Published Jul 26, 2005
The beauty of blogging is that, over a period of years, a dedicated writer can develop an audience of up to several, gain the trust of this audience, and thus have a stage upon which to stand when he shouts out that one absolutely, completely, and preposterously crazy truth that only he knows. Now is that time for me. Now is my time to say, I feel bad for Terrell Owens, I know where he’s coming from, I understand why he’s holding out and I’m down with it.
I realize that’s crazy. Ol’ Terrell, he got a 7-year, $49 million contract before he started playing for the Iggles last year. Who holds out because they’re underpaid when they’re making $7 million a year? Who wants to redo a contract only one year old? A spoiled brat, right? Someone who has no idea what normal people earn and work for, right? That’s what the press says, that’s conventional wisdom.
But that ain’t my wisdom, no siree. Terrell, he think he got screwed, and he right. That’s the problem with any negotiation, you always have the two sides to it and both sides are tremendously important and valid to the individuals to whom they belong. The Eagles think they offered Terrell a fair deal and they’re right too. And that’s a problem.
We got in this position because the two sides entered negotiations with a fundamentally different view of reality and, unfortunately, no part of the negotiations made the two world-views coincide. Terrell felt like a spurned, underrated receiver in San Francisco, and he itched for a chance to prove himself — and expected that, once he had proven himself, he’d be compensated at a high level. Well, Terrell produced last season, playing a key role in getting the club to the Super Bowl and making key plays that kept Philly in the game until the very end. Wouldn’t you, as a reasonable person being underpaid by $1.5 million/year, go on strike?
On the other hand, Philadelphia thought that they were paying a fair price for a top receiver, with a reasonable discount for the risk of signing an older player who might be on the downside of his career and who was also known to be a disruption in the locker room, a position borne out by the fact that they hired Owens’s services in a competitive bidding process. Philadelphia felt they’d paid a fair price for top-receiver performance and were happy to have got what they paid for.
Both world-views were supported by a particular subset of the facts when the contract was signed, and both world-views are supported by a particular subset of the facts now. Inconveniently enough, that means that both world-views are true, and therefore both sides have a valid point. This point makes for poor demagoguery, and thus I will never be a sportswriter or a Maximum Leader, but, dammit, it’s my soapbox and I’ll waste it however I please.
But you’ve got to feel bad for poor T.O.. I mean, he’s a real piece of work, but he was on absolutely his best behavior for a good six months, every minute of every day. That must have been torture, and it must equally only have been the taste of the long green in his mouth that kept it shut. Thinking of the pain he must now have inside makes me feel the same gut-wrenchingly neurotic sense of mixed empathy and vicarious embarassment that makes me hide my eyes for two-thirds of any given episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Which either means that I’m too sensitive to the plight of my fellow man, or that Terell Owens has become a misanthropic Jew.
great post—you make sports interesting! wanna watch some curb??? ;o)