Oh, how the mighty have fallen. The past couple of years have been complete hell for NFL wide receiver Terrell Owens. The arrogant but ultra talented athlete gets candid in the February issue of GQ, where he talks about his two alleged suicides attempts, being unemployed and broke, his fallout with BFFs and co-stars of his reality show, and his court cases with his FOUR baby mommas.
On why no NFL team wants to sign him:
An unnamed NFL executive said, “It’s not his knee that’s the problem; it’s his attitude. He may have been less openly divisive with the Bengals, but you can’t live down the destruction of all those years. With T.O., no matter how brilliant he can be on the field, the dark side is always lurking. You don’t know which T.O. you’re going to get, and no one is comfortable risking that.”
On his portrayal on VH1′s The T.O. Show
T.O. says he agreed to do the show in order to “expose a new audience, a more female audience, to me as a human being beyond the macho sports personality.” The show’s co-producer, Jesse Ignjatovic, says he’s never seen celebrity so willing to show his vulnerability. “I can’t imagine another NFL player who would let us film while he told his mother, who relied on him, that he was going broke, someone who wouldn’t hold back tears while he stood there in her kitchen.”
On how his business partners helped him blow $80 million
Most egregious of all was the ill-fated Alabama entertainment complex (with an electronic-bingo component) that cost him $2 million. He invested, he says, at the suggestion of his advisers and a lawyer they steered him to, Pamela Linden. The venture turned out to be illegal in the state, not to mention a violation of the NFL’s policy prohibiting players from investing in gambling. Owens is suing Linden, as is Clinton Portis, the former Redskins running back who also invested. (Several other players and the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. also got sucked into the venture.)
“I hate myself for letting this happen,” he says. “I believed that they had my back when they said, ‘You take care of the football, and we’ll do the rest.’ And in the end, they just basically stole from me.”
In addition to those financial woes, Owens says ”a guy who I’d helped when his grandmother passed,” had slowly drained one of his accounts of more than $270,000. The bank eventually returned the money, he says, but “it pretty much destroyed whatever trust in people I had left.”
On friendships
“I don’t have no friends. I don’t want no friends. That’s how I feel.”
Who has time for friends when you have to pay $44,600 a month in child support for for his four children, ages 5 to 12.
On baby mommas regrets
“If there’s anything I’m sorry about, it’s getting involved with all that.” He never actually dated any of the women, he says. One was a one-night stand, the others “repeat offenders.” Owens, who has never been married, concedes he is “not a very good judge of character.” Still, he “never suspected they were the types to do what they done in the past year.”
On suicide attempts
T.O. chalks them as “misunderstandings.”
Read the article in its entirety here
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