WWW- One of the great days in football, Thanksgiving Day, what always feels like the best doubleheader day we’ve got, went on yesterday without Terrell Owens. It means a team sport went on without him. It means a sport that is still a team sport, officially declared one this week by a arbitrator, goes on without him.
Michael Vick was back to being dazzling against the Lions. Ron Dayne, an old Giant, helped out the Giants mightily by making the biggest run of his career against Bill Parcells’ Cowboys in Dallas. This was after Keyshawn Johnson, another guy who thought he was bigger than his teams once, had made big catches for Parcells all day long. Just like that, Owens was old news. Guys like him all think they’re indispensable until they find out they’re not. So Owens is the latest, but not the last, to think he was bigger than his team. He’s not. If the arbitrator, Richard Bloch, said anything with his ruling on Owens’ appeal, he said that. Teams still matter in sports.
This is how Bloch’s ruling ended:
AWARD: The grievance is denied.
That is the end of the story for now, and the end of Owens’ season, until he is with some other team and some other coach next season and everybody is saying that everything will be different now. Maybe it will be. But only because Owens is the latest guy, but not the last, to learn the hard way that these are still team sports, no matter how much we convince all guys like him that we are hanging on every word. No matter how much we convince them that the more outrageous they are, the better. Richard Bloch stood for that on Wednesday. This wasn’t a free-speech issue. This was a team issue. If the rules and concepts of the team don’t matter in sports anymore, then nothing does.
Owens isn’t some kind of political prisoner now that he has effectively been fired by the Eagles. He is a prisoner of his own greed. Please remember that this all started with this position from Terrell Owens: That the $49 million contract he already had, a seven-year contract, one on which the ink was barely dry, wasn’t enough.
Richard Bloch writes: “Shortly after the Super Bowl, the Player announced that his year-old contract didn’t adequately reflect his playing level, and he demanded a new deal.”
A few paragraphs later, Bloch writes this in the decision handed down on Wednesday:
“In his quest to secure a new agreement or to have the team release him, Mr. Owens embarked on what the club accurately characterizes as a nonstop pattern of disruptive conduct.”
Bloch then describes what happened after Terrell Owens finally arrived at the Eagles’ training camp, and after the head coach, Andy Reid, had tried to set matters straight with him:
“Thereafter, Coach Reid testifies, the Player declined to speak to him and Reid resorted to communicating with Owens through the Player’s position coach. Owens also declined to talk to various Eagles’ personnel, including the Offensive Coordinator, Brad Childress. Childress testifies that, as contrasted with the first year of their relationship, Owens was incommunicative. From the first time they met in training camp that second year, he says, he was met ‘with nothing, no response, just kind of straight-ahead stare.’ Childress continued to greet the Player for some seven or eight nights until Owens, at one point, said: ‘Why do you talk to me? I don’t talk to you. There’s no reason for you to talk to me.'”
This is Terrell Owens, then. He talks and talks to the media when he thinks the media can help him get a bigger contract, but he doesn’t have to talk to his own coaches, because that is exactly the way you think when you think you are bigger than the team.
Are the Eagles pure here? Of course not. Owens, as talented as he is, should never have made the regular season. He should never have played a game for them. They thought the same way they did when they got him from San Francisco, that he could be the difference-maker who could finally win them a Super Bowl. But you know something? If Owens had gotten cut in the preseason, he would have probably gotten exactly what he wanted, when he wanted it: He would have gotten a new deal from somebody else, and a new team, convincing everybody that he could be the difference-maker somewhere else. He would have won. This way he loses something, a half-season out of his prime that he doesn’t get back. Andy Reid didn’t do this to him, the arbitrator didn’t do this to him. He did this to himself.
On television and in the newspapers lately, we have read and heard comparisons between Owens and Chad Johnson of the Bengals, another great player with a great big mouth, one who holds up signs for the television cameras and talks and talks and tries to make himself a celebrity. But there is a difference between the Bengals’ difference-maker and Owens, at least so far: Johnson is not malicious.
Owens, from the time he had a big Super Bowl, was malicious about his team and his teammates, all in the name of getting his money. There was no team, just him, and his greed, and his ambition. Nothing else mattered to him, or his bullhorn of an agent.
In the real world, you act this way with your employer and your fellow employees, you get fired. The Eagles fired Terrell Owens. An arbitrator said they were well within their rights to do that. Grievance denied. Thanksgiving Day, indeed. Thanks to Richard Bloch. If the team doesn’t matter anymore, all we’ve got is wrestling.