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Shortly after Terrell Owens was elected to the Pro Hall of Fame, in his third year of eligibility, former 49ers executive Carmen Policy called with congratulations. It was a delightful chat. “He was bubbly,” Policy said. “Forgive my use of the term, but he was adorable in our conversation.”
The two reminisced about Owens’ early days as a painfully quiet third-round pick in the 1996 draft. But because he knows Owens’ longtime knack for torching relationships, Policy also offered some advice. He told the receiver to embrace the Hall of Fame community because it offered him a chance at a new football family, one that would grow with each new induction class. “Let it be a steppingstone to make your life better,” Policy instructed.
No such luck. Owens doused the good vibes in lighter fluid and struck the match even before this Saturday’s induction day. Stung by not being a first-ballot selection, the NFL’s all-time second leading receiver will forego his own Hall of Fame ceremony, the first inductee ever to reject an invitation.
Instead, Owens arranged a podium for himself at his alma mater, the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, where he will make an induction speech on his own terms. As he tweeted Monday: “It means I’m in control and not the media or anyone else that feels slighted or (that) I’m doing something wrong.”
The decision left Hall of Fame officials taken aback. They will counter by limiting the focus Saturday to the honorees who actually show up in Canton, Ohio. Owens, who caught more touchdown passes than anyone except Jerry Rice and Randy Moss, will be reduced to a footnote. The Hall of Fame will send him his Gold Jacket.
That things would combust like this for “T.O.” is no surprise. T.O. was the tempestuous showboat who angered opponents, danced on the Dallas star, berated coaches and clashed with teammates. Such behavior is why it took him so long to get elected to the Hall of Fame in the first place.
But for those who know Terrell Owens, the sensitive and shy kid from rural Alabama, the state of affairs remains shocking. You see, in his early days, before the T.O. persona bulldozed his reputation, Terrell Owens was actually one heck of a sweet guy.
“He burned all of his bridges and now no one can get to him. And he can’t get to anyone else to enjoy this great, great honor in his life,” Policy said. “He just didn’t have a human compass to point him in the right direction.”
Gary Plummer, a veteran linebacker, watched the entire transformation. He met Owens back when the 89th overall pick was an ego-free rookie willing to play special teams.
“He was an introverted, well-mannered nice kid when he first came in. He ended up being an extroverted, angry, bitter human being,” Plummer said. “He clearly experienced wealth that he never could have imagined growing up in Alabama. He was able to do things for family and friends that he never dreamed of.
“And instead of showing appreciation for that, it’s just a middle finger to the world. That’s a bad legacy. I think it’s just a big f— you to the NFL and f— you to Philly and f— you to San Francisco and f— you to every coach. It’s just who he’s become.”
Still, Plummer remains sympathetic. He believes Owens’ sheltered and traumatic childhood in Alexander City, Alabama, left the receiver unprepared for the machinery of fame, money and media. Plummer cited the trend of bankruptcy among ex-NFL players as evidence that even savvy city-slickers can get derailed by the league’s trappings. Owens, with his naiveté, never stood a chance.
“I absolutely feel like this is something that happened to him,” Plummer said. “I could see his edge just start to harden the longer he was a starter. And, of course, getting the money and things like that. Then it was not this gradual descent into darkness. It was full-on conspiracy mode — ‘Gather the troops and circle the wagons. Everybody is against me.’ And once he got into that, it was over. Nothing was going to change that.”
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Owens’ bitter ending with the 49ers makes for a difficult hagiography. These Hall of Fame induction preview stories typically overflow with fond memories and vivid accounts of old glory. With Owens, the phone barely rings. There’s a veritable “who’s who” of who didn’t call back. Other members of 49ers family, like former coach Steve Mariucci, “respectfully declined” to discuss Owens’ time in San Francisco.
The tension is mutual. When TMZ asked Owens which team he would represent in Canton, he said: “Well, it won’t be the 49ers.” The receiver later elaborated in a tweet: “There’s NO LOYALTY with organizations, so why should I have any. I gave 181 percent to that organization with no reciprocity.”
But a handful of his 49ers teammates remain loyal, including at least two, Junior Bryant and Derrick Deese, who plan on traveling to Owens’ celebration in Chattanooga this weekend. “I want to go back and support him,” Bryant said.
And Owens certainly fit into the team’s inner circle on Wednesday at a memorial for Dwight Clark at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Clark, the former 49ers receiver later who became the team’s general manager, drafted Owens with a late-third round pick. So Owens paid his respects, then stuck around for the private reception, chatting amiably with Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, now his fellow Hall of Famers.
Bryant, in a phone interview, said Owens was a role model for work ethic during his 49ers days (a point on which even Owens’ detractors agree). He said while many players pay lip service to giving it their all in practice, Owens actually did it. And in doing so, Owens earned his place among top players ever to play a star-studded position.
“My attitude is that he played hard and he wanted to win,” Bryant said. “I just know what he did and what he brought. … Anybody who thinks he doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame is just being intellectually dishonest.”
As for those antics? Bryant noted that star receivers, as a demographic, aren’t exactly shrinking violets. And he said the mild-mannered Terrell Owens is the one he still sees most often, even now that the cameras are off. When Bryant and Deese organized a benefit in the Bay Area for the Navy Seals Foundation last Sept. 11, Owens was there.
“T.O is going to do whatever he can to help former teammates, especially when it comes to a worthy charity,” said Deese, a 49ers offensive lineman from 1994-2003. “That’s a side that people don’t know about. He gives a lot. … If people spent three or four days with him, they would find out that so many of the things that are said or written about him aren’t true.”
Ray Brown, now the offensive line coach for the Arizona Cardinals, blocked for Owens from 1996-2001 and had an uncommon bond with the receiver. “He was from the South, which I liked,” said Brown, an Arkansas native, recalling their first meeting. “He was just a wide-eyed, bushy-tailed dude, ‘yes, sir,’ ‘no, sir’ dude.”
Like Bryant, Brown realized Owens played with an edge. But Brown was one of the few players on the team who could get T.O. to take it down a notch. “I’d just appeal to him with kindness and buttered him up,” Brown said by phone Monday. “I’d just say, ‘Come on, man, you can’t do that.’ I thought he was a great teammate. I enjoyed him. T.O. worked his butt off and he produced. He should have been a first-ballot guy.”
🗣🎤🧥🏈🍿😎 pic.twitter.com/SMz2KlZwzz
— Terrell Owens (@terrellowens) July 3, 2018
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The Hall of Fame arranged for this year’s induction class to speak to the media via conference call, another ritual that Owens declined. But the six-time Pro Bowl selection did speak by phone with longtime 49ers beat reporter Matt Maiocco, now of NBC Sports Bay Area, who wrote the Owens profile for the official Induction Weekend program.
It helps that Maiocco knew the shy kid, too. In his first full-length profile of Owens, for the Oakland Tribune on Aug. 7, 1996, Maiocco wrote largely about the receiver’s down-to-earth personality. Under the headline, “Mom taught 49ers rookie well,” he penned these lines:
“Owens isn’t the sort to blow a large chunk of change on fancy sports cars or other luxuries. He knows not to take instant wealth for granted. … Owens addresses elders as ‘Sir.’ Instead of being an exception, the rookie believes the way he was taught should be a standard for the younger generation. ‘I feel like it’s respectful,’ Owens said.”
By 1998, the kid who eschewed flashy purchases rolled into the 49ers’ practice facility with a white Cadillac Escalade and the personalized license plate: XPOSUR. But Maiocco remembers at least one thing that never changed, no matter whether it was Terrell Owens or T.O.
“He never lied,” he said. “He didn’t have a diplomatic bone in his body. He wasn’t going to sugar coat it. He wouldn’t use a filter.”
Over the years, Owens emerged an extreme case, a player whose behavior was so outrageous that it threatened to undermine his Hall of Fame talent. Even eight years after his last snap, his havoc-to-yardage ratio still prevents him from taking a proper bow.
How did it come to this? It’s never easy to find answers with someone as complicated as Owens, but those who witnessed his personality change during his 49ers days generally choose from the same menu of life-altering events:
The Jerry Rice Dynamic
Owens wore No. 80 while at Chattanooga because he idolized the greatest receiver of all time. The 49ers front office saw the connection, too, and it was no coincidence Owens ended up in San Francisco. Clark and personnel chief Vinny Cerrato understood that Rice had also been a small-school standout, at Mississippi Valley State, and figured he’d be ideal to mentor another diamond in the rough.
For the most part, it was an ideal pairing. Owens had the fire and the discipline to work just as tirelessly as Rice, which was no small feat. “And that’s where you need to give T.O. the credit,” Policy said. “He had this innate sense of wanting to be at the top of the game. He was bent on becoming the next Jerry and he never, ever showed a disrespectful side to Jerry. Jerry maintained, shall we say, an almost a fatherly image to him.”
But there was a downside, too. Rice was a superstar receiver with an ego to match. At times, he demanded the ball, yelled at his quarterback and fumed at his coaches. As ESPN the Magazine writer, Tom Friend observed: “And T.O. noticed Rice was never vilified for it. He watched Rice sign autographs and drive away in a Bentley. That’s who T.O. wanted to be, dammit. The sooner the better.”
By the time Owens took over as the 49ers primary receiver, he’d learned from his mentor how to grab the spotlight in good times and how to unleash his frustration when things went bad. But he lacked Rice’s charm and diplomacy, his ability so smooth things out after an outburst.
“Exactly,” Policy said. “To rise to the top takes hard work and talent. But there’s a third element that goes into it in order to maintain your position and bring others along with you. Jerry had that third element. Call it “It” — call it whatever you want — but T.O. never seemed to have it or develop it.
“T.O. taking on the role of the No. 1 guy started a transformation that lacked control, structure, discipline and balance. And that’s when things started to head south for him.”
It’s comical now to look back on what Owens said in his first camp without Rice in the fold. The 49ers saved $2.5 million against the cap by releasing Rice and allowing him to go to the Raiders in 2001, and Owens practically breathed a sigh of relief that his hero was gone. It couldn’t have been easy for either man when, in Rice’s final home game with the 49ers, it was Owens who played the starring role, breaking a 50-year-old NFL record with 20 catches for 283 yards.
“I think it was to a point with a lot of his outbursts and the way he wanted the ball a lot, it had become a distraction,” Owens said, as quoted in a San Jose Mercury story on Aug. 1, 2001. “There were incidents where he got in Coach’s face, this and that. That kind of thing happens in the heat of battle. You know, J.J. (Stokes) had some frustrations, too. But he made his point in a more subtle way.”
The Dallas Star
In Dallas, on Sept. 24, 2000, the receiver twice made infamous runs to the midfield star after a touchdown. The second time, Cowboys safety George Teague rammed him from behind. It started a melee on the field — and a team-wide cringe along the 49ers sideline.
In the aftermath of the 41-24 victory, Mariucci told the team: “We’re not going to play that way. We’re not going to win that way. We’re not going to lose that way.” But Owens considered any criticism a betrayal. In his mind, scoring two touchdowns over the dreaded rivals represented a triumph for the 49ers organization — and now he felt as if no one had his back.
Mariucci ultimately suspended Owens for a week and fined him $24,294, one week’s pay. As the coach explained later, he did so as a pre-emptive strike before the NFL office could level even more severe penalties. As Deese (who can be seen in replays as the first player to join the fray against Teague) said: “Mooch was trying to step in and stop something that could have been a lot worse. If it’s the league, it’s maybe three or four games. … But T.O. still didn’t like it. He took it personally.”
Mariucci told the NFL Network in 2017 that he made a tactical error in not having the punitive moves come from the front office or ownership. He did it personally, as a coach: “We had friction from then on,” he said on The Rich Eisen Show.
In fact, 18 years later, Owens is still steamed. “The relationship that I had with Mariucci, it was fractured, I think, the day after he suspended me for going to the star,” Owens told Maiocco for a podcast.
Owens added: “There was so much hoopla and so much media attention around what I did when I went to the star that he felt pressured or compelled to suspend me. It wasn’t that the league suspended me. He suspended me.”
Owens’ demeanor was noticeably more surly after that, in the locker room and in the press.
‘The $10 Million Catch’
In a playoff game against the Green Bay Packers on Jan. 3, 1999, Owens dropped four passes and also lost a fumble. But he found Young along the sidelines and pleaded, “Steve, believe in me.”
And when the game was on the line, with three seconds left, Young found Owens at the goal line just as two Packers crunched him like wrecking balls. The 49ers won 30-27 as Owens cried tears of joy under an avalanche of giddy teammates. “At the bottom of the pile,” Owens said that day, “I was just saying, ‘Thank you, Jesus.'”
For Owens, it was a boost to his confidence — and his pocketbook. By the start of the next season, he had a $34.2 million deal that included a $7.5 million signing bonus.
“I called it the $10 million catch,” said his agent at the time, David Joseph, “and the residual may be more than that.”
Terrell Jones, the former strength coach, recalls sitting outside the 49ers defensive meeting room on the day Owens attended a press conference to announce the contract extension. Jones said he was chatting with conditioning coach Mike Barnes when Owens blew by without saying hi to either of them. They teased him about the snub.
“T.O. turned around and he said, ‘I hate the way that my money changes people,”’ Jones said. “We looked at him like, ‘What? We’re just busting your balls for not saying hi.’ He turned around and kept walking. We were both like, ‘Well, this is interesting.”’
It only got worse from there.
“It seemed like after he signed that contract, that’s when he went downhill,” Jones said. “He was getting into fights with players. He was getting into fights with coaches. In my eight years, I never saw one player get in more fights with his teammates. There were times when I saw players chase him out of the locker room because they wanted to fight him.”
Friend, in his profile for ESPN the Magazine, wrote that after the Green Bay catch, Owens began craving attention. The receiver got his teeth fixed, for possible endorsements. He bought stylish clothes. He got a new personalized license plate: Catch II. To a lot of people in the organization, the touchdown had changed the kid forever. “Before the catch, he was Terrell Owens,” one source said. “After the catch, he became T.O.”
Policy, in our phone interview, also identified the Green Bay catch as a seminal moment.
“Now you’ve got money, the elevation from a stellar performance in a particular high-profile game, and that combination is all kicking in,” he said. “So he had all that energy. It’s kind of like having nuclear energy without any proper controls and safeguards. He just had all of that energy spreading out and it created some significant negative fallout.”
More than one source said that in the wake of stardom and money, Owens wanted to operate under a different set of rules, rebelling against guidelines large and small. In 2003, the 49ers struggled with an outbreak of staph infections after a game against the St. Louis Rams. The Centers for Disease Control advised the 49ers to scrub down their weight room twice daily. Along with other safeguards, players were required to wear shirts while working out.
“So T.O. was in there one day and I said, ‘Hey, T.O, you have to put a shirt on. It’s policy,'” Jones recalled. “He said, ‘Well, this isn’t 24 Hour Fitness.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’re right, but you have to wear a shirt and put a towel down. So he huffed and puffed and started calling me names.'”
Owens eventually relented, but Jones said the receiver confronted him again when the workout was over. Jones said he let it slide when Owens called him an “Uncle Tom” but nearly came to blows when T.O started saying things about his parents.
“My dad died when I was 2 years old,” Jones said. “And he knew this because I’d told him before. You can say anything you want about me, but don’t say anything about my parents. And I came out of that door and I was pissed … Teammates came to my defense, but that’s the kind of guy he was. If he didn’t get his way, he would verbally assault you.”
The Media Burn
Plummer said what really flipped Owens’ switch was the way the media delved into his early childhood. Owens later shared the harrowing details on his own terms, in his autobiography, “Catch This!” He was born in Alexander City, Alabama, and mostly raised by a grandmother who was so protective that she allowed Terrell to leave the yard only to attend church or school. Even when he got a bicycle, he was not allowed to ride it past the driveway.
In his book, he does not recall hearing the words “I love you” from his mother or anyone else. Most devastatingly, when he was 11 he had a crush on the girl across the street. But the girl’s father instructed him to stay away. Why? Because that was his half-sister.
“It took me a while to understand that I was talking to my father,” Owens wrote. When he asked his mother why she’d never told him that the man across the street was his father, she said that “it wasn’t necessary to explain everything to me.”
The way Plummer remembers it, that story first surfaced in the media after Owens divulged the information in a conversation he considered off-the-record. But a writer ran with it anyway, and other outlets followed suit. Suddenly, the naive and trusting kid was shattered forever, according to Plummer.
“He was furious,” Plummer said. “That was the genesis of his hatred toward the media. I will always believe that had that not happened, T.O. would have been a completely different guy. It’s sad. And literally — for him — it wasn’t a bell curve. It was like dropping off of a cliff.”
Outside the Hall
David Baker, the president and CEO of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, told NFL.com that Owens’ image will be on banners hanging around the Hall’s campus and on the video boards of the main stage. Baker also said the he welcomes Owens any time he’s ready. “The Hall of Fame and my successor’s successor will always guard his legacy, just like every Hall of Famer,” Baker said.
Until then, Owens’ friends from a more innocent time with the 49ers can barely fathom how this joyous occasion turned so sour. In a 2012 interview with GQ, Owens said that almost all of the $80 million he made during his career was gone, swallowed up by bad investments. In a recent tweet, Owens said that he didn’t “blow” through that amount of money but rather “those that I hired ‘mismanaged and misappropriated’ funds. Through my experiences I continue to share with athletes in and entering into the league to avoid similar circumstances.”
Policy, meanwhile, alluded to T.O.’s financial situation in recounting his congratulatory phone call.
“I wished him the best and I felt really, really terrible about his state of personal affairs. Because he’s kind of up against it,” he said. “Things aren’t going well for him in any way, shape or form. I think he’s kind of depressed and he’s certainly dejected.”
But Deese struck a more optimistic note.
“I believe this is his day, it’s his honor, and the way he chooses to celebrate it is totally up to him,” he said. “I’m going to support him in any way I can, regardless of where it is.”
