point/counterpoint: Is something wrong with Terrell?

It’s important to note who found Terrell in his bed, next to an empty pill bottle – his publicist, whose job it is to ensure Terrell gets publicity.

For a flamboyant football star who is starting to take on the over-ripe image of a cocky jock who has received too much attention too fast, Terrell naturally began to slip out of public focus and into the abyss of obscurity.

For an attention junkie, this is the worst thing that can happen because it means the gradual deprivation of the one thing he lives for – all eyes on him. Terrell doesn’t want this to happen and his publicist sure doesn’t want it to happen, either.

Now, I’m not implying that Terrell’s publicist was in on this; she doesn’t have to be. It’s the kind of scheme that only Terrell has to be involved in. Out of sight of cameras, fans and even a witness, Terrell had plenty of time to do one thing: think.

It could be speculated that he spent those solitary hours alone in a hospital room with nothing but painkillers and natural supplements to keep him company. Perhaps he paralleled that stretch of time in solitude to his future and discovered inwardly that his popularity is fading (that’s a good cause for the alleged depression he was facing, which his publicist mentioned in the police reports).

If that were the case, it is possible that Terrell was lying around on painkillers wondering how someone past his peak could still get that last boost into the limelight without having to score another 100 touchdowns.

When found in his bed, he simply ignored the attempts made by his publicist to rouse him, knowing she would quickly connect the empty pill bottle to the “unconscious” condition in which she found him, panic, and alert the authorities, thus alerting the public – and all he had to do was lie there.

The report says he answered “yes” to the question, “Did you take the pills to harm yourself?” But he fogged the story up when he said later that he answered the authorities without knowing the nature of the question due to his cloudy state of mind. Also, by saying the pills were inside a drawer in the same table on which the pill-bottle was sitting, he makes people wonder why he would remove the pills from the bottle and stick them in the drawer, if he didn’t really swallow them all.

But the question of whether he really did take the pills to harm himself is always going to be there, because the seed has been planted. There’s no way to know for sure whether he took the pills, how many he took or why he took them. So those who believe he actually swallowed 35 pills will think, “Terrell is a scared, fragile human underneath that hulking exterior,” without considering the chance that this entire episode arose out of Terrell’s starvation for publicity.

Now, because of the ambiguity of the whole situation, Terrell has dodged accountability and created a debate that will propel him into infamy for walking such a dangerous line between the delicate humanist who wants to be understood and the macho-man football star the media made him out to be.