2 Boys From the Rural South (Ala/Miss)—T.O. and ‘Sweetness’
These two NFL stars would seem to have little in common, except they actually have a lot in common. Terrell Owens was born in Alexander City, a dirt poor community with about 14,000 people and Walter Payton was born in Columbia, Mississippi, a dirt poor community with about 6,000 people. Their communities were similar—mostly poor and black. Neither families had any money and were dirt poor. From this region and environment their lives proceeded in an interesting fashion.
My sources for Terrell Owen are multiple and extensive since I have been intrigued by his personality for some time. The source for the snippets about Walter Paton are exclusively from the book ‘Sweetness’ by Jeff Pearlman. Except for Walter’s wife, the book has not come under fire from most others who knew Walter Payton. For both athletes, those who knew them well have been generous enough with praise and affection, excluding a spouse and significant or insignificant others. Both athletes believed intensely in God; both rarely went to church; both strongly believed that God was their biggest fan; and when things went sour—well, “God behaves in mysterious ways” or “God has other plans for me in life”, etc. Both athletes were extremely self focused about their athletic performances and league records they sought to break. Terrell Owens was irritatingly open about it; Walter Payton camouflaged it, with public statements to the contrary, stating that the only thing which mattered was whether the team won, not who had the best stats in the game. Payton’s teammates and coaches knew otherwise, but didn’t care since no one took a more fierce physical punishment every game than Walter Payton. Walter wasn’t very big, and was all bruised up most of the season. In his teammates’ mind he earned the right to be selfish. When Sweetness was denied the ball enough he pouted, when T.O. was denied the ball enough he exploded, and often intimidated a quarterback to change the play in the huddle. That raised a storm in San Francisco, and the storm was fierce enough that with ensuing teams, it happened less often because coaches, to keep the boat afloat, made sure T.O. was an often enough a target and T.O. made sure to keep the pressure on. Always a tense situation.
Sweetness grew up in an intact close knit family with a brother and a sister.
T.O. grew up in his grandmother’s house with his mother, a brother, and a sister. Although his father lived across the street T.O. never knew that until much older.
Sweetness developed an almost perfect physique, almost overnight, without any weight training until late in high school.
T.O. had little natural athletic talent and was not even a starter in high school and most of college.
Sweetness had the run of the neighborhood and was well liked by his peers. He was, even back then, very much a ‘somebody’ in the community, among schoolmates and school coaches.
T.O. was only allowed out of the house by his grandmother to go to school or to play sports, but when practice was over T.O. had to come home. Hardly anyone back then can remember much about him. He was very much a nobody. Even his bicycle could not be ridden outside his small yard.
Walter Payton was very much a mama’s boy.
Terrell Owens was very much a grandma’s boy
Walter Payton was ’special’ by the time he reached high school and ‘pampered’ like any other talented football player would be. Terrell Owens was kept isolated from other kids because his grandmother said he was ‘better’ than the other kids, that he was special, that God would only let him succeed in life if he never trusted anyone—that others would always try to keep him ‘down on the farm’, that he should always tell the truth and live with the consequences. Terrell Owens was a young ‘tattle-tale’ in school. When kids would gang up on him for squealing, at first he ran home, but his grandmother would not let him in, and sent him back to defend himself. The downside perhaps here is that T.O.learned not to fear conflict, that to stand your ground was what God and his grandmother wanted him to do. It was always Terrell Owens against everyone else. He vowed someday to be a somebody instead of a nobody. This vow became the total focus in his life, and centered about becoming the best possible wide receiver he could be.
Both were typical southern blacks of their day—-respectful, shy, and goal oriented. “Yes sir” was used by both and in T.O.’s case right up until his early days with San Francisco when Steve Young asked him to ‘cut it out’.
Walter Payton was taken in the first round of the NFlL draft by the Chicago Bears. He immediately became a star on the team, actually their biggest star. T.O. was taken 87th on the third round of the NFL draft by San Francisco. Jerry Rice was the star there and T.O. thus a virtual nobody.
Both, early in their careers were quiet, shy, and insecure. Sweetness remained that way his entire career. T.O. after a few years with San Francisco, created a football persona which became the T.O. personality. His former coaches seemed to all agree: There is Terrell Owens and there is T.O. Bill Walsh, once his San Francisco coach, said both personalities were the real thing.
Sweetness didn’t have to demand anything. He was the best running back and would get the ball as much as possible. T.O. was mired in competition and essentially developed his T.O. persona to maximize the pressure for the coach and quarterback to get the ball to him. He learned from Jerry Rice that there needed to be unpleasant consequences when the ball did not come his way often enough.
Both Sweetness and T.O. were friendly to everyone on the surface, but neither one tended to have close friends or share personal problems with others. Both lasted a lot of years in the NFL, and this longevity is especially noteworthy for Sweetness whose body took a real pounding out on the football field, year after year. Sweetness did develop a relatively close friendship with Roland Harper, Matt Suey, his agent, and his two personal assistants. T.O. seems to have never had any close relationship with anyone outside his grandmother who, by the time T.O. got picked by San Francisco, was in the beginning stage of Alzheimer’s disease and after a few years died.
T.O. never married. Sweetness did, early in his career, but it was soon a marriage in name only. Sweetness found early on that tons of pretty girls would slip him their number and he could have sex whenever he wanted. He became addicted to sex as an end in itself. He and his wife essentially lived in different houses. Sweetness had his wife, his significant other who was an airline flight attendant, and a huge cache of telephone numbers of girls from different cities. Mike Singletary, a very religious person, like most of Walter’s teammates, knew Walter was involved constantly with different women, and one time deliberately sat next to Walter on a plane and confronted him about all this. Walter never said a thing, just looked out the plane window, but Singletary could see the tears stream down his face. Sweetness went through life with internal torments.
Like Sweetness, T.O. had ready access to a lot of girls for sex. Both had endless telephone numbers for girls in city after city. With Sweetness, since this availability came early on in his career, it became a compulsive behavior. He didn’t hang with the guys after practice and he used sex as a therapy for his ego and to compensate for the physical pain he was often in. T.O.’s access to endless women started mostly after college and it never became compulsive. He compartmentalized his sexual life to Sunday and Mondays. After that he didn’t want any distractions of any sort for days of practice and game days. Sex on Monday and Tuesday was maybe like a substitute for masturbation. Sweetness was out in public a lot with girls; his wife knew but just viewed that as the price a wife pays to be married to a sports hero. T. O., on the other hand, was rarely seen in public with anyone, period. Sweetness hired mostly very competent women to handle his appointments, his publicity, his charities, and to keep his wife in the dark about most matters. These assistants were as close to him personally as probably anyone else in his life, and not in any sexual way. His agent, a southern white man who was his agent from the git-go was the one who protected Sweetness the most, and kept him from doing anything foolish—especially as it might affect his public image. T.O. had a publicist but not so much to advise him in any way, but just to keep all matters outside of his own training regimen away from him. He always had his own personal trainer. T.O. paid dearly for his inability to focus on anything other than football. All other aspects of his life, financial, and otherwise were loose cannons.
Sweetness was built with a strong durable body, but a body constantly in pain from all the hits on the field he was taking. He became addicted to pain killers and ate them like candy year after year. Back then there was little, if any, concern about the consequences for the punishment bodies were taking out on the football field. Tough men just toughed it out. Sweetness was maybe the toughest of all.
Sweetness was a ‘loner’ on the team, never drank, smoked, swore that much, or hung out with guys after practice.T.O. was also a ‘loner’ on the team, more so than Payton, and seldom spoke to other teammates until late in his career when he felt media pressure to at least act like his teammates existed. Unlike Sweetness, T.O. was a health nut and was absolutely obsessed with his diet and training methods. The exception was one time when some injury was painful. When the doctor prescribed some pain medication, perhaps not surprisingly, T.O. ate it like candy and ended up in the hospital when his assistant thought he was trying to commit suicide. All his enemies in the press thrived on that theory. Payton, on the other hand, ate junk food all the time. He was not health conscious by any means. Maybe it is not so surprising that he died at age 46 from a rare form of liver/bile duct cancer. Was this related to playing football? Who knows? Clearly his liver took a physical and chemical pounding year after year. Any conclusion would be speculative.
Both T.O. and Sweetness created public images of themselves which served their personal situation and personality. With Sweetness he saw value in being projected as a loving husband, father, all for the team and not himself, and friend to the less fortunate. Sweetness really did empathize with the less fortunate, especially those with severe conditions , but he also realized the media value in his acts of sympathy. He milked it endlessly. To his teammates Sweetness was an enigma, a sophomoric practical joker, but they liked him, saw the punishment he took on the field, and felt protective of him. Some felt his childish practical jokes, like constantly pulling someone’s pants down and endless other things high school boys do, were out of place in an adult locker room. But they pretty much all were very protective of Sweetness and Sweetness was always, on the surface, the picture of Sweetness to everyone. Whatever he was, he was not a mean person. T.O. either.
T.O.’s relationship with teammates was more enigmatic to an extreme. Nobody felt any need to protect him. No one in their right mind would pull his pants down as a joke. Or any other kind of joke on him either. Teammates and coaches treaded gingerly around him. He never bothered anyone except the coaches and his quarterback. No one knew over what, and when, T.O. might blow up. T.O.’s ego was right on his sleeve and his attention always directed to his own practice and play. Others, for the most part, didn’t exist. His coaches tended to marvel at his work ethic and focus, but were driven nuts by his temperament. He was not the kind of player any coach felt they had under control. When Wade Phillips, became his coach and the press asked how he planned to control T.O., he wisely replied: “ I am not here to control T.O. or any other player. I am here to help them become the very best player they can become.”
Both T.O. and Sweetness were very sensitive about how others treated them. Both were highly self centered when it came to their personal stats and any records they might be able to break. The difference was that while Sweetness pouted and got real quiet when he didn’t get the ball enough, especially when some sort of record was on the line, while T.O. simply exploded, saw it all as the conspiracy of others to not give him his due. Bill Walsh once explained that there was no way to know when T.O. might turn the whole boat over, that his perception of how others felt about him was not always the same as reality. Jerry Rice commented that “it was a mistake to ‘cross T.O., that T.O. would never forget or forgive any perceived slight.”
In Sweetness’s mind the world came to him and he, in turn, did his best to perform well. In T.O.’s mind the world would do everything it could to block his personal progress to be somebody and he, in turn, would run over, through, or around every hurdle others put in his way.
Sweetness felt uncomfortable meeting with the press and was not a good source of information for the press as he was very close-mouthed. But he was always polite and said the correct political things about any game or other players. He was big on saying the only thing important was the team winning, not his own performance, but he was just as concerned about his own stats as T.O. With T.O., the press was of course, just another form of the enemy. He didn’t befriend them anymore than he befriended anyone else. On the other hand the press was the means whereby T.O. could promote himself. And T.O. loved to do just that. And the more T.O. used the press to promote himself, the more they became antagonistic toward T.O. Sweetness let others do the promoting of his own image. T.O. promoted himself, a one man band, and in reality he really was a one man band. Outside his grandmother, who else would T.O. feel made him a success besides himself? In one sense no one ever gave anything to T.O. simply because he would take it himself before anyone could give it to him. If T.O. scored important touchdowns in a game no one made it faster to a microphone to herald his accomplishments than T.O. himself. His personal celebrations on the field are legendary. This irritated the press and many fans. His teammates were the least upset. They were used to it. A typical teammate would say, in various ways, “T.O. hardly ever speaks to me. But he never causes me any problem either. He works as hard or harder as anyone on the team to be ready on game day. We like having him on the team. He helps us win games. He is a good teammate.” His coaches, often frustrated by his volatile and unpredictable moods, almost never disliked him. He was their time bomb with talent and a short fuse. It is simply hard for a coach to hate an athlete who is so focused and tries so hard to be the very best he can be. As Steve Young, his quarterback at San Francisco said, “You can say whatever you want about T.O. off the field, but there is no criticism you can make about him once the game starts. He excels at all aspects of his position.” Vince Lombardi would have loved T.O.
Sweetness had an army of players, coaches, sport writers, and fans who would sing his praises for him. With T.O. he did the praising of himself— his coaches and players ended up doing the defending, and the press had a field day attacking him. Strangely, and it really is unique, T.O. hardly ever responded to his critics in any harsh terms, and never by name. T.O. was all about himself. It was not his nature to spend any time attacking any particular person. He is almost always, away from the field and press, very soft spoken, very articulate, very personable. People who only know T.O. from his press clips or what the press says about him, are invariably taken back by how different he seems in person. When a microphone is not in front of him, the T.O. persona disappears and the original Terrell Owens is what you get—the shy, friendly, humble, and thoughtful but detached person he is.
Both Sweetness and T.O. were/are really lonely people. They had so much of everything and yet they both felt very alone. Maybe a high percentage of ‘important people’ do. After every peak of success, for both Sweetness and T.O. came the feeling “This is all there is at the top? Where is the ultimate contentment of success?” When both aged and were forced into retirement by age related decline in performance—surprisingly, lovable Sweetness found himself more alone, bored, and depressed than T.O. He actually got less attention in retirement than T.O. currently gets. ‘Characters’ probably will always retain more public interest past their time. In one sense, T.O. has whole new aspects of life to which he can give some attention. The T.O. persona has no use for him these days, so it has slowly disappeared. In his 40’s T.O. is just starting to explore a social life, to interact more with others, to give thought to his finances, to be some kind of father to all his carelessly conceived offspring. Sweetness used protection with his sexual dalliances and T.O. did not. Sweetness only had one child out of wedlock and when that happened he signed an agreement to provide support for the child up until age 18, under the condition that he never has to see the child or have him publicly named as the father. And he never, to the day he died, would ever agree to see the boy. No Sweetness there.
Both Sweetness and T.O. actually get along well with children, at least for the little time they are around them. The two kids of Payton actually love him despite the extent to which he neglected them when growing up. When present he was always attentive to them. Only when T.O. retired did he make any real attempt to spend any time with his several out of wedlock kids. T.O. has no use for the mothers as he suspects it was all a career plan of theirs to have sex, have a child, then collect $40,000 a month for child support. Just by coincidence, none of these women ever married anyone, perhaps lest the child support payments stop. Who knows? That stuff is a real messy arena.
Sweetness was never, like most professional athletes, very sharp when it came to business ventures. At death he was well off, but not real wealthy. T.O. is harder to pinpoint since he has been in court endlessly to get child support payments reduced. You do that by pleading poverty and try to hide your money every which place. T.O. probably has been as unsuccessful at business as Sweetness, and maybe more so, or maybe less so. No way to really know. One thing is for sure. His income, each year, is far more than the vast majority of people who are retired.
Both Sweetness and T.O. are remembered well and affectionately by their former coaches and players. The only head coach who refrains from kind words about T.O. is Jason Garrett of the Cowboys and he says nothing, less he gain the ire of Jerry Jones, the owner. The Cowboy situation between owner, coach, and players has always been a three ring circus since Jerry Jones became the owner. Steve Mariucci, coach of T.O. at San Francisco, has the most reason to hate T.O., but he does not and simply says, “I love the guy, but he drove me nuts”. It must be remembered that the persona of T.O. was created under his watch and Mariucci was blindsided by it. Other subsequent coaches knew what they were getting, and found their own ways to keep T.O. under control, at least most of the time. What coach, out of the blue, wants to find out a given player is changing the play call in the huddle? And even worse, the different play called was successful more often than not. What a ego challenge that is. Other coaches found their own ways for T.O. to give input in ways which protected their ego. But that is vintage T.O.. to demand a certain play be called when he sees an opening for himself to make a big play. Since he was mostly right in the result, T.O. rationalized that since the object is to win the game he did what he had to do. In his case, without doubt, the motivation was to increase his own stats.
He forced his release from Philly when he realized Philly never intended to give him the big salaries promised in a long term contract. In football, the owners can walk away from a contract any year they choose to. The players cannot. The Philly Owner was one of the first owners to get a player to sign a long term contract with huge salaries at the back end, which he never intended to pay. When T.O. saw what was happening to others when they hit the back end, he was furious at having been duped into his contract. He watched Philly rewrite the contract for Donovan McMann and decided his contract should be rewritten too. Told that this was the kind of thing done for productive quarterbacks, not wide receivers he went ballistic. T.O. was not being paid as much as any of the top ten receivers. He could hear his grandmother’s voice telling him “They will do anything to keep you down, not give you your due, don’t you let them get away with it.” The fans had loved him since with him they almost won the Super Bowl, but fans are always fair-weather beasts, and they could care less about where T.O. stood on any salary scale. All players the fans felt, made way too much money and they should be grateful. T.O. didn’t hold out, he just refused to speak to anyone except his wide receiver coach. He never gave in, which surprised no one, and Philly had to release him. Dallas picked him up and made him one of the highest paid wide receivers. T.O.never forgave Donovan for not supporting him in his contract dispute.
All T.O.’s quarterbacks except Romo and to some extent Donovan, defend T.O. and for good reason. Most, including Romo and Donovan, only made it to the pro bowl, with few exceptions, when T.O. was on the team. For all the pressure he put on them, he made them look good. With Romo, it is personal. Romo felt pressure to be the leader of the team, but many on the team considered T.O. the leader—faults and all. T.O.’s attempt, at this point in his career, to be more involved with his teammates backfired, bit him in the ass. The Cowboys let T.O. go so that Romo could be the undisputed leader, and probably also realized T.O. was past his peak age wise. Of course, you really can’t make anybody be a leader, and if a quarterback is a good quarterback, there is no need to make him a leader. He is certainly the most important player out on the field, leader or no leader. The current locker room leaders of the Cowboys all have huge emotional and criminal problems. One such leader, at least for a time, required round the clock security guards to protect the public from such a leader. I guess it is all good theatre.
Finally, both Sweetness and T.O. are lucky they are not coming into the league today. Sweetness would never last that many years any more. The players are bigger, faster, and stronger than in the past. Even Payton’s body would never have held up so many years in today’s game. And T.O. would not fare well either. The goal of most every team today is to spread the ball out to many receivers as part of the game plan. The days of feeding the ball to the best receiver so much of the time are over. It will be hard to catch Jerry Rice, T.O. and Randy Moss in the record book with the ball being spread around so much in modern football. With computers so much involved in game plans this trend is not likely to get reversed.
Lives like the above raise endless questions about life itself. I never have met T.O., no particular reason I need to. I did stand next to Walter Payton at a car show in Chicago when he was in his heyday and only remember he was hardly taller than I. He weighed however 80 lbs more than I and it was all muscle. So I guess he is like me with 80 lbs more muscle. I have often been asked why I admired T.O. and the way he got to the top of his profession. Given his environment and lack of raw athletic talent, it is extremely unusual for anyone to go as far as he did, to end up as one of the best at his profession all by himself. My own teaching profession put me in contact with hundreds of students born in similar pockets of poverty as T.O. Had he been in one of my classes I probably would never have seen him outside of sitting in class. He would find a way to learn the material on his own. Young people like T.O. have all kinds of hurdles that need to be cleared for them to make any progress with a successful career. Even when helped over some hurdles, endless other hurdles remain, and most such young people, at some point, just run out of energy. They settle for less and never get to the top. T.O. may or may not get to the Hall of Fame. Who gets in there is determined by the media, and much of the media really dislike T.O. But even if he does get in, who is he going to thank for helping him get to the top? He is a rare person who really did it his way. This is not to say that many people, at different points in his career, did not want to help him. But he simply would not trust anyone, and probably still does not.
Modern science indicates we all have a certain amount of willpower, and it can be used up. T.O. essentially focused all his willpower on one single pursuit. He never spread his willpower out to other areas. The trade off is the chaos in other parts of his life. Walter Payton was a born athlete and he did not need to expend all of his willpower on football. He had a social life, a family, an army of assistants and mentors. So they both got to the top via different routes. Poor Sweetness took a terrible pounding year after year and was dead by age 46. Payton believed if someone was going to tackle him, he needed to be sure he hurt them as much as they were about to hurt him. T.O., especially after a couple of serious injuries, would step out of bounds when a collision was about to happen. Some called it unmanly, T.O. called it stupid to take serious hits for no reason. Payton took it foot by foot, T.O. rounded it out in yards. He thought the foot by foot goal was chump change outside the goal line area.
Both of these athletes are intriguing, likable, and yet with their share of human flaws. There is a steep cost to get to the top of the football profession. Is the cost worth it? Sweetness could have at least escaped from dire poverty based on his other inherent talents and personality. T.O.? Not sure of that, his escape was far more difficult given his limited natural abilities, personality, and home environment. On the other hand one could argue that without his ‘strange’ grandmother, where would T.O. be? Probably in a low paying job or in jail. In the last analysis, while the T.O. persona grates on a lot of people, there are few, if any, football players on any team with him who felt he in any way interfered with their own chances to succeed. He made the team look better by his performance on the field. His work ethic and focus had more of an impact on player attitude than any personal interaction with him could have ever made. In the end the players on his teams were right when they would say, in one way or another that: “T.O. helps us win games. We like having him on the field during games, he is a good teammate.”
If there was a WillPower Hall of Fame, T.O. would be a shoo-in. Unfortunately willpower is difficult to accurately measure. For most who succeed it is a combination of willpower and talent. And some people with huge willpower succeed by simply exterminating those in their way——Hitler, Stalin, etc are good examples there. Some of the people who have done the most good for society had little more going for them early on but huge willpower. What did Lincoln have going for him at age 21 but his willpower. But this whole topic of willpower gets tangled up with talent at some point. Isn’t strong willpower a talent? T.O. did use his willpower to get to the top, but there are few, if any, destroyed careers in his wake. The media tried to paint T.O. as throwing his quarterbacks under the bus. Really, how many of his quarterbacks ever made the Pro Bowl when T.O. was not on the team? Not very often.
So ‘Sweetness’ and T.O. had a lot in common personality-wise but how they advanced was affected by natural talent vs acquired talent at their position.
Teammates, for the most part, appreciated both of them. Coaches, for the most part, appreciated both of them, albeit T.O. was by far a greater challenge for coaches. Almost all fans and the media loved ‘Sweetness’. Most fans and the media disliked “T.O.” and his “I am going to love me some me.” Had T.O. been the first player to leap into the stands after a touchdown, a suspension and huge fine would have been the result. “Now that crazy SOB is leaping into the stands.” Peter King would have renewed his demand that Terrell Owens be banned from football. But aside from his ‘irritating’ personality, what crimes has T.O. committed? He has been a perfect citizen, he has no criminal record, no off the field acts of violence, and if his teammates, coaches, and quarterbacks are not against him as a person or teammate, the basis to make him out a ‘bad guy’ crumbles for lack of reality. If ‘I am not the one who got tired” and ‘if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck” are about the only statements used to claim he threw teammates under a bus. He apologized for the latter comment and has long been forgiven by the player involved.
In the end, ‘Sweetness got the shorter end of the stick.” He died young, mostly likely in part from the huge beating his body took out on the football field. There is no comparison there. T.O. had a bigger well developed body and was perhaps the best physically trained football player out there. Walter was well built to sustain the pounding with bones and muscles a physiological wonder, but organs like the liver are stressed from all the bruises received while being jostled around. He wasn’t even a big person so what there was of him felt the full concentration of those hits. 46 is a young age to die. The fast lane was too much for Walter, a simple kind of person from a rural ghetto. Maybe ‘all that glitters’ is not gold. Of course Walter had a good 30 years of good living.
T.O. was never in the ‘fast lane’ of social life. He was never even out of his own little bubble in life until he was out of football. What his fate will be the rest of his life is, like his earlier life, an enigma. He remains a ‘loner’ but he gets enough attention from varied sources that he seems, in some respects, to be slowly having some sort of adult ‘childhood’, at least in the sense he is more aware of others, his kids, his financial situation, and even tries out all sorts of new adventures like bowling, diving, some media commentary, acting, and whatever. Shorn now of his created T.O. persona, perhaps he is becoming aware that not everyone is his enemy. At least now people are not in the way of his short term goals. Perhaps he will fare well as an aging loner. Time will tell.
