Terrell Owens: "I'm in hell".

[smr-nj]

Terrell Owens In GQ: I'm In Hell | ThePostGame

Oh, boo freakin' hoo.

I have a hard time feeling any kind of sympathy for these egomaniacal players who through their whole playing career, only had this "blameless" psyche...... everything was somebody else's fault, somebody else doing them wrong, etc.

Hey, T.O. ----- in order to HAVE friends, you have to BE a friend, and it doesn't look like you EVER took the time or effort to be a friend to anybody but yourself.

[DetroitCity313]

That seems a little harsh. People are very quick to judge athletes from the stories we see, but we don't see the way family members come up out of nowhere asking for money and the way in which a lot of these guys feel the need to provide for their entire family/friends. From the article, it appears he lost a lot of money because of his agent/business guys (a common problem for athletes) and was unable to control his finances. Also, as the article hinted at, the guy might have clinical issues. We are very quick to de-humanize celebrities and athletes, but this is a guy who has had a lot of problems in his life. I for one am sympathetic to his situation.

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

He disn't seem all that sympathetic a character to me beforehand, and really didn't seem much more so after having read the article.

That written, I do think he, like a fair number of top-end athletes, invested themselves completely into their sport at the expense of developing better decision making processes and interpersonal skills (among other things). Often such athletes identify their self-worth with their athletic success, and the combination of those skills leaving them paired with reaching mid-life crisis proves the late 30's a challenging time to navigate. I hope he is able to turn things around.

[shauntacular]

I feel bad for the guy because he's broke now. The child support system is horribly broken. I absolutely hated the guy as a player (from way back in his SF days with the ball-on-the-star incident at Texas Stadium) but I don't want to see anyone suffer.

If he's looking for work, he could make a nice living in the WWE. I'm not kidding - he should give them a call. He wouldn't have to put himself in too much peril, and he'd be a nice draw.

[RedRamage]

I want to feel bad for him... I know he didn't have things great as a kid. But so much of reading that story just sets me on edge:

"I don't have no friends. I don't want no friends. That's how I feel."

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."

"This is the team leader we're talking about," Owens tells GQ. "He told me not to do it."

He concedes his only mistake in calling McNabb out was one of timing, admitting "I might not have said or done things at exactly the right moment."

It's not his talent that keeps teams from calling, he insists, but instead a reputation cast onto him by the reporters he often held hostage.

"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."

There is just way too much of pushing the blame off on others... "They aren't being fair," "Its the media's fault," "He recommended I do that," "He told me not to do it."

I don't doubt that some of the blame does indeed rest on others. The problem is that reading that bit in the original link along with large portions of the full GQ story, I just don't find TO admitting that any of it is HIS fault. I'm much more willing to accept someone blaming someone else if he can admit where some of the issues might have been caused by himself. He doesn't seem like he's learned anything. For example, the linked story talks about how he owns these properties that now have gone bellyup because of the housing market issues. That's a legit problem, but the GQ story has this bit:

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.

October of 2010 is well after the housing bubble burst, yet instead of living in one of his other properties that he's already paying for, he buys a half a million dollar apartment and pays for a decorator to help him furnish it. Obviously he has not learned from his past mistakes.

[slfairless]

Wow, he is a mess.

I do feel bad for him but he did it to himself, with one decision after another. Karma is a...

And the women are one blood sucking blob expecting $44k per month for popping out a kid... got to love it.

[ROMAD1]

I guess his $25 million reasons to live are gone?