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Trying in Vain to Make ANY Damn Sense Out of the Terrell Owens Situation

mjdPosted Sep 28th 2006 12:31AM by mjd


If you'd have told me yesterday that I'd be spending a good portion of the next afternoon trying to figure out whether or not Terrell Owens made a legitimate suicide attempt, I'm not sure I'd have believed you. But that's exactly the odd position I find myself in right now.

The two big questions: 1) Did he really try to off himself? And 2) If so, what then?

We know that he told police he tried to harm himself. They asked him if took the remainder of his pain medication (35 pills) and he said yes. They asked him if he tried to harm himself, and he said yes. Also according to the police report, his publicist told police that he was depressed. Those are facts. Beyond that, everything else is fuzzier than Jeff Fisher's upper lip.

The publicist denies saying that Owens was depressed, and Owens claims that he was out of it when he was answering the questions. That's certainly believable, if not entirely convincing.

I'm not in a position to accuse anyone of lying, but I also don't believe that the police were making anything up here. For all the problems that Terrell Owens has had, they've never been of a legal nature. And while I do believe that there's often some resentment from cops towards star athletes and vice-versa, even if they did have a problem with Owens, why make something up about him trying to kill himself? What purpose would that serve? Why not just put a few slugs in him, Steve Foley-style?

But on the other side of things, there's the fact that if it had been ruled a suicide attempt, that the hospital would've been required to keep him for 72 hours to conduct a psychological evaluation. And there's also the fact that he practiced/worked out with Drew Bledsoe today, which I don't think is something that's normally done on the some day that someone takes 35 vicodin has their stomach pumped.

And of course, there's probably the single strongest piece of evidence, and that's Owens' word. You may not like him, and you may not believe a word that comes out of his mouth, but he is the only person alive who knows what was going on in his head last night and this morning.

I'll also say that the fact that Terrell Owens is rich and famous is not an argument against the possibility of a suicide attempt. The absolute dumbest thing anyone's said all day came from the publicist, who said that Owens had "25 million reasons to live." Because, you know, rich people don't become depressed or kill themselves. Kurt Cobain made Terrell Owens look like a poverty case, and he was able to pull the trigger. James Leer has a whole list of well-off people who've offed themselves. I just can't get over what an ignorant and insensitive thing that was to say. Does Terry Glenn have fewer reasons to live than Terrell Owens because he's paid less?

It's also possible that this is all a complete coincidence, that his publicist overreacted, and things spiraled out of control. It wouldn't be fair to place any blame on Terrell Owens if he did just have a bad reaction to medication, but at the same time ... you know, these things don't seem to happen to anyone else. I can't imagine, for example, Bobby Engram, calling a press conference to explain why he didn't try to kill himself.

So here are the possibilities:

1) Total misunderstanding. An unexpected drug interaction between his pain medication and his supplements left him incoherent for a while, and he's fine now.
2) It was one of those "cry for help" suicide attempts, where he has no real intention of killing himself, but is clearly troubled somehow.
3) An actual suicide attempt that didn't work.

Personally, I'm ruling out the third option, but other than that, I don't know what to believe. Sorry, that's the best I have for you. I just don't have a clue. I'd say at the very least, he's probably a little depressed, but honestly, I think it feels a little weird to even know as much about this as I already know. I care about him as a fellow human being, of course, but I don't know this guy. It's none of my business what kinds of pills he ingests, or when, or why, or anything else. I haven't a clue what goes on in his head; in fact, his head may be the most inaccessible head on the planet. Is he suicidal? Hell, I couldn't even figure out if he likes the color blue.

All I can do is wish him the best. If he's suicidal, depressed, perfectly fine, needs a new pharmacist, or needs a new publicist, hey, I just wish him the best.

Whatever the case, though, this is something that's going to dog him the rest of his career. Fans will constantly remind him of it, people will always poke fun at it, and, perhaps most importantly, other teams around the NFL are going to remember this. It's easy to see how a team would roll the dice on a guy who's been an attitude problem in his career, but a suicide risk? That puts him in a whole other category. How many general managers are going to offer a guy a contract when it says "may have attempted suicide" on his resume? The Dallas Cowboys could very well be the last team he plays for.

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