Catch This!: Going Deep With the NFL’s Sharpest Weapon
By Terrell Owens and Stephen Singular
Simon & Schuster, 270 pages, $23
You may see Terrell Owens on the field tonight, making spectacular catches as he tries to help the Philadelphia Eagles beat the New England Patriots and claim victory in Super Bowl XXXIX. Or you may see him merely standing around, sidelined still by the broken leg and sprained ankle he suffered Dec. 19. Either way, you will see him.
Because Owens, the Eagles’ star wide receiver, is almost impossible to overlook.
Part of that, of course, is due to his production. Owens has already caught 77 passes this season (his first in Philadelphia after eight spent as a San Francisco 49er) for 1,200 yards and 14 touchdowns.
But part of Owens’ hold on our attention is also due to his persona. Owens has, in the past decade, become one of the most colorful characters in the NFL, known for his eye-catching touchdown celebrations, everything from dancing with cheerleader’s pompoms to signing his own touchdown ball with a Sharpie marker stashed in his sock. Because of those antics, he has too readily been dismissed as an egomaniacal, unthinking boob.
But as is evident in his recent biography, “Catch This!: Going Deep With the NFL’s Sharpest Weapon,” written with Stephen Singular, Owens is anything but stupid.
Brash, fearless and unflinchingly honest, Owens is, surprisingly, as mesmerizing in print as he is on the football field, a man whose brain cells fire as quickly as the nerve cells in his muscles. His on-field accomplishments and this book are remarkable achievements for a man who was never supposed to get this far.
Owens was raised by his mother, Marilyn Heard, and maternal grandmother, Alice Black, in Alexander City, Ala., a small town about one hour south of Birmingham. From Black, Owens learned self-reliance and self-discipline. But Black also ingrained in her grandson a deep distrust of outsiders. Black’s mother had disappeared when she was 12.
“My grandma never found out what happened to her, and this would haunt her until she was an old woman,” Owens writes. “It made her fearful of many things and deeply protective of her family. She didn’t trust anyone easily and almost no one beyond her blood relatives.”
That distrust took on almost epic proportions. Black’s home was a fortress in which the blinds were always closed, the windows always shut and the TV always off. Bath water, fresh air, even free speech were rationed.
“One year, I got a bicycle for my birthday,” Owens writes. “Grandma let me ride it to the end of the driveway and back to the front door, over and over again, until I’d worn out a patch of ground. . . . Across the street, kids were always playing basketball or football, but I couldn’t go over and join them. She’d watch me get right to the edge of the curb and try to step into the street before yelling at me to stay in the yard.”
It is tempting to play armchair psychologist and posit that Owens’ propensity to act out on the football field is in direct reaction to his childhood repression. It would be easy to demonize Owens’ grandmother and decry the suffering she inflicted on her poor, defenseless grandson.
That, though, would be too simplistic.
“I’d grown up resisting all of her rules and restrictions, but now they were helping me ward off certain temptations when I was far away from home and had money to spend,” Owens writes.
Besides, his grandmother was only one twisted branch on a gnarled family tree.
Owens only learned of his father’s identity, for instance, when he developed a childhood crush on a girl who lived across the street. Then 11, Owens was warned by the girl’s father, L.C. Russell, that he could not be interested in her because she was his half-sister.
“It took me a while to understand that I was talking to my father. He’d been living across the street for many years, but nobody in my family had ever told me that,” Owens writes. “When I asked my mom about this, she said that it wasn’t necessary to explain everything to me.”
Given this background, it seems remarkable that Owens remains involved in the life of his own son, Terique, 5. Owens offers few details about him and makes clear he is no longer involved with the boy’s mother.
“[A]t first, this was a very difficult situation for me because of the way I’d been raised, not knowing my father until I was almost a teenager,” Owens writes.
But he quickly took to fatherhood:
“Anytime he’s around, my mood changes instantly for the better. . . . My son is helping me to grow up.”
And that statement, as much as anything, may explain Owens’ propensity to seek controversy and explain why he always seems to be in the middle of public clashes with coaches and teammates. Owens, in some ways, remains an overgrown child, emotionally stunted and socially inept.
“I’ve matured late, both as a football player and as a human being,” he writes. “I was slow out of the chute when it came to interacting with other people, like a grade school kid in high school, a high-schooler in college, and a college student my first few years in the NFL.”
Owens has never–from his college days at Division I-AA University of Tennessee at Chattanooga to his current spot as one of the best-paid receivers in the NFL–hesitated to call out a coach for what he believes to be poor play calling and for failing to involve him sufficiently in the offense. His aggressiveness is what helped him go from a partial-scholarship player to a lightly regarded draft pick to an NFL star. But it has also cost him many relationships with coaches and teammates.
In his freshman year of college, the lightly regarded Owens clashed with coach Buddy Nix for not giving him enough playing time. He also clashed with 49ers coaches Steve Mariucci and Dennis Erickson, as well as San Francisco teammates Bryant Young and Jeff Garcia. There has even been talk of tension between him and current Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb.
Owens’ motto: Burn bridges now, worry about the consequences later.
There is no question Owens sees the world through his own filter. He can, at times, be infuriating and smarmy, ready with a justification for every transgression. He can also be too quick to cast blame on others, too slow to accept it for himself.
But his honesty makes him a refreshing antithesis to the overly corporatized, bland images that many athletes–perhaps most famously Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods–cultivate. Owens doesn’t shy away from controversy. He doesn’t hesitate to talk about the black-white divide in NFL locker rooms, the persistent racism he still encounters when he returns to Alabama, or the unequal power split in an NFL populated by black stars but run by white owners. He answers not to Madison Avenue but to his own conscience, saying what he thinks, and thinking what he wants.
Owens is a good father and a churlish teammate, a self-serving boor and the self-effacing bedrock who supports his entire family financially. He is a superstar and a crybaby, a catalyst to victory and an unshakable distraction. And he is multitalented.
There is no question he can be infuriatingly infantile, too ready to act, and react, without considering the consequences of his actions or words. But he also forces us to examine our own prejudices. It is easy enough to denounce Owens. But would you, or I, or anyone else, have turned out differently if we had been raised in circumstances like his?
In some ways, “Catch This!” is a conventional rags-to-riches sports biography, the story of a small-town boy who makes good with hard work and determination. But while most books in this genre too easily serve up the empty calories of platitude and cliche, Owens offers more. His is a meaty, bizarre tale, one that inspires, amuses, infuriates and, perhaps most importantly, makes us think.
