Now that the long NFL career of Terrell Owens is presumably over a summary statement about him is in order. My defense of Terrell Owens is limited to his time as a football player in high school, college, and the NFL. His life, post NFL, will likely be good theatre if one is turned on by unpredictability and tragic endings. Terrell Owens outside of his football career is like a fish out of water. It would be hard to imagine anyone less prepared for life after NFL football than Terrell Owens.
The very ingredients which made him a success in life as a wide receiver are inoperable outside this goal. These ingredients included:
A belief that he was special
A belief that he could trust no one, that others would do everything to bring him down.
A belief that he had to run over, around, or through every hurdle in his way on his own.
A belief that his own will power, focus, and training program could take him to the top of of his profession.
A tremendous need to be alone, a need to be honest no matter what the consequences, a need to be non-forgiving and be a one man band about his own achievements.
A burning desire to be somebody, to see his name in print, on TV and do this without granting any personal access to media commentators and most beat reporters. He considered them all enemies.
I am not aware of any other football player----with such little innate ability (he was never the center of attention, let alone spoiled by coaches and peers in high school or college---who got to the top on his terms utilizing all the ingredients above. I am not aware of any other football player who was a good citizen, had no criminal or bad behaviors off the field, and yet whose persona fired up more antagonists from the media and many fans as Terrell Owens. As long as he could pile up the stats they could not bring him down, although the effort to do so went on for more than a dozen years. During all these years no wide receiver trained harder, focused more, or played harder in the game than T.O.
There is a heavy price to pay for this route to the top. T.O. could never have gotten to the top probably any other way. It would be hard to find anyone who could duplicate his effort and focus. For that I admired him and always will.
All his long time detractors are having a field day now. He is a fish out of water thrashing around, no longer able to do the only thing he ever prepared himself to do---be a wide receiver in the NFL. To the delight of his detractors and the sadness of his supporters,Terrell is his usual brutally honest self when he says he feels like he has no friends. Of course he never really had any close friends his entire football career or life. All his teammates and coaches said repeatedly he was unapproachable as a friend. Whenever Terrell Owens was spotted in public he was almost always by himself. There never was any 'posse' at any point in his career. It would be hard to imagine just who he would thank, outside of his Grandmother and himself, for his success in football. He really was self-made.
Terrell, in any social setting, is vulnerable. For him to succeed in anything outside of football he would need a whole new set of personal qualities. To expect this is probably a bit much. I suppose, if he could set his focus on something new with the same qualities he applied to football, he could pull something or other off. This seems unlikely. Maybe he needs to be like Ricky Williams and get away from people and go off to the wilderness and live amongst a group seeking contentment via alternate lifestyles. What he probably should not do now is continue to set himself up for ridicule and contempt for his unique personal qualities (or failures if one wishes to label them such). He is 38 years old now and he can find solace in that it took that many years for his detractors to be able to dance on his grave, so to speak. How many other kids from his neighborhood came close to his achievements? They are all still, relatively speaking, nobodies. He reached his goal, to be somebody, and thrived in it for a good twenty years, his way, a one man band.
T.O., from the get-go of his focused rise to the top of his profession, envisioned that his performance on the football field would determine his status as a worthy person. He was incapable of giving a piece of himself to media commentators or fans---to dance to their tunes--- as an additional price to pay for their respect. Political commentators, like Peter King of Sports Illustrated, depend heavily on personal access to football players---their 'unknown sources'--- for their character assassinations or hero worship of star players. Many fans expect a player to fit into their own perceptions of humility and form of celebration. In neither area did Terrell have anything to offer them. It is no crime, it need be noted, for anyone to remain aloof from others. Peter King's vocabulary, in his references to Terrell Owens, reflects the kind of retorts expected from a 14 year old ghetto kid on a neighborhood playground, not a professional sport commentator. Terrell, to King, was referred to as "Mr. Glass groin", "wack-job Owens", "wacko", "nuttier than a fruit cake", "a little bit off", "jerk", "stupid" etc. At the same time King relentlessly character assassinated Owens, he portrayed Brett Favre's character, in endless lengthy articles, as the 'perfect' idol for a sports hero. This is not football reporting, it is cheap ass juvenile soap opera character garbage. In essence Terrell was being asked to dance to the tune of others as the price for any recognition of his achievement on the football field. King and others, not remotely close to Terrell personally, even demanded he be thrown out of the NFL.
To Terrell's credit, he never once, to my knowledge ever used such derogatory adjectives about anyone. He is, always has been, and continues to be, a gentlemen in his comments about others. His strongest statements about others consist of such statements as "I was not the one who got tired", "You don't talk to me unless I talk to you first", "Who can make a big play? I can", "I am going to love me some me", etc. Even in his latest appearance with three angry women about child support, he refused to character assassinate any of them on TV and just sat there and took their attacks about his inability to relate to them. For T.O., with precious few exceptions, the character assassination is always a one way street. He will talk forever about himself, and it basically stops there. Others really are not part of his world, period. That too, is remarkable. Most people, called the kind of names Peter King called him, respond in kind. Terrell never did. His comment when asked to respond was "They are paid to do what they do and they are good at it. There is nothing I can do about it".
As much as I have studied his personality, I cannot begin now, just as no one has been able to do prior to now, predict his future. I spend a lot of time analyzing famous people, and Terrell is right up there with Lincoln when it comes to a wall of personal impenetrability. As a friend of mine would say, T.O.'s a 'piece of work'. Strangely, such 'pieces of work' usually have tragic endings. What Terrell is, is extremely 'different'. That is hardly grounds for the kind of character assassination he has been relentlessly subjected to. He really doesn't owe any of us an apology for not tap dancing to our tunes. It does give everyone, including Terrell, pause to wonder just how much such intense focus to achieve a goal, is worth. He got twenty years of success at what he does. Had he danced to the tune of others he would have had a lifetime of being another nobody. In that context he achieved a lot, and is now paying a stiff price. Age, as it is for all great athletes, is one hurdle even T.O. can't run through, over, or around. At the other side of this hurdle is a stone wall. Turn out the lights, the party's over. Well, not for his detractors. For them the party has just begun. They'll tire of it in due time.
