JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- With most people, you never know what will strike a nerve. A seemingly innocent word or deed can sometimes fire the synapses, perhaps even send a person over the edge.

	Fred Taylor has missed 24 regular-season games in four years in the NFL.

And then there is Fred Taylor, the superb but frequently infirm Jacksonville Jaguars tailback, and a player whose hot button has been pushed a few too many times. Blurt out even the first syllable of the word Taylor despises the most -- injury -- and it is the equivalent of stripping off his skin and applying a cattle prod to every ganglia in his chiseled body.

That his reaction should be so severe, particularly in light of the events of a 2001 campaign all but wiped out by injury and innuendo, is understandable. Taylor is, unfortunately, a player whose medical dossier is nearly as long as his litany of football accomplishments. The size of the first has affected his wherewithal to bolster the latter.

For all his wondrous skills, abilities matched by only a few premier backs in the league, Taylor cannot escape the injury curse.

His frustration in this matter certainly is justifiable, and it's difficult only to tell what wearies the former University of Florida star more -- the injuries, or the media scrutiny of them.

"It's something that, as hard as you try to put it behind you, some people are still going to (focus) on it," said Taylor, the team's first-round selection in the 1998 draft. "I'm not thinking about it. I'm looking ahead. Right now, I'm healthy and that's all that matters."

Truth be told, Taylor is rehabilitating a thigh bruise, but neither that nor the Tampa Bay defense could slow him in a Friday night preseason game here. In the type of cameo appearance typical at this point of the preseason for stars of his magnitude, Taylor played only in the first quarter but rushed for 25 yards on four carries.

He flashed the quickness, cutting ability, power and pad level that epitomize his performances when healthy. The Jaguars desperately need a healthy Taylor, merely to climb back to respectability. With the wide receiver corps depleted by the release of Keenan McCardell and ongoing holdout of Jimmy Smith, the Jacksonville passing game is a shadow of itself, and quarterback Mark Brunell figures to take a beating if the Jaguars can't run the football.

Without Taylor, the Jaguars can't run the football, at least not too well. It would not be hyperbole, with apologies to Brunell, to suggest that Taylor is the team's most indispensable player and its likely offensive centerpiece. Even at the NFL level, there are only a handful of backs who can approach his all-around abilities, precious few with his game-breaking skill.

"When he's whole, I mean 100 percent physically, he's in an elite class," said Tampa Bay safety John Lynch. "There aren't many guys who compare to him in terms of being able to do so many things."

The problem is, Taylor has done them so infrequently because he has yet to play an entire season injury-free. If he could get 20-25 "touches" per game, there is no telling the magnitude of what he would achieve. Unlike so many players who are prone to injury, Taylor has never been labeled as "soft" -- one look at his frame and running style and it's immediately obvious how ridiculous such a suggestion might be -- but rather seems star-crossed, kind of like the guy in the old Dick Tracy comic strip with the dark cloud always dogging him.

In four seasons, Taylor has missed 24 games, the equivalent of 1½ years of playing time. Yet he has authored some of the NFL's longest plays in that period, twice rushing for more than 1,200 yards and scoring 37 touchdowns from scrimmage. The numbers, though, would be markedly more impressive had Taylor been able to dodge injuries with the same kind of deftness he uses to elude defenders.

His rushing average, for instance, is 4.7 yards a carry. There are only three backs among the top 20 rushers of all time with a better mark. He has scored a touchdown every 23.3 rushes, finding the end zone overall every 22.6 touches. Yet the injuries have limited Taylor to just 745 carries. By comparison, Walter Payton logged 1,179 rushes his first four seasons.

Taylor, 26, had a 90-yard touchdown run against Miami in the 1999 playoffs. In 2000, he went for 234 yards in a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers. He strung together nine straight 100-yard performances in that 2000 season, the third-best such skein in league history. Taylor is one of but 11 backs in NFL history to have rushes of 40 or more yards in three straight games.

But those achievements are all Kodak snapshots in a career that would be a very long highlight film without all the injuries.

"Look, stuff happens, especially at the position I play," Taylor said Friday evening. "You can't dwell too much on it. All you can do is look ahead and see the positives. I'm positive that, without getting hurt, I can lead the NFL in rushing. There's no end to the things I can do. And I do believe that with the extra (conditioning) I did this offseason things will be fine. I don't want to be adding to that injury list."

	"	When he's whole, I mean 100 percent physically, he's in an elite class. There aren't many guys who compare to him in terms of being able to do so many things. "
		— John Lynch, Bucs safety on Fred Taylor

A strained shoulder and concussion cost Taylor three games in his rookie season of 1998. In '99, a hamstring pull sidelined him for six contests. He missed three games in 2000 with a strained medial collateral ligament. But nothing could compare to last season, for Taylor or for the Jaguars.

Despite the efforts of backup tailback Stacey Mack in 2001, the Jaguars ranked 26th in rushing offense, principally because of Taylor's absence with a severe groin injury. The injury, in which the abductor tendon was partially detached from the bone, occurred in the second game of the season. For the rest of the year, the Jaguars listed Taylor as "questionable" every week, and even suggested he might return after only a month of rehabilitation.

Taylor knew the injury -- which he described as "getting a sling blade and putting it up your (rear end)" -- was more debilitating than the franchise publicly acknowledged during the season. It probably should have landed him on injured reserve for the year, but instead the team kept dangling this carrot to the fans, the hint that Taylor might be back at some point. The way the Jaguars handled the injury left Taylor disillusioned and created tension between he and coach Tom Coughlin.

A truce has been declared, both men cognizant that each needs the other. For his future financial independence, Taylor, one of the players who lost millions to former agent Tank Black, has to perform in an offense where he will get the ball. And even if the Jags had Smith and McCardell back again, Coughlin is aware that you win by running in the NFL.

"We've got to hammer people more with the running game," said Coughlin, "and Fred allows us to do that."

Indeed, the four-year veteran can be a battering ram. And the Jags, whose 6-10 record in 2001 was their worst since the franchise's inaugural '96 season, need him to be just that. For all their woes of a year ago, the Jaguars were surprisingly competitive in most outings. Jacksonville lost six contests by seven or fewer points, a half-dozen games by four or fewer.

Not coincidentally, Taylor didn't play in any of those games, and there is little doubt he would have made a difference in some of them.

"It hurt the team and it hurt me too," Taylor said of his absence. "It just made me sick to have to sit and watch stuff going on. That's not going to happen again."

Len Pasquarelli is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com.