort of like Barry Bonds, the most evil human being to ever walk the earth not named Michael Vick.

Nobody fits the mold of caricature better than Bonds- about whom few people who anything about surface facts and second hand stories. Yet people already have their opinions made about him, rightly or wrongly and on both sides of the fence. He’s so polarizing we are told we MUST feel a way about him. You must love him, or you must hate him. There can be no in between. It seems the sports world cannot accept that Bonds might be a guy who juiced, but is not a bad person.

Or maybe he is just a dick. Like Babe Ruth reportedly was. But wait, wasn’t Ruth beloved- he certainly is now. His warts are glossed over and forgotten. Why can’t he just be a man and not a gargantuan either/or?

Why does Bill Belichick’s decisions as a coach decide whether who he is off the field? Is he a worse man than Tony Dungy? A slam dunk question for some. Not for me. I see the whole good vs. evil aspect entirely a social construct for advancing a story. There are lurking questions about both men that probably will never be answered. I don’t say this to hail one and bash the other- I’m simply stating a reality.

Part of this creation of the caricature just is the nature of private life. We can only get so from what people show us in public. Even those close to some don’t know about what they keep hidden.

Another part of it is that sensationalism sells. The populace has made a judgment on Brittany Spears based on what sound bites and supermarket tabloids have told them. Vick’s only contribution to the world off the field is dog fighting because giving to charity just doesn’t sell papers. We want to see the seedy underbelly.

But we want our heroes too. Without them, we wouldn’t follow sports, movies, or hell, the world in general, because it would be too depressing.

So maybe it isn’t that we can’t get the whole story but instead that we choose not to. In fiction we see gray characters all the time, but that fiction is usually localized to books. Most mainstream movies and TV feature caricatures all the time. Heroes are all good, villains all evil with little redeemable qualities. It seems we are on the whole, incapable of having people of depth in our stories.

Thus we are told why Babe Ruth isn’t Barry Bonds, or why Derek Jeter is different from Jose Reyes. Or why Michael Vick is scum, or how Pac-Man Jones is like Sean Taylor.

Or was he? I couldn’t tell you. After all, I don’t know who Pac-Man Jones really is.

And I’ll never know what kind of man Sean Taylor really was.