The Sports Curmudgeon

I’ve called this news conference to tell everyone assembled here that I did not try to commit suicide last night as I pondered writing this piece. I want everyone to be clear on that point. I admit I have gagged on the over-reaction of the media to this story. But I was never in danger of choking.

Where to begin? Terrell Owens is a really good football player; and at the same time, he is a really difficult person to feel empathy towards. Notwithstanding his innate antagonistic streak, he is a human being and I really don’t wish him any harm. He may have “ruined” a couple of NFL franchises with his antics, but on the scale of heinous human behaviors, those antics and those outcomes are far less than inconsequential. If he is actually a person in need of a mental health intervention, I hope he gets one and that it is productive.

Importantly, only two people on the planet know exactly what happened a couple of nights ago; those two people would be Terrell Owens and Kim Etheredge. There are ample reasons not to take anything said by either of these two people as the gospel truth.

Finally, I do not read minds and I seriously doubt that psychiatry/psychology has reached a state of understanding such that serious practitioners of these fields could state with certainty that they could describe the mindsets of either person here who knows what happened the other night. This situation is likely to remain mysterious for all of time - - even after Terrell Owens finishes writing the next three of his autobiographies.

I do want to say that the media has been guilty of a “crime” that #1 son used to accuse my long-suffering wife of committing during his teenage years – i.e. practicing psychology without a license. I know that Dr. Phil with his shallow insights and simplistic homilies has made this practice socially acceptable in the past several years. People see how easy it is for him to “get to the bottom of the issues” and try to do it themselves. I find that practice appalling. So, let me be really clear about this:

I do not pretend to understand or have any great insights into Terrell Owens’ psyche.

I hope to keep all of my comments based on observed and tangible behaviors and events – except where I make it clear that I am deviating from that path.

Allow me a small bit of self-disclosure here because I believe it is relevant to this matter. I know that this is not one of my endearing qualities – and I readily admit that I don’t have a lot of endearing qualities to begin with – but I really do not care if just about anyone on the planet likes me or not. I care if my family likes me; I have a very few close friends whose affection for me matters to me; but other than those two dozen or so Homo sapiens, it really doesn’t matter to me even a whit is someone likes me or not.

Please note; I did not say I want people to dislike me or that I prefer if they dislike me or that I dislike just about everyone on the planet. That’s not what I said. I just don’t care if someone else chooses – for whatever his or her reasons might be – to like me or to dislike me. That’s “their thing”; I have no way to control it; so I choose to ignore it.

Why is that important here? I think it is important because lots of Terrell Owens’ behaviors point to a person who wants other people to like him. I believe that is part of why he works so hard to perform so well in his chosen profession; I believe that is why he “writes” autobiographies – to assure folks that he is a “good guy”; I believe that is why he travels the image path of Hulk Hogan appearing to “say his prayers, take his vitamins and work hard”. It seems to me that Terrell Owens really wants other people to like him and I think whether or not others choose to like him is very important to him.

If I’m correct, that is a speed bump in Terrell Owens’ life. He can’t control whether or not anyone else likes him and he probably feels badly when/if someone doesn’t like him. I have realized my lack of control in such situations and have found a way to live my life such that I do not give “other people” this kind of dominion over my life. I don’t want to feel badly because someone else does something related to me over which I have no control; I’m not sure Terrell Owens has seen the world through that prism. Few if any of his overt behaviors suggest to me that he recognizes the situation he has created for himself.

I don’t mean to imply that I’m superior or inferior to Terrell Owens in any way relative to this matter. I’m certain that we are different. I believe my outlook on life provides me with more room for comfort than does his outlook on life. I’m equally certain that his outlook on life provides him with more fame and more public attention than I will ever garner. Chaqu’un a son gout.

Everything I’ve observed about Terrell Owens tells me that he revels in the adoration/adulation/attention of others. I deduce this from his demonstrative behaviors on the football field and by his enormous efforts to “look good” whenever he finds himself embroiled in some controversy that always seems to be at least half of his own making. What I do not perceive is that he realizes others can bestow or withhold their adoration/adulation/attention on him or from him at their whim. So, his comfort and his feelings of importance are tied to the behavior of other people over whom he has no control. If I’m right, then he can’t possibly understand the power that he has handed over to all of those “other people”. I don’t know if Terrell Owens understands that when people get tired of him and his antics they will move on to someone else who is doing something “interesting” and there is nothing he will be able to do in order to drag them back to the point where they will pay attention to him or give a rat’s patootie whether or not he kills himself.

My advice to readers here is to pay zero attention to anything in the media that purports to explicate the deep and underlying reasons for Terrell Owens’ behaviors. First of all, any such attempts are subject to manipulation by Owens and his “peeps”; secondly, there is a serious tangible motivation for Owens and his “peeps” to make Owens’ image come out of the end of such an investigation in a pristine state. Any professional doctor who examined/analyzed Owens would not allow his findings/therapy to be made a subject of public debate and scrutiny; any doctor who did that would be suspect for having motivations related to fame and recognition that transcend his professional duties.

Fame has served Terrell Owens well in terms of his desire for attention and public accolades. What I’m not sure he realizes yet is that when he cannot maintain fame for his athletic performances, the only way to continue to feed that bulldog is for him to go to the “dark side”. Infamy can also bring attention and a diminished number of accolades for a while. If you doubt that, see Rodman, Dennis. Long after he was an accomplished NBA player, he was still very definitely in the public eye. But he fades into anonymity with every passing month…

Enough about Terrell Owens behaviors for the moment, let me move on to something else that the sports media needs to consider. Whenever there is some kind of financial journalist who talks about the prospects of the “Frampdoodle Industry”, the financial media thinks it is important to include disclosures about the whether or not the financial journalist has any holdings in the “Frampdoodle Industry”. They see this as a way to identify a real or apparent conflict of interest. The sports media need to adopt this practice from its brethren in the financial section of the paper.

Let me be bald about this. Publicists and agents have exactly ZERO motivation to tell the truth about anything - - particularly about their clients. They are paid by the client to tell partial truths if they can but to lie through their teeth when half-truths aren’t sufficient to make the client look good. I don’t know if there is a genetic disposition that makes all of them lying weasels or if they will merely do/say anything if the price is right. I do know that in either case, publicists/agents need to be held in low regard. I’ll stop short of making an analogy here to prostitution - - but not too far short of that mark.

And so, there is a disclaimer that needs to be added to every article that includes a statement about an athlete by a publicist or an agent. Here’s an example directly related to the case at hand:

Kim Etheredge – the publicist for Terrell Owens who is paid by him to say anything and everything that will make him look good even should he be caught copulating with a corpse and whose current standard of living depends on the continuation of her contractual relationship with Terrell Owens – said today …

Let’s stop pretending that Owens’ publicist, Kim Etheridge, and agent, Drew Rosenhaus, are independent and unbiased reporters of the facts. They are not. And simply identifying them as “publicist” or “agent” is not sufficient – any more than identifying Dr. Josef Mengle as “an anthropologist with discredited views” would be sufficient. Etheridge and Rosenhaus are bought and paid for by Terrell Owens; nothing that they say or try to represent is the whole truth except by incredible accident. They are paid to lie and to skew the facts to make situations appear to be something positive. It’s time for the media to identify these kinds of folks for what they actually are each and every time they are part of a story. Maybe then, we’ll stop hearing so much “bovine effluvia” from them.

Having said that I would not believe anything Kim Etheridge said without outside verification – including that the sun came up in the east yesterday morning – , let me now say that she is about as incompetent a publicist as I would be in the same job. Let me give just a couple of examples:

She said that Terrell Owens had “twenty five million reasons to live” and so he could not possibly have tried to commit suicide. Leave aside the crassness of that statement. Didn’t Ernest Hemmingway commit suicide; didn’t Marilyn Monroe commit suicide – notwithstanding the Oliver Stone conspiracy junkies of the world – didn’t Howard Hughes die with a few “mental issues”? [I’d use Kurt Cobain as an example here too except his death also freed him from living with Courtney Love and so his suicide may have been a rational calculation on his part.] Let’s get this straight, rich people with more money than Terrell Owens and people with far more fame than Terrell Owens have committed suicide and suffered from obvious and debilitating mental illnesses. His “twenty five million reasons” to stay alive – if they really exist – speak only to his crass materialism. Bad job by a publicist.

The person who has “twenty five million reasons” to deny that this was a suicide attempt is Kim Etheredge. I suspect she has no other clients worth $25M; and based on her performance and presence so far in this matter, she is not likely to get any other clients with that net worth any time soon.

She wanted to speak of Terrell Owens’ “stature” as an athlete and a person of repute. What she said was that people had to recognize a “man of his statue”. Shouldn’t a publicist know basic English?

Worst of all, she blames all of this on the Dallas police and their overreaction to the fact that they had a case involving a famous person. Here’s what she fails to say and in failing to acknowledge these things she makes the situation look worse:

She made the call to 911. The police didn’t just drop in because they were “in the neighborhood”.

Owens home is – reportedly – about four blocks from Baylor Hospital where the EMTs ultimately took him. So, if this was no big deal, why did she make the call instead of driving him to the hospital herself? It would probably have taken less time…

The “story” got out because of the 911 call she made. Had she taken him to the hospital herself, the medical privacy rules would have precluded the hospitals/doctors from telling the papers about it. The story is out there because she placed the call.

The current posture is for Owens’ “peeps” to attack the police report as being inaccurate and self-serving. It may be inaccurate; I wasn’t there so I don’t know. But in terms of “self-serving” please ponder for just a moment whose interest is best served by the report that was filed and then appeared on the website The Smoking Gun. How will the officers/EMTs benefit from that report? That’s surely not obvious. So “self-interest” is a territory occupied only by the people whose livelihood and current standard of living depend on continued payments from Terrell Owens. And it’s time for the sports media to call this for what it is.

Remember, I don’t wish Terrell Owens any harm. I hope he gets any and all of the highly competent medical treatment that he may need and/or seek. I want him to continue to play football in the NFL because he is a good player. But I do wish that his publicist would come down with a case of “adult onset autism”. If that isn’t a known medical condition, don’t you wish it were?

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…