Terrell Owens had a sensational career on the field and you can say he had quite the career off the field. His antics often overshadowed what he did on the field and his image took a huge hit.
T.O, or as Skip Bayless calls him, Team Obliterator had controversy following him ALL THE TIME. Some of his action were trivial and petty and didn’t need all the attention but the media does what it does. We all know how powerful the media is and once you have a certain reputation it is extremely hard to break
With everything that surrounded T.O, maybe something like Twitter would have helped. He was interviewed by the Dallas Morning News and when asked about the social media he said this,
“Where social media is now, if it was really that way back then I would have been able to dispute or dispel some of those things. The media is very, very powerful. I realize the way that people perceive me now is based on the media’s inaccurate portrayal of who I was. [Social media] is now a platform for a lot of guys to dispute or dispel anything that’s going on out there. There’s no middle man. Had I been able to have that platform, there were times where I did interviews where I tried to defend myself, but with a lot of people that don’t know much about the media, there’s something called editing. So they edit it the way they want it portrayed and for people to see it across the country, so that’s how it all happened.”
Now, T.O is right when he said he could given his side to any situation and dispelled plenty of things. The media is powerful. But we see it with athletes today that social media can do plenty of harm if you’re not careful.
