Oooh, how painful was that for TO? Standing in front of all those cameras and stooping down to kiss the feet of men he’d been spitting on for months hurt like hell.
It hurt like hell to watch it too.
What was his thinking? “Hey, if I do what they wanted me to do now, maybe they’ll take me back. Lesson learned.” Sounds reasonable, but throughout this entire soap opera, TO neglected one thing.
Consequences.
I have a two and a half-year-old daughter, and I spend the better part of my time with her trying to teach her that her actions have consequences. Touch the oven, burn your finger. Touch daddy’s iPod, lose a limb. She’s still young, I know, but I’m pretty sure she gets the whole cause-effect thing better than TO.
As fellow TSR blogger Tim Russo pointed out earlier today, guys like Terrell Owens just don’t get it. Yeah, they’ve got to put up with a lot of bullshit behind the scenes that we don’t see, and it sure sucks to be underpaid, but give me a break. Hey, TO — you live a charmed life. You’ll continue living a charmed life because you’re still going to get paid this year, and next season some team desperate for a dominant #1 receiver will throw a low-risk contract your way.
Of course, maybe we’ll see a new Terrell Owens next year. Stop rolling your eyes and calling me naive. Nobody’s ever taken it this far with TO. Nobody. And now that he knows he can have the game he loves so much taken away from him and he can’t do squat about it, maybe he’ll keep his gaping mouth shut. One thing’s for sure: He’ll be a man possessed next year and he’ll put up monster numbers for whichever team takes the plunge. And his mouth will stay shut. For the first few weeks of the season, anyway.
And where is Drew Rosenhaus in all of this? I know, he was standing next to TO at the press conference, offering his support as all the best multi-millionaire super agents would do for their top clients in this situation, but why isn’t he taking more heat? He’s supposed to be giving TO advice on how to better his career, not tear it down. Owens is the one who took the risk by calling Philly’s bluff, but Rosenhaus talked him into it, or at the very least enthusiastically supported TO’s decision. My first bit of advice to Owens would be to find new representation, someone who won’t stand by your side and watch you commit career suicide.
Witnessing a man get humbled so thoroughly and so publicly is almost unpleasant. I mean, there’s that part of me that takes sublime pleasure in all of this because, as we all would agree, TO had this coming. And I applaud the Eagles for making a move that so dramatically helps team morale but so severely hurts team talent. Still, watching him in front of all those cameras, reading words that he most likely didn’t write, I felt sorry for Owens too. How can someone have such an inflated sense of worth? How can someone alienate so many people and then think they’ll forgive him so easily? I mean, did he really believe the Eagles wouldn’t take it this far? Talk about naive.
ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio reported that Philly won’t even attempt to recoup a portion of TO’s signing bonus that his contract entitles them to claim, adding that one team official said, “We just want to get rid of him.” Ouch.
That’s about as rocky as rock bottom gets.
