"So what’s gonna happen with T.O.?"
You can’t escape the question. It comes up in every conversation. You could be visiting your 92-year-old grandmother and she’ll ask you what you think is going to happen to T.O. Not suicide-bombers in London, not the high price of gas, not the weekly missing female featured on cable news can replace T.O. as the number-one topic in Philadelphia. Not even an Eagles player getting shot in South Florida can shake our obsession.
"Did you hear Jerome McDougle got shot?"
"Yeah, man, but what’s gonna happen with T.O.?"
For the sane people who live in other parts of the country, it’s the first week of August, a time to relax and enjoy the last month of summer. In Philadelphia, a morality play is unfolding in the guise of Eagles training camp.
You remember Eagles training camp, don’t you? That’s where you drive 2,000 miles in 90-degree heat to some hick campus to see players practicing. Practice. We’re talking about practice. (Oh sorry, that’s another sport with another controversial Philadelphia superstar). I know most of you don’t agree with me on this, but I’m already exhausted by the Eagles season and we haven’t gotten to the first pre-season game. Pre-season games are, you know, scrimmages where you pay full price to see guys play who will be driving trucks in September, not playing in the NFL.
Listen up. What we have here is a failure to communicate. We have a contract dispute between a greedy player and his greedy agent versus a greedy NFL team. Take Terrell Owens (as Henny Youngman would’ve said, please somebody take him). Owens was a classless jerk with great talent when he played for San Francisco. He complained about not getting enough passes thrown his way and he badmouthed his quarterback, implying he was gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Now he comes to the Eagles and he behaves like a classless jerk with great talent who complains about not getting enough passes thrown his way and badmouths his quarterback (this time the issue is not the quarterback’s sexual orientation, but his propensity to get tired in playoff games in the fourth quarter). And guess what, we’re surprised! Now T.O. wants more money because $9 mil is not enough as he takes care of a large family.
Then there’s Drew Rosenhaus, T.O.’s agent, who makes those on HBO’s Arliss look like St. Francis of Assisi.
Rosenhaus is the only guy who could save a kid from drowning and make it look like a ploy to get a better deal for his client. The way this guy operates, he makes a great white shark look like a porpoise.
On the other side of this dispute are the Eagles, that notoriously sentimental organization that ditches you as soon as you get your first gray hair. While you, the fan, automatically side with management in these disputes because we know you’d play the game for nothing if you could, there’s the little matter of NFL contracts. To describe an NFL contract as one-sided would be like saying the Tower of Pisa seems to be leaning a bit. NFL contracts are not guaranteed. So when you read about those fabulous seven-year deals – incidentally handed out only to the star players – in reality those contracts are likely to be dumped by the team not halfway through the deal. For the Eagles, Joe Banner negotiates these deals like Ebenezer Scrooge before the ghosts started visiting him.
And then there’s gentleman Jeffrey Lurie. Lurie represents himself as the Alan Alda of NFL owners, a sensitive man of the 21st century. His wife, Christina, is an outspoken advocate of feminism, except when she’s instructing Vera Wang to design those skimpy cheerleaders outfits. Lurie has, shall we say, his inconsistencies, too. All while protesting the ESPN show Playmakers as harmful to the NFL’s image because of its depiction of players as philanderers and substance abusers, Lurie was peddling a cheerleaders lingerie calendar. Lurie, it turns out, is not only Alan Alda, he’s part Larry Flynt. He has made quite a handsome profit on the franchise he purchased from mean old Norman Braman, but apparently he needs the extra bucks those cheerleaders calendars bring in to remain competitive in today’s NFL.
Pity the poor Eagles fans, who are as anguished as Hamlet with a decision to make. They want desperately to spell out E-A-G-L-E-S after a Super Bowl win. Each season under Andy Reid, they gobble up their conference (with Andy how could it be any other way?), only to fail in the big one. They need T.O. to win the big one, but Philadelphia fans don’t only want to win, they want to win the right way. And therein is the crux of their dilemma. Sure T.O. is a jerk, but he’s a talented jerk. And he’s our jerk. Who to root for?
A drama of Shakespearean proportions unfolds before us. So I ask you, what’s gonna happen with T.O.?
