Friends may not be calling, or teams, but lawyers, a slew of them, definitely have him on speed dial. Especially those who represent the four women to whom he pays a total of $44,600 a month in child support for his four children, ages 5 to 12: "If there's anything I'm sorry about, it's getting involved with all that." He never actually dated any of the women, he says. One was a one-night stand, the others "repeat offenders." Owens, who has never been married, concedes he is "not a very good judge of character." Still, he "never suspected they were the types to do what they done in the past year."

Last summer, when the money started to dry up for real and the extent of his financial disaster became clear, he reduced the amount he paid to each of the women. Three of them sued him. When he failed to show up for a court date with the mother of his oldest child, Tariq, because it conflicted with his public tryout, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. "She wouldn't reschedule," he says, his hands reaching out unconsciously as if strangling an imaginary neck. "She'd pressed me in a deposition about if I intended to try to get on another team, but then when I do the workout, do what I can to get work, this is what she does."

Now he is in court with all four women, whom he lumps together like one big bloodsucking blob. None of them are being fair, he says: "They know I'm not working; they know the deal." Although he never established regular visitation with any of the children through the courts, he says he sees the eldest three as much as he can when their mothers allow it. So bitter is his relationship with the mother of the youngest child, a son, that he has never met the boy.

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Even in the NFL, where tales of brutal childhoods and absent fathers are as common as concussions, Terrell Owens's story stands out. Raised mostly by his joyless Baptist grandmother, who kept the kids inside her tiny, dark home virtually every moment they weren't in school and sometimes drank so much she passed out, he discovered the hard way at age 11 who his father was: after he developed a crush on the girl across the street. Only then was he told that she was his half-sister, that his father, married with four kids, had been living closer than a field's length away all those years. In his 2004 autobiography, Catch This!: Going Deep with the NFL's Sharpest Weapon, Owens wrote that growing up he never heard the words "I love you," not even from his grandmother, whose photo he carried on the road with him for most of the years he played. In an episode of The T.O. Show, he went back to his hometown of Alexander City, Alabama, for what was supposed to be a confrontation with his father about all the missed years, but instead it wound up a sad and awkward reminder of a life of unrequited longing. "I had two jobs, I was busy," was all his dad could muster.

Owens knows that not having had a father or the chance to learn social skills beyond his grandmother's insular world is at the heart of why he acts as he does, how he bristles at authority and says things that may be true yet are obviously not in his long-term interest. And he worries that he is revisiting the sins of his father on his own son, Atlin, the 5-year-old he's never seen. The producers of his show had him consult with a therapist on-camera, and what the woman said about the cycle he was perpetuating really got to him, motivating him to call Atlin's mother to try to see the boy. So far, though, that hasn't happened.