Love Me, Hate Me, Just Don't Ignore Me
As you're planning your Super Bowl party this year, give a thought to future Hall of Famer Terrell Owens. He's out of work, out of money, and currently in court with all four of his baby mamas. And now for the part that really depresses him: For the first time in his long, checkered, and spectacular career, nobody wants to throw him the ball
by Nancy Hass
Photograph by Peter Yang
February 2012
On a weekday night just before Thanksgiving, he's seated at a banquet-sized dining table in his three-bedroom Los Angeles condo, Real Wives of Whatever blaring on the flat-screen in the living room a few feet away. He looks at his phone, hoping for a text from the pals he's been trying to hook up with for weeks. He wants to meet at the lanes nearby for a few frames and some laughs, but it's looking bad again tonight. "People get busy, you know," he says. His lean legs twitch; the famously cut six-foot-three frame, still impossibly taut at almost 38, bends slightly back in the chair like a loaded catapult. He's wearing a hoodie and basketball shorts, and his earlobes glisten with the dime-sized diamond discs he's worn for years.
Bowling is his escape, one he wishes had been there for him on those sweaty teenage nights in the Alabama town where he grew up, skinny and unpopular, so dark-skinned that the other black kids razzed him nonstop, and later, to take the edge off marathon weight-lifting sessions at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He learned to bowl for a charity event early in his stint with the 49ers, and he hit the lanes whenever he could during the fifteen seasons he spent in the NFL, racking up stats that make him one of the greatest wide receivers in league history—second only to Jerry Rice in career receiving yards—and a likely first-ballot Hall of Famer. Bowling is chill, especially for a guy like him who never did like the clubs, never drank much or bothered with drugs. And a massive chill is what Owens—idle, adrift, desperate for cash, fending off rumors about his mental health—needs right now. Bad.
Since last spring, when the Cincinnati Bengals declined to renew his one-year, $2 million contract, Owens has been a man without a team, making him arguably football's most talented unemployed player. Plenty of teams could use a receiver of Owens's caliber, there's no question about that, but no one has made even a lowball offer. His agent, Drew Rosenhaus, has tried to drum up interest by hinting that some unnamed club is sniffing around, but nothing has materialized.
Which leaves T.O. a caged cat for the first time in his career, pacing the 1,800-square-foot apartment he paid $499,000 for in October 2010, circling the maroon and silver velvet chairs that a decorator helped him choose, stepping past the pile of dirty laundry in the long hall, picking at a pan of brown rice on the stove. He plays pickup basketball when he can—the game was his first love—and softball in a rec league run by Jamie Foxx, but that's not enough to keep his mind off things. Praying helps; he's taken to attending a local Presbyterian church, a world away from his Southern Baptist roots. "It's preppy. At the part where we say 'Amen,' they say 'Indeed.' "
Still, the season ticks by—Sunday, Monday, Sunday, Monday—every week a blur, all the way through December and into the playoffs, and the disbelief mounts.
They know they need me. Why don't they pick up the phone?
···
It's not that he isn't ready to play. T.O. works out three hours a day, starting at 6 a.m.
You could argue that he's old. You could argue that it's the knee. He tore his ACL after he was released by the Bengals and kept the injury a secret until he had surgery in June. But he's not buying it. He suspects, no, he knows that's not what is making owners and coaches wary. After all, his history as a miracle healer—that's "good" T.O., the bionic superstar who broke his leg yet started in Super Bowl XXXIX for Philadelphia less than two months later—is legend. He's been rehabbing like a mother, as he always does, three hours a day, starting at 6 a.m. And didn't he and Rosenhaus stage a workout weeks ago on the Calabasas High School field that was televised on ESPN, to prove to the world he was 100 percent? That not a single team scout came to check him out seemed to suggest that it isn't his knee, or at least not just that. Hell, if there were any doubts about his health, why wouldn't they invite him in on a Tuesday for a private workout, like they do with other free agents, just to keep their options open as injuries pile up?
It's his mouth, that unhinged gusher of an orifice with its gleaming slice of teeth. Or at least memories of the chemistry-killing vitriol that spewed from that mouth during his time with San Francisco, Philadelphia, Dallas. And how he punctuated the raw stream of consciousness with a magic bag of clever if ultimately self-destructive antics once the play ended: the spike on the "sacred" Dallas star logo in 2000, the Sharpie pulled from his sock to sign a ball after a 2002 touchdown against the Seahawks, the 2006 Thanksgiving Day TD after which he blithely deposited the ball into a huge Salvation Army kettle. "In terms of what I said, well, my grandma brought me up to be honest," he says, fidgeting with a set of Buckyballs, those tiny stubborn magnets that won't let go. "And in terms of what I did, well, I will tell you this, and you will never be able to convince me otherwise, if another player who had performed as well as I have on the field had done those same things, they would shake their little heads and say, 'You gotta admire his enthusiasm,' or, 'Just look at how much he loves the game!' He'd be a hero."
Owens may have had a mediocre 2009–2010, his one year with Buffalo, but you can't say he didn't bring it last season in Cincinnati: seventy-two catches and nine TDs for nearly a thousand yards (easily besting his pal, ten-year Bengals vet Chad Ochocinco). And in both cities, he achieved something more: a modicum of restraint. There was nary an end-zone shimmy or a tactless remark (at least about his current teammates or coaches) to reporters. But it turns out to be hard to live down the reputation as team poison, to convince owners that he's not a hand grenade without a pin, a petulant attention grabber with unresolved childhood trauma, a man in serious need of mood stabilizers.
"It's not his knee that's the problem; it's his attitude," says an executive at one of the better teams, who didn't want to be named. The ratio that once made it worth it for owners to sign him—two parts genius to two parts trouble—has shifted now that he is not quite as fast, his body not as reliable. "He may have been less openly divisive with the Bengals," the exec continues, "but you can't live down the destruction of all those years. With T.O., no matter how brilliant he can be on the field, the dark side is always lurking. You don't know which T.O. you're going to get, and no one is comfortable risking that."
To Owens, this reputation as human nitroglycerin is a matter of perception—a perception twisted by reporters. He has written a pair of autobiographies, and his most recent attempt to show the public who he really is was his reality program, The T.O. Show, which ran on VH1 from July 2009 until this past November. A "follow" show that aimed to track his movements during three off-seasons, it was packaged for the network by Monique Jackson and Kita Williams, two sassy women who for years had been his closest female friends and appeared on the show as his "publicists and business partners." He cooperated, he says, "to expose a new audience, a more female audience, to me as a human being beyond the macho sports personality." The show was, of course, massaged to make the messy narrative of his life more cogent, but co-producer Jesse Ignjatovic, a reality-show veteran, said he had never worked with a celebrity so willing to let down his guard. "I can't imagine another NFL player who would let us film while he told his mother, who relied on him, that he was going broke, someone who wouldn't hold back tears while he stood there in her kitchen."
But the media roundly scoffed at the idea of a "new" T.O., and Owens responded as he always has: defensively. "They, you, need a bad guy," he fumes, refilling his tall glass of springwater as the hostility in the room grows thick. Around each wrist are two-inch-wide rubber bracelets embossed with words in black and white: LOVE ME HATE ME. "I think people change, but the media, they never allowed me to change. They never allowed me to be a better person."
Under similar circumstances, a lesser talent with a smaller ego might eat crow and feign gratitude. Owens's lack of contrition is either principled or plain crazy, considering how much he needs to play. Not just the kind of "need" you see in superstars whose egos are wrapped up in being in the limelight, the ones who can't let go as age slows them down. Needs it, as he's not afraid to admit. Owens may have made a lot of money in his career—at least $80 million—but he insists almost all of it is gone.
It's not a matter of having lived too large—he was never the type to stockpile Ferraris or build himself a compound; the flashiest car he ever drove was a Mercedes, and while he indeed racked up a few homes that cost as much as $4 million, the only crib he classifies as even mildly sick by pro-ball standards was the one he bought in Atlanta to live in during the Philly off-season.
The problem, he says, is that he's by nature too trusting, loyal to a fault, despite everyone's carping that he's selfish. It's the sad old stereotypical song of the up-from-nothing black athlete: He let other people take care of things. He says his financial advisers (informally recommended by Rosenhaus) put him in a series of risky, highly leveraged ventures that he didn't discover until autumn 2010, when he finally demanded a full accounting. And of course there were the houses and condos, which he had always figured he could rent out; they became dead weight when the real estate market collapsed in 2008. Individually they weren't terribly lavish, but together the mortgage nut is reportedly almost $750,000 a year. The Atlanta house is on the market; the south Jersey place he paid $3.9 million for was sold for $1.7 million in late 2010. Most egregious of all was the ill-fated Alabama entertainment complex (with an electronic-bingo component) that cost him $2 million. He invested, he says, at the suggestion of his advisers and a lawyer they steered him to, Pamela Linden. The venture turned out to be illegal in the state, not to mention a violation of the NFL's policy prohibiting players from investing in gambling. Owens is suing Linden, as is Clinton Portis, the former Redskins running back who also invested. (Several other players and the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. also got sucked into the venture.)
"I hate myself for letting this happen," he says. "I believed that they had my back when they said, 'You take care of the football, and we'll do the rest.' And in the end, they just basically stole from me."
A spokesman for Linden would say only that "we did not represent the athletes on this specific investment." The financial adviser, Jeff Rubin, declined to comment. (Rubin appears to have shut down his firm, Fort Lauderdale–based Pro Sports, a few months ago. In September, he was arrested on drug charges in connection with the alleged rape of a female employee.)
"When Drew [Rosenhaus] heard about what had happened with my money, he said, 'Oh man, is there anything I can do?' " says Owens, pushing back from the table with disgust. "And I said, 'Dude, are you going to give me my money back? I don't think so, so why bother trying to appease me?' " ("In my opinion," says Rosenhaus, "the conversation did not go down that way." )
On top of it all, a few months ago Owens says that a friend, "a guy who I'd helped when his grandmother passed," had slowly drained one of his accounts of more than $270,000. The bank eventually returned the money, he says, but "it pretty much destroyed whatever trust in people I had left." He never had many friends—teammates never called him to party, he says, wrongly assuming that he was "too big" to socialize—and now, "I don't have no friends. I don't want no friends. That's how I feel."
Friends may not be calling, or teams, but lawyers, a slew of them, definitely have him on speed dial. Especially those who represent the four women to whom he pays a total of $44,600 a month in child support for his four children, ages 5 to 12: "If there's anything I'm sorry about, it's getting involved with all that." He never actually dated any of the women, he says. One was a one-night stand, the others "repeat offenders." Owens, who has never been married, concedes he is "not a very good judge of character." Still, he "never suspected they were the types to do what they done in the past year."
Last summer, when the money started to dry up for real and the extent of his financial disaster became clear, he reduced the amount he paid to each of the women. Three of them sued him. When he failed to show up for a court date with the mother of his oldest child, Tariq, because it conflicted with his public tryout, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. "She wouldn't reschedule," he says, his hands reaching out unconsciously as if strangling an imaginary neck. "She'd pressed me in a deposition about if I intended to try to get on another team, but then when I do the workout, do what I can to get work, this is what she does."
Now he is in court with all four women, whom he lumps together like one big bloodsucking blob. None of them are being fair, he says: "They know I'm not working; they know the deal." Although he never established regular visitation with any of the children through the courts, he says he sees the eldest three as much as he can when their mothers allow it. So bitter is his relationship with the mother of the youngest child, a son, that he has never met the boy.
···
Even in the NFL, where tales of brutal childhoods and absent fathers are as common as concussions, Terrell Owens's story stands out. Raised mostly by his joyless Baptist grandmother, who kept the kids inside her tiny, dark home virtually every moment they weren't in school and sometimes drank so much she passed out, he discovered the hard way at age 11 who his father was: after he developed a crush on the girl across the street. Only then was he told that she was his half-sister, that his father, married with four kids, had been living closer than a field's length away all those years. In his 2004 autobiography, Catch This!: Going Deep with the NFL's Sharpest Weapon, Owens wrote that growing up he never heard the words "I love you," not even from his grandmother, whose photo he carried on the road with him for most of the years he played. In an episode of The T.O. Show, he went back to his hometown of Alexander City, Alabama, for what was supposed to be a confrontation with his father about all the missed years, but instead it wound up a sad and awkward reminder of a life of unrequited longing. "I had two jobs, I was busy," was all his dad could muster.
Owens knows that not having had a father or the chance to learn social skills beyond his grandmother's insular world is at the heart of why he acts as he does, how he bristles at authority and says things that may be true yet are obviously not in his long-term interest. And he worries that he is revisiting the sins of his father on his own son, Atlin, the 5-year-old he's never seen. The producers of his show had him consult with a therapist on-camera, and what the woman said about the cycle he was perpetuating really got to him, motivating him to call Atlin's mother to try to see the boy. So far, though, that hasn't happened.
Despite how fluidly he places blame on others—coaches, the media, his baby mamas, his financial advisers—this is one instance in which he accepts responsibility: "At some point, you have to grow up, man up," he says. "My childhood, it wasn't the Huxtables. So what?"
I'M IN HELL. That's what he texts back to people who ask where he is. "He's stronger than anyone I know, but he's under a lot of pressure, to put it mildly," says one of his few close friends, Matthew Hatchette, a former NFL wide receiver and frequent bowling buddy who coaches high school football in the Valley. It's enough to drive a man to dangerous lows. But all that talk about T.O.'s alleged suicide attempts, the one in 2006 and then another, just a few months ago, that surfaced when TMZ released the 911 call from his assistant? A misunderstanding, he says.
On that night in late October, he had taken a couple of Ambiens and was on the phone with the mother of his off-and-on girlfriend, Kari Klinkenborg, a six-foot-tall, 26-year-old former college volleyball player-cum-model he met in Miami. "Kari's mom got a bit concerned," he says, when she heard him nod off on the other end of the line. She called his assistant, Adrienne Williams, who panicked when she arrived at his condo and found an empty bottle of painkillers prescribed for his knee. "She didn't know I'd put the pills away in a drawer," he says. In the 911 call, Williams confirmed to the operator that she suspected a suicide attempt. "I know I should have counted these," she says, referring to the pills.
It might be argued that an assistant who berates herself for not keeping track of how many pills her boss is downing is an assistant who thinks it's a distinct possibility he may take too many. But Owens insists he wasn't trying to kill himself. "The hospital released me that night," he says. "If they thought I was suicidal or I hadn't been conscious, you ask yourself, would they have let me go that night?"
As for the 2006 incident, when he was taken to the hospital after swallowing too much hydrocodone (a painkiller) and was found unresponsive by his publicist, who pried two pills out of his mouth, he says that was an allergic reaction in combination with a dietary supplement. (At a press conference the day afterward, the publicist famously denied Owens was trying to commit suicide, saying, "Terrell Owens has 25 million reasons to stay alive.") In that case, as well, he was released just hours later, and practiced with the Cowboys the next day.
He has never taken medication to help regulate his moods, he says, and doesn't think he has ever been clinically depressed, "but that doesn't mean I don't get real down. I'm human; that's what people don't realize. I may be a public figure, but really, I'm just like a guy who could be in your family and have some difficult things happen to him."
···
If there's one word Owens can't abide, it's regret. The mere sound of the syllables sends ripples of discomfort across his face. His grandmother, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's soon after San Francisco picked him in the third round of the 1996 draft and hasn't recognized him for years, always told him: "Never regret anything." They talked bad about Jesus, she would remind him, so you know they're going to talk bad about you.
"To say I regret anything would be a slap in my grandmother's face," he says. "Are there some things I might do differently now? Sure."
Such as?
"Some of the things in Philadelphia." He sits back in his chair, seeming to catalog the events in his head: proclaiming that he didn't care what fans thought of him, the locker-room tussle with his teammate Hugh Douglas, the various flare-ups with Donovan McNabb. But definitely not his attempt to renegotiate his $49 million, heavily back-loaded contract. "I was not paid competitively, and that was that," he says. "The teams talk about how we should keep to our end of the bargain, but then they dump you at the point at which you'd actually start earning out, and that is supposed to be okay. Why don't they need to keep up their end?"
How about the decision not to publicly apologize to McNabb for suggesting in an interview immediately after the Eagles lost the Super Bowl that the quarterback had "got tired" on the field? For a moment, he is silent. Could he actually be on the verge of admitting he made an error?
"Well, I probably should have done...," he begins, rubbing his hand along the contours of his massive shaved dome. Then he stops himself. "No. No. Listen, I was in the locker room before the press conference, and my team captain, Jeremiah Trotter, read through that apology they wrote for me. He got to the bottom part, the part where it had the stuff about Donovan, and he did this." Owens snatches a piece of paper from the table and rips off the bottom three inches. "This is the team leader we're talking about; he told me not to do it." (Trotter's response: "Totally inaccurate. I would never do anything like that. I never even saw the letter. I'm the one that told him to apologize to get back on the team.")
His only real mistake, Owens insists, was "timing. I might not have said or done things at exactly the right moment" (though it's hard to imagine the right time to publicly dis your QB). He concedes, after some prodding, that he lacks an essential social skill that has cost him. "I am not," he says, "a tactful person."
Is he sorry he never got the message that Jerry Rice tried to impart to him back in San Francisco, during the years the two had what is probably the closest Owens has ever known to a father-son relationship (it soured, of course), how you have to be "politically correct" to survive in this game?
"I don't even know what that means," he says, waving a hand dismissively, so fast that it stirs up a breeze. "You know who you're talking to? What does that mean to someone like me? It's like another language."
···
It's obvious from the volley of texts that the late-night-bowling thing is not going to happen this evening. Midnight is fast approaching, and Owens has to be at rehab at dawn. Then there are the enervating calls to take from lawyers.
It's times like these that he misses Monique and Kita, who used to check in a lot; he fell out with them a few months ago, after shooting ended for the final season of the show, when he discovered they were trying to sell their own lives as a reality program. "They said they were planning to make me an executive producer, but if we were business partners, don't you think I would have known about it?"
Trying not to lose himself in brooding, he works every day to "find the silver lining in all this," pushing himself to think about other things, including the home-decor line he'd like to start ("modern, with lots of deep colors") and acting. That's a big part of the reason he moved to L.A. a year ago. He had a feature role in a small-budget rom-com shot this past spring (he co-stars with Stacey Dash and George Clooney's current companion, former pro wrestler Stacy Keibler), which will have a limited release in New York and L.A. in February.
But acting isn't likely to pay the bills anytime soon. Nor is T.O. Cutz, the men's hair salon he has in Miami. Has he thought about what he'll do if the call from Rosenhaus—the shouty, happy call telling him to pack his bags—never comes?
"I will be here next year," he says, up on his feet, his jaw set. "I'll be fit and healthy and ready to play." He says one of the mothers of his kids is pushing him to look into a steady gig, coaching or television commentating, but he "doesn't have his mind on that yet." He still believes he has a couple of seasons left in him.
By the door, he lingers near a stack of shoeboxes piled pec-high. New basketball kicks?
"Cleats," he says, flipping open the top lid. He forces a thin smile. It's hard to tell just what the sight of the sharp, shiny spikes is doing to his head at this moment. But like his grandmother told him, you've got to be strong. And when you tell the truth, you'd better be prepared for the consequences. "I'm ready," he says, letting the lid fall shut. "They may not be ready for me, but me, I'm ready."
Sapp.
You expect me to feel sorry for a guy who plays football for a living and makes millions of dollars, the wastes it all?
