(Photo by Rick Stewart/Getty Images)
Pariahs make the world go ‘round.
Terrell Owens is a premier talent. He’s also a perennial troublemaker. Between now and the end of the season, the six-million-dollar Bill is a safe bet to perpetrate some species of outrage in Buffalo—which would be worse news if outrage weren’t so instrumental in his employer’s PR strategy.
Decorum means pleasing the customer.
Deviance, on the other hand, means making him appreciate how nice it is to be pleased.
I’m not writing in defense of Owens. The huddle’s no place for a runaway ego, and No. 81 is a certified prima donna. But sometimes prima donnas are the best teammates. In a league so desperately seeking positive role models, there has to be room for a guy who sets such a reliably bad example.
Day is day because it isn’t night.
Right is right because it isn’t wrong.
If Owens were more inclined to walk the line, his coworkers wouldn’t know where not to follow.
Football fans love to loathe their favorite villains. Owens, Pacman Jones, the Artist Formerly Known As Chad Johnson—they’re magnets for criticism, and lightning rods for scorn. The reason, I think, is that we affirm what we like by attacking what we don’t. Moralists will argue that Owens undermines traditional values in loving his neighbor less than himself. I’d counter that his lack of principles ultimately makes us more sure of our own.
It’s bad to be unscrupulous.
It’s worse to be uncertain.
Owens is a notorious bridge-burner, but one man’s bonfire is often another man’s beacon.
Identity is an exclusionary construct. What you are is dependent on what you’re for; what you’re for is defined by what you’re against. The NFL needs Terrell Owens because Terrell Owens is precisely what the NFL doesn’t want, and because desire is unintelligible in the absence of revulsion. Every self-absorbed hero is doomed to fall by his own hubris. The one with the reality show is at least considerate enough to be a cautionary spectacle on the way down.
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Warren Zevon never got flagged for an excessive end zone celebration, but he did know a thing or two about unsportsmanlike conduct:
Well, he went down to dinner in his Sunday best
Excitable boy, they all said
And he poured the popcorn all over his chest
Excitable boy, they all said
Well, he's just an excitable boy
Which isn't a sin until someone commits it.
Because the righteous are born to rail against the wicked, and anyone who preaches virtue without damning vice is either filming a United Way commercial or only just saying, is all...
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