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: 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 materialized.
Which leaves T.O. a caged cat for the first time in his career, pacing the 1,800-square-foot apartment he paid $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 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 punctuated the raw stream of consciousness with a magic bag of 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
"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