Start helping, stop sheltering T.O.
Cowboys star obviously has personal problems that need attention
OPINION
By Mike Celizic
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 2:12 p.m. ET Sept 27, 2006
The wakeup call came long ago when Terrell Owens was in San Francisco making America’s ultimate team game all about T.O. It was confirmed in Philadelphia, where his utter self-absorption destroyed a season.
Now, there’s nothing to wake up to, just a howling cry for help from the game’s most magnetic personality. The entire nation — or at least that part that cares about sports — heard it loud and clear Wednesday morning when police and emergency services reports about Owens’ Tuesday night suicide attempt were made public.
The only ones who didn’t get the message, it appears, are the people closest to Owens — the advisors who call themselves his friends. This is not the time for them to be pretending that his life is a slow-motion romp through a sun-splashed field of daisies. This is the time to admit there are some personal issues for which the man needs help.
This isn’t exactly what Dallas football fans want to hear. Although they might be concerned for Owens, who can be as charming and entertaining and engaging a person as you’ll meet and remains a superlative football player, they have to be groaning inwardly about what this is going to do to the team. In the parlance of the locker room, this qualifies as a distraction — big time.
Everything is based on reports at this time and nothing has been confirmed. But the Dallas police, when given an opportunity to deny that Owens had been taken to a hospital because of a suicide attempt, didn’t deny it. In the business of news, the absence of official denial is the admission that what you read is what happened.
So, although this column is based on the reports, I’m not going to spend a lot of time qualifying everything. Owens took a whole lot of pain pills. His publicist and friend, Kim Etheridge, was concerned and called EMS. When technicians arrived, Owens was taking two more pills. He admitted he was trying to hurt himself. They took him to the hospital, where doctors induced vomiting.
That’s the story, and if you want to be shocked at it, be my guest. I’ll settle for being surprised. Anyone who acts as bizarrely as Owens and who holds himself away from teammates and above public opinion probably has a problem. I wouldn’t have expected it to show up in a suicide attempt; but I also didn’t expect him to lead an unruffled existence in Dallas.
I also will accept the standard psychiatric observation that people who swill pills with someone else in the house don’t really want to kill themselves. If that had been Owens’ intention, he would have gone with a gun, an item which most athletes these days seem to have handy. That he went with the pills was the classic cry for help.
If so, Etheridge didn’t hear it. The line coming out of Team T.O. is that he had an allergic reaction to the pain killers he was taking for his broken finger. Everything, in other words, is just peachy-keen. I couldn’t believe Owens’ alleged friends more if they were standing naked at the South Pole complaining about the heat.
Somebody will say that at times like this, football doesn’t seem important. That’s true — for Owens. And it’s true for everyone in Tampa, where Chris Simms played a game with his spleen ruptured and needed emergency surgery to survive.
But it’s not true in Dallas, where Owens came advertised as someone with great talents for both winning football games and destroying teams. As I said higher up, fans are still going to worry about the effect on the team, and who can blame them?
I also suspect that his critics, while having the good manners not to say “I told you so” at a time like this, are nonetheless thinking it; they knew, after all, that Owens would do something to screw things up. They didn’t think it would be this, but causing problems is what he does.
Another story line you’re going to hear is that it’s the media’s fault. Yep, if we hadn’t criticized his little peccadilloes and made him a target for our jibes and taunts, he wouldn’t have been depressed and this wouldn’t have happened.
That’s hogwash. Whatever Owens’ problems are, they go way back to his childhood, when he was raised by a strict grandmother who didn’t allow him to leave the house except to go to school and church.
It shouldn’t be surprising that a man who put on such a public act of not caring what anyone thought and grabbing for attention in whatever outrageous manner he could might be prone to depression. Sadly, it’s also not surprising that none of us thought to consider that possibility.
But that’s how we function in a world in which we are surrounded by looniness on all sides. We take people at face value, not daring to consider what may lie behind the smile.
I know about that. For three years, I worked next to a person I considered to be one of the finest people I had ever known. I especially admired the incredible job he was doing as a single parent raising a 16-year-old daughter who was headed for an Ivy League education.
Then I came to work one morning and he wasn’t there, having been detained by the police on a million dollars cash bond. Turns out it wasn’t his daughter. Turns out he’d been living with her as if she were his wife for eight years.
He’s the first person I thought of when I heard about T.O. You never know what’s inside.
Luckily for T.O., there is help available. He’s surrounded by people who call themselves his friends. It’s time for them to live up to the claim.
It’s time to stop sheltering him and start saving his life.
Mike Celizic writes regularly for MSNBC.com and is a freelance writer based in New York.
URL:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15029960/
