40,000-100,000 circulation
Feature story
Fifth place
New beginning
There have been many twists and turns on the road to Green Bay for Terry Glenn, who thinks he's finally found what he's been looking for.
By JASON WILDE
Wisconsin State Journal
GREEN BAY – The man of the house pulls his black Bentley halfway into the driveway, then backs up and honks the horn. His next-door neighbor, a pot-bellied, mid-40s man in a loud flower-print shirt, stops his lawnmower and leans into the open passenger-side window. The two chat for a moment, share a laugh, then go their separate ways – one back to his lawn, the other into his garage.
Inside the large, new home, there are three boys, a leaping puppy and one very pregnant woman who are all thrilled the man of the house is back from work. He kisses the love of his life, removes the bag of ice that is Saran-wrapped to his aching left knee and plops himself down on the brown leather couch in front of the giant high-definition television.
Almost instantly, the competition begins for his attention. The dog – a Jack Russell Terrier named Bella, a yapping bundle of energy and fur – has delivered a gnarled chewtoy to him, wanting to play fetch. The boys – his son, 6-year-old Terry Jr.; Christopher, Terry Jr.'s friend from home in Columbus, Ohio; and Ben, the son of the lawn-mowing neighbor – fire up the PlayStation2 and rope him into a game of "Street Hoops." Then another. And another. And another.
The man of the house smiles.
If you didn't know better, you'd think you just walked into the pilot episode of a new family sitcom on the WB. The storyline: Troubled NFL football player gets traded during the offseason from the big city to the smallest town in pro sports, finds happiness in middle America. Cue theme song and opening credits.
But this isn't some goofy sitcom. There are no cameras, no laugh track, no studio audience. This is real life. This is Terry Tyree Glenn's life. Not as the Green Bay Packers' new go-to wide receiver. As man of the house. This is what has been missing for so long, from his tough, tragic childhood until now.
"This is what it's all about right here," says the 28-year-old Glenn. "My first year in the league, it was me going home by myself, watching TV or going out and getting a drink and hanging out with some fellas and running around. You know, doing what young guys do. I had nothing to come home to. But I see the importance of a family now and just how much joy it can bring to you.
"I'm not perfect. I'm just living my life. People can say what they want to, but I'm going to live my life. And that's what I'm here to do. I'm here to do what I can to get through life and know that I've done all I could to make people happy and make myself happy." And at this moment, he could not be happier.
"All the stars are aligned. They may not be perfectly aligned, but they're getting there," says Glenn's Jerry Maguire-like agent of seven years, James Gould. "He is happier than he's been since I've known him. Things are coming together for him better than they have in a long, long time. This is a new lease on his life."
A knock at the door
Terry was 13 at the time, and he was the man of the house then, too. You have to be when your family is on welfare, your mother is a mess and your father up and left when you were only 2.
He still remembers that October night in 1987 when Kenneth Adams pounded on the door. He remembers being cold, because the duplex at 38 S. Wheatland Ave. didn't have heat or electricity because his mom stopped paying the bills. He can still see Adams – this fat, evil-looking man with rotten teeth – standing on the stoop, and he can't forget the uncomfortable feeling he got when Adams tried to invite himself in.
"He says he just saw my mother and that she told him to come into the house and wait for her," Terry recalls. His sister Dorothy, then 7, was asleep upstairs. "So I'm thinking, Me and my sister are here, I'm not letting nobody in this house.' And I slammed the door and locked it. And I went back to bed."
Terry's mother, Donetta Glenn, was 16 when she had Terry. She was known as "Niecy" in her west-Columbus neighborhood, and her alcoholism was well-known, too. Her mother, Terry's grandmother, had pretty much raised Terry, but she passed away when he was 11. Now he was back with his mother, who was trying to put her life back together at age 29.
"She'd spent a lot of time in and out of jail, and that's when she was getting out," Terry says. "She wasn't always perfect, but she was trying."
A few days after the knock at the door, Terry's mother gave him some money to go to the store, told him to take care of his sister and left. "That night came, and she didn't come home," Terry remembers. "And then the next day came, and she was nowhere to be found. I started thinking, Where's she at? Maybe she just left us.' The next night, I started to get worried, because nobody has heard from her. Nobody knows where she is."
Terry took his little sister – he and Dorothy have different fathers – across the street to stay with some neighbors and reported Niecy missing. A few more days went by. They went to stay with some relatives, and that's where he was when the phone rang.
"They'd found a body in an abandoned building," Terry says, staring blankly out the kitchen window of his new home. "It was her. That was it. It was my mom."
Last seen leaving a bar with two men – she'd left her purse and drink behind – Niecy had been beaten to death and dumped at 2469 W. Broad St. Adams turned himself in in Louisiana a year later and was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in a Marion, Ohio, prison for involuntary manslaughter.
After Niecy's death, Terry and his sister were shuffled from aunt to aunt, often separated and never finding the right fit. "It's not like I was strung out at a place downtown searching for a home," Terry says. "I was with relatives, and it just wasn't working with them."
That's when he met Charles Henley Jr. – "June" for short. Terry was a year older than June, but they hit it off immediately. He started spending more and more time at the Henley house until he asked June if he could come live with his family. June's parents, Mary and Charles Sr., had their doubts, but they couldn't say no.
"We actually didn't know him that well," Mary Henley says. "But we were concerned about him because we knew he had nowhere else to go, no one else to turn to. If we turned him away, where would he go? We were thinking, like, a weekend. It turned into eight years."
Charles Henley, a newspaper circulation manager for the Columbus Dispatch, is a man who believes in rules, and there were two hard-and-fast ones for his kids: No missing curfew – 10 p.m. on school nights, midnight on weekends – and everyone gets a paper route. He treated Terry exactly the same. That fall, Terry and June went out for football together.
"I didn't know who Terry was during football his freshman year, but he played freshman basketball and I noticed him. He could jump out of the gym," says Gregg Miller, coach of Brookhaven High School in Columbus. "So I looked him up, found out who he was. He wanted to play football, he just didn't know anybody. He was a year older than June, so the next year when he was a sophomore and June was a freshman, that's when they both went out for football. They were like brothers. And it just kind of went from there."
By the next year, they were stars. June, the class president, was a standout running back (he ended up playing at Kansas and briefly with the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs). But Terry? It's tough being a star wide receiver on the run-oriented Brookhaven Bearcats.
"The passing game isn't real big here," Miller says. "I think Terry has the school (season) record with 18 catches, which isn't much over 10 or 12 games. But it's what he did with those 18 that showed what he could do."
College recruiters took notice, but Terry was still playing catch-up academically, hurting his scholarship chances. Yet he was unfazed.
"I always felt like I was going to be something. I never really got caught up in all the things that were going wrong in my life," Glenn says.
Georgia Hauser knew it, too. A teacher at Brookhaven for more than 30 years, she is the Bearcats' den mother, baking cookies and organizing team meals and taking care of her boys. For Terry, though, she did much more. "She was really the mother figure in his life," Miller says.
When Terry went to Ohio State – initially as a walk-on – Hauser was there for every home game. When he was sick, she took care of him. When he had a problem, she advised him. "She was always there for me. Always," Glenn says.
"For any kid that goes away to college the first time, there's uncertainty," Miller says.
"You and I had mom and dad who we could call at home and say, How do I do this?' Or, I need money.' Or, Send me some cookies.' When I ran out of clean clothes, I shipped them home to my mom to wash. She did that for him. She really was the mother figure in his life."
No excuses
Terry Glenn, as compelling a story as he is, is no saint, and he admits this. Having made more than his share of mistakes, he doesn't make excuses for any of them.
In April of 1996, the New England Patriots selected him seventh overall in the NFL draft. That July, he totaled his leased Mercedes Benz 500SL after he lost control driving 60 mph in a 35 mph-zone and hit a tree in Franklin County, Ohio. (Glenn escaped injury; his passenger, Chris Snider, received only minor cuts and bruises).
In November of 1999, he was accused of groping a woman outside a Saugus, Mass., bar. (No charges were brought and the case was settled out of court). He was pulled over for speeding early the following morning and was three hours late for practice and meetings. (Then-coach Pete Carroll fined him and benched him for the first quarter of the next game).
In December of 1999, he was suspended for one game by Carroll and docked one week's pay for not attending a meeting and not coming to the Patriots' facility for treatment of a respiratory infection. (Glenn says he was in bed with a 102-degree temperature and in constant contact with trainers; the fine was later rescinded by coach Bill Belichick, who took over after Carroll was fired following the 1999 season).
In December of 2000, Glenn went to a Canadian strip club with teammates Ty Law and Troy Brown after a Patriots game at Buffalo. They were stopped at the U.S. border upon their return, and Brown was arrested for possession of ecstasy; all three players were late for the next day's meetings. (All three were fined by Belichick).
And in May of 2001, Glenn was arrested in Walpole, Mass., and charged with assaulting Kimberly Combs, his ex-girlfriend and Terry Jr.'s mother. (Combs later recanted her allegations, and the charges were dropped).
Then came last year, a quagmire of allegation, litigation and frustration. Glenn says no one outside the situation could possibly know what went on, and no one can understand just what was being taken away from him.
You see, football had always been there for Glenn. Football had always brought him happiness, starting when he was a kid playing Pop Warner and selling Cokes in the stands of Ohio State games.
"Football's been my whole life since I was six, seven years old," Glenn says. "It was a way for me to get away and play and have fun, to forget about the things going on in my life, get away from reality a little bit."
That's what made the 2001 season so difficult. Some of the problems, by his own admission, were self-inflicted. Others, though, he says were the result of being treated unfairly and maliciously. He even hints at a conspiracy.
It all goes back to May of 1998, when he smoked marijuana with a friend shortly before a Patriots minicamp. He tested positive a few days later and landed in the NFL's substance-abuse program, subjecting him to drug tests three times a week and potential suspensions if he failed or missed another test. Glenn insists that the one positive test was an isolated one; he swears he has not tested positive since. The NFL cannot confirm this, however, citing the confidentiality of the program.
In April of 2001, Glenn missed a scheduled test while attending a track meet in Austin, Texas. He says he contacted his medical advisers – "I had proof of phone calls that I made to tell them where I was," he says – but no one called him back for two days. When someone finally was dispatched to test him, he came up clean, but because the NFL program counts a missed test the same as a positive test, he was subject to a four-game suspension. He appealed, and while he was told his case was a slam-dunk, the suspension was upheld.
Because of the other off-the-field incidents and his inclusion in the substance-abuse program, there were behavioral and morals clauses written into the six-year, $50 million contract extension Glenn signed with the Patriots in November of 2000. The Patriots charged that the suspension constituted a breach of the contract, and they withheld the remaining $8.5 million of his $11.5 million signing bonus, including a $2 million payment that was due when he reported to camp.
When Glenn found out about this on Aug. 3, he did the first thing that came to mind – he left. Without Gould there to talk him out of it, Glenn went AWOL. (Gould was attending the memorial service for Minnesota Vikings tackle Korey Stringer, another of Gould's clients and one of Glenn's former teammates at Ohio State who died of complications due to heat exhaustion in training camp.) "Terry tends to drift and isolate when things aren't going well," Gould says. "It went south quickly, and that's when Terry left. After that, there was no stopping it."
Glenn demanded a trade, and Belichick, the Patriots' coach, tried unsuccessfully to suspend him for the season by placing him on the reserve/left camp list. After serving his four-game suspension, Glenn returned in Week 5 to catch seven passes for 110 yards and a touchdown vs. San Diego.
Glenn still didn't have his money, though, and Glenn claims Belichick and the Patriots started inventing ways to avoid paying him. Through a spokesman, Belichick declined an interview request for this story.
"They were trying to build things against me so when we got to the end of the season, they could say, 'He did this, he did this and he did this – we shouldn't have to pay him,"' says Glenn, who would be suspended for one year if he tests positive or misses another drug test. "They started making up meetings times, telling me one thing and everybody else something else. It got to the point where it was real bad. I was calling the (NFL) Players Association every day, telling them what (the Patriots) were doing. And there was nothing I could do about it."
Glenn's relationship with the Patriots only deteriorated from there. He was inactive for the next six weeks – ostensibly because of a hamstring injury, which Glenn was milking – and Belichick suspended him for the Patriots' Dec. 2 game against the New York Jets for "conduct detrimental to the team."
Glenn returned from the suspension to see limited action in the next three games, then did not travel to the regular-season finale at Carolina. He was suspended for the playoffs "due to multiple unexcused absences from team meetings and practices," and the Patriots went on to their improbable Super Bowl XXXVI victory without him.
Meanwhile, Glenn's attorneys had filed a suit against the NFL under the Americans with Disabilities Act, claiming that he missed his drug test because of chronic depression. As he watched the Super Bowl from his living room in Columbus with friends, New England fans had turned against him, with the insinuation in Boston being that Glenn was using his background as a crutch, an excuse for his behavior. Glenn's eyes alight with anger when the topic is raised.
"I've never used my childhood as an excuse for anything. Anything," Glenn says. "I'm responsible for what I do, how I act, what I say. Cut me some slack? I don't ask nobody for nothing. I don't want people to feel sorry for me. I can't help how people feel, but I don't ask for it. That's the way it is."
Gould, Glenn's agent, was given permission by the Patriots to seek a trade. The first team he thought of was the Green Bay Packers.
"If you take all the circumstances and spin that web, you could deduce that Terry's a bad guy. But he's far from that," Gould says. "He's a warm, engaging person who has moments of withdrawal. He has such warmth to his personality, that's the way I'd like to see him all the time. But that's not the way anybody is all the time.
"This (trade) was all about (Packers coach and general manager) Mike Sherman trying to feel comfortable with the guy Terry is. It was a lot of soul-searching, a lot of phone calls. And the Packers came away believing this is a really good kid. I don't think he'd be in Green Bay if Mike Sherman didn't see that."
'The best comeback'
Sort through all the caveats and qualifiers, every "if" and "as long as," and this much is clear about Terry Glenn: He is a rare football talent.
"The kid runs the best comeback in football," former Patriots coach Bill Parcells says. "Nobody can run the comeback like him."
Parcells, who coached Glenn as a rookie in 1996, is talking about the pass pattern. But now that Glenn is in Green Bay, the kid is running the comeback pattern of his life. And with Brett Favre throwing the ball, Parcells thinks the odds of completion are pretty good.
"There isn't any question about his ability now. No question. He can do it," says Parcells, now an ESPN studio analyst. He talks to Glenn about once a week. "He was a clutch player for me. That's why I've always liked him. He was a dedicated football player when I had him.
"I can only go on what I saw. What I saw was a great young player his first year. I think Terry's very determined. In fact, I know he is. When a player with his ability is determined, he'll produce. He will. You just watch."
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