W.O.W -- aka Whiner of the Week
There’s an often told story about the philandering husband whose long-suffering and credulous wife walks into the same restaurant in which he is snuggled up in a corner booth with a long blonde dressed in enough material to make two handkerchiefs and a face cloth, and with his hand on her personal body parts and her lips engulfing his like a toilet plunger.
Outraged, the wife storms up to her ne’er-do-well cad of a spouse and demands to know the meaning of what she is seeing. As calmly and firmly as Dick Rumsfeld explaining why the democratization of Iraq is going along even better than expected, the man says nothing is going on. The woman is a client and the kiss was a nice way of cementing the business deal which they came in to discuss over dinner.
The wife sputters something about the voyage of discovery his hand was embarked upon and the apparent passion of the smooch.
“Who you gonna believe,” the man whimpers with his best hurt puppy-dog look, “me or your lying eyes?”
This is what we thought of when we watched our Whiner of the Week, Terrell Owens, act like the offended party after Dallas police and emergency medical services reported they had taken him to the hospital after they determined that he had taken 35 pain pills in an apparent attempt to do himself terminal harm.
We might have cut him a break if he had called it a misunderstanding, but he and his “publicist,” the gum-cracking Kim Etheridge, basically accused the people who came to help him of filing a false report. Owens whined that he didn’t take all those pills; like most people who get a prescription, he took most of them out of the bottle and put them in a drawer, saving just two extras that Etheridge said she tried to pry out of his hand. His incoherence was the result of bad chemistry between the pain pills and the “supplements” he also takes.
Etheridge, in words that reflected all the courses she took in communications, explained that she called 911 because she was worried when “a man of his statue” suddenly became non-responsive. We can only guess that she has met men of other statues — Michelangelo’s David, perhaps — who are more responsive.
Two days later, T.O. fired his long-time personal trainer, James "Buddy" Primm, 55, for telling the local papers that Owens had been down because he had just been dumped by his fiancée and had been denied a visit with his son on the boy’s seventh birthday. Owens said he fired Primm for talking about the troubled star’s personal life. We can surmise that it didn’t help that the information passed on by Primm confirmed that Owens may have been depressed, as the police report reports him saying.
At week’s end, the people who helped T.O. were asking him to apologize for suggesting they made up what they saw with their own eyes. And Owens was asking us who we wanted to believe, him or their lying eyes.
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