Terrell Owens has always been an island of sorts. His brash personality and self-absorption routinely alienated his teammates during an NFL career that teetered between terrific and toxic, leaving him to fend for himself.

Now, at 38 and out of football, he’s lonelier than ever, and running out of money. In a GQ profile, Owens comes across as wounded, broke and desperate. When people text him to ask where he is, he replies back: “I’m in hell.”

But is it his own fault? That’s the perennial debate on T.O., who had a heartbreaking childhood but continually pointed fingers at everyone but himself once he became an adult.

In the GQ story by Nancy Hass, Owens blames the media for not giving him a chance to rehab his injury, blames agent Drew Rosenhaus for not protecting him from a bad business arrangement, and — perhaps most surprisingly — blames a former team captain for his issues with former Philadelphia teammate Donovan McNabb.

Owens earned around $80 million during his NFL career, but has found himself in deep financial trouble, despite never spending lavishly. In the February edition of GQ, Owens admits to trusting the wrong people, who in turn cost him a lot of his fortune.

“It’s not a matter of having lived too large — he was never the type to stockpile Ferraris or build himself a compound; the flashiest car he ever drove was a Mercedes, and while he indeed racked up a few homes that cost as much as $4 million, the only crib he classifies as even mildly sick by pro-ball standards was the one he bought in Atlanta to live in during the Philly off-season.

The problem, he says, is that he’s by nature too trusting, loyal to a fault, despite everyone’s carping that he’s selfish. It’s the sad old stereotypical song of the up-from-nothing black athlete: He let other people take care of things.”

Owens said financial advisers recommended by Rosenhaus lost much of his money in highly leveraged ventures, then houses and apartments he thought he could rent out in a worst case scenario became dead weight in a housing market collapse (none of the properties is particularly excessive, but total a yearly mortgage of about $750,000), and $2 million was lost in an Alabama entertainment complex investment. That venture turned out to be illegal, and also claimed former Redskins running back Clinton Portis as a victim.

“I hate myself for letting this happen,” Owens told GQ. “I believed that they had my back when they said, ‘You take care of the football, and we’ll do the rest.’ And in the end, they just basically stole from me.”

Owens has also found himself friendless, thanks to a growing sense of distrust thanks to his many unfortunate dealings.

He never had many friends — teammates never called him to party, he says, wrongly assuming that he was “too big” to socialize — and now, “I don’t have no friends. I don’t want no friends. That’s how I feel.”

And on top of that, he’s battling in court with 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.”

When money became tighter, Owens had to reduce the amount he paid to each of the women, and three of them sued him. A warrant was issued for his arrest when he didn’t show up for a court date with the mother of his oldest child, Tariq. Beyond that, the relationship he’s maintained with the mothers and his children is tenuous, at best.

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.

As for McNabb, Owens stands by his decision not to mend fences with the former Eagles quarterback, whom Owens characterized as “tired” following the Eagles’ 24-21 loss to New England in Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005.

When given an apology written by the team’s media relations staff, Owens claims to have handed Eagles’ captain Jeremiah Trotter the mea culpa moments before he was to deliver it to reporters.

Owens tells GQ Trotter read through the statement and arrived at the portion regarding McNabb, who threw for 357 yards, but was picked off three times. Owens claims Trotter ripped off the bottom portion of the page and told Owens he didn’t owe McNabb a thing.

“This is the team leader we’re talking about,” Owens tells GQ. “He told me not to do it.”

Trotter calls Owens’ account inaccurate, telling the magazine he was the one insisting Owens apologize.

Once again, T.O. stands alone.

Owens’ career is defined as much by its theatrics than for its statistical body of work. His playing days ended last spring after his one-year, $2 million contract was not renewed by the Cincinnati, where Owens and Chad Ochocinco collectively proved to be more style than substance.

Owens has clearly moved on.

Some decisions, he admits, may have been handled differently now. But at this point of his life, he’s not willing to look back.

“To say I regret anything would be a slap to my grandmother’s face,” Owens says, referring to the woman who raised him.

He concedes his only mistake in calling McNabb out was one of timing, admitting “I might not have said or done things at exactly the right moment.”

To this day, Owens remains confident bordering on cocksure, convinced — even with a medically repaired ACL — that he is capable of the jaw-dropping playmaking ability of his youth. It’s not his talent that keeps teams from calling, he insists, but instead a reputation cast onto him by the reporters he often held hostage.

“I think people change, but the media, they never allowed me to change,” Owens says. “They never allowed me to be a better person.”

Described in the GQ piece as a “caged cat” living in a spacious 1,800-square foot Los Angeles apartment, Owens remains on an island. He claims to be broke despite making at least $80 million during his playing days.

He says he’s never been diagnosed as clinically depressed but he’s been “real down.”

“I don’t have no friends — I don’t want no friends,” Owens says. “That’s how I feel.”

 

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I have nothing against interracial unions,  I support love being colorblind and gender blind, but as an African-American woman it is hard to explain why black celebrities just seem to be simply allergic to women who look like them. If you notice it seems to be only the black guys who do this in sports more commonly than all other races combined. Can anyone say “self hatred?” It’s sad that a black celebrity actually marrying a black woman is newsworthy, but it is, especially in the world of white women obsessed professional sports.

If you want to leave nasty comments about how evil I am for stating this, just take a day or 2 to gather a list of 5 CURRENTLY relevant black athletes in football and basketball who are currently dating or married to actual black women. Just name 5, who are famous and actually still playing , not from the past. Then we will talk. Again, when I say relevant I mean people who are currently playing and famous and not some nobody no one has ever heard of. I promise you it doesn’t exist. Here is the story about this happy couple…..

Story From ThePostGame.com

Can LeBron James win a ring in style? We’ll find out. Can he present a ring in style? Yes. The King topped off a New Year’s Eve and birthday celebration Saturday by getting engaged.

James, 27, proposed to longtime girlfriend Savannah Brinson, the mother of his two children, at SL Nightclub in Miami. The two have been together since James was a national prep star at St. Vincent-St. Mary in Akron, Ohio. The couple’s two boys are LeBron, Jr. and Bryce, age 7 and 4, respectively.

The engagement came just a week after Michael Jordan popped the question to Yvette Prieto, making it a popular stretch for basketball icons to get hitched.

The news was immediately followed by a host of Twitter jokes.

We’ll refrain from that and simply congratulate the happy couple. Between the end of the lockout, the birthday, and the proposal, LeBron certainly had a great fourth quarter … of 2011

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Metta World Peace may be the king of non-sequiturs.

On Sunday during the Lakers media preview, World Peace graciously took a moment to chat with a Los Angeles Times reporter. The only problem? He wasn’t interested in answering any of her questions.

When asked about whether his teammates are going along with the recent name change, World Peace instead chose to give a shout out to Jesus Christ. “I’m just happy that Jesus Christ did not let me lose my teeth when I was 20-years-old,” the Lakers forward asserted. “Because I was wondering, like, what if you kept your baby teeth until the age of 18 or 20?”

His praise for Jesus’ baby teeth decision also revealed World Peace as a creationist. “Not only did [Jesus] build the world in seven days and seven nights,” noted World Peace, “but he also said, ‘OK. Let them lose their teeth early, rather than late.’ ”

After some hemming and hawing from the Los Angeles Times reporter, World Peace readily admitted that his answer “has nothing to do with your question, but that was definitely on my mind.”

Other things that are probably on his mind: the unveiling of his new jersey, the team’s trade drama, and the fact that he’s going to have to start getting in shape after a two-month hiatus.

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The left hook is malice made into a thing of beauty. Boxing lore will tell you that the left hook has dashed more aspirations, left more men arrayed on the canvas like crime scene photographs than any other punch in the inventory.

Throw it as the punctuation on a jab-cross-hook combination and it is surreptitious, it crashes in from just outside the peripheral vision. The gifted can double up on it, take the hook downstairs to tenderize the rib cage and then bring it up to the temple where it makes men fall out like they’ve been touched by the Holy Ghost. A few can throw it at the beginning of a sequence and it’s like opening a conversation by telling a man you slept with his wife but only after you slapped his grandmother. Master it and you are a fighter; without it, you’re just someone throwing punches.

Joe Frazier was a fighter. There are few in the history who expressed the left hook as fluently as he and fewer still who deployed it with the devastating consequences he did. There was little poetry in Frazier’s approach to the craft; his style was a catalogue of tics, glove-to-forehead, shoulder-hunch-and-duck jerks, all as redundant as a blues verse. He fought like a car with a bad transmission: moving in one direction only. But inside that awkward motion was a mastery of technique that few could appreciate unless they’d tried actually defending against it. The novice believes that the hook is thrown from the shoulder, but Frazier knew its origins lie way further south — that it begins with a pivot in the left foot, the ill intent moving north, picking up torque in the hip and then finally expressing itself through the shoulder, the arm, the fist. The truth is that Frazier more than any boxer other than Floyd Patterson laid down the principles that the young Mike Tyson mined and remixed.

When Frazier and Muhammad Ali met for their first bout in 1971, nearly four years after Ali had been stripped of the title, the country boy shocked the former champion, absorbing his best and bobbing his way in to deliver a bulk shipment of left hands. In the 14th round one of those hooks found its mark and Ali found himself on the canvas. When doubters shrugged off Ali’s loss as the product of too much time away from the ring they overlooked the fact that he had always been vulnerable to left hands.

Years earlier Ali had been floored by a left from Henry Cooper, a British no-name best known for his capacity to bleed during a fight. Frazier fought in a relentless march of forward motion. Ali relished punishing his opponents while moving in reverse and earned his living lashing blinding jabs at his opponents. Frazier hardly ever threw the jab, preferring to introduce himself by way of the hook. In meeting Frazier, Ali had stepped into a ring with a man whose strengths perfectly aligned with his own weaknesses and defined what became their epic rivalry.

This went beyond boxing. Black people loved the charmed harlequin Muhammad Ali, but the truth is Frazier’s life contained our metaphors. Born to sharecroppers, Frazier’s pedigree included chopping cotton in South Carolina fields and brewing corn liquor. He came north to Philadelphia with the black tides of the Great Migration. Observers thought there was something of the blues in Frazier’s style, as if he had distilled that element of the Black south down into his personal rhythms inside the ring.

It was Frazier’s lot to bear the contempt of the public for the way Ali initially lost his title – stripped of it by the government for refusing induction into the Army in 1967. Ali took to referring to himself as “the People’s Champ,” implicitly casting Frazier as the man of the Establishment — Uncle Tom with a more talented left hand.

Black folk indulged Ali as he mined the worst of our collective self for slings to hurl at Frazier. Thus a man who sharpened his rhetorical skill trading lines with Malcolm X and Don King used his verbal gifts to do to Frazier precisely what he’d done to every other fighter since Sonny Liston – reduce them to the foil in his comedic routine. Even at the outset his nemesis got top billing – people referred to their initial fight as Ali-Frazier instead Frazier-Ali, with the reigning champion’s name listed first. Ali was selling the fight but Frazier, the dark-skinned, soft spoken, pork-eating Southern boy understood that there were acres of hurt in our history, far too many wounds not yet healed to grant Ali amnesty and call it all showmanship.

In thinking of him solely in association with Ali we forget far more than we remember about Smokin’ Joe, like the fact that long before a hyphen handcuffed his name to that of his greatest nemesis, he won the heavyweight Olympic medal in the 1964 Tokyo games. Or that he gave Ali money to keep him afloat during the years when the U.S. government had stripped his boxing license. Or that he buzz-sawed through the heavyweight division in the years following his Olympic medal, all but unstoppable until he ran into a force of nature named George Foreman in Jamaica.

The ghosts of his loss to Ali in their third fight in Manila stayed with Frazier for decades. The indelible image of trainer Eddie Futch waving off the referee and stopping the fight in the 14th round was one that Frazier seemed never quite able to exorcise from his mind. Yet yesterday as Joe Frazier fought his final rounds against liver cancer, a challenger more wily and implacable than any he encountered in the ring, another image occurred to me. It is of the young Frazier, all sinew and bad intentions, crouched low, the left hand coming from a place as deep as the cotton fields and as ancient as the blues.

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Tom Brady – There are only a handful of things that get you automatic inclusion in this list, and it’s now been expanded to include, “pass for 500 yards.” Brady was incredible in this game. His 517 passing yards rank fifth in all-time in NFL history for a single game, and also set franchise and Monday Night Football marks. He didn’t suffer an incompletion until the second quarter, ran a masterful no-huddle offense for a good portion of the game, completed passes to eight different receivers, and passes of 99, 46, 30, 24 and 23 yards to five different guys. At 34, he still keeps raising the bar.

Wes Welker – Breaking loose for a 99-yard touchdown reception helps, but that alone may not be enough in a game where so many players played at a high level. Welker finished with eight catches for 160 yards, but did let a possible touchdown fall through his hands in the second quarter.

Aaron Hernandez – Hernandez is emerging as one of Brady’s favorite targets. He had seven catches for 103 yards, including a 30-yarder that set up his own touchdown on the next play, and a highlight reel grab over Nolan Carroll in the fourth quarter.

In the doghouse

Chad Ochocinco – It’s clear there is still a lot to be done here. He struggled to find snaps as the Patriots went to their no-huddle offense, providing a clear indication he isn’t up to speed yet, and when he was on the field, he didn’t make an impact. The only impression he left was when he was whistled for lining up in an illegal formation in the first half.

Julian Edelman – Did well in the return game with five punt returns for 49 yards and two kickoffs for 65 yards, but caught a punt at the 1-yard line and attempted to bring it out. Certainly, the coaches will be in his ear for that gaffe.

Devin McCourty – He had a couple big plays, but was generally abused by Miami receiver Brandon Marshall. On the other hand, he was able to cover him one-on-one, which was an important aspect of the Patriots’ game plan on defense. In a game like this, where not a lot went wrong, McCourty falls victim to nitpicking

story from MassLive.com

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Assuming that this success is driven by genes rather than environment, there is a rather obvious inference to make – black people are naturally better sprinters than white people. Indeed, it is an inference that seems obligatory, barring considerations of political correctness.
Logically flawed

But here’s the thing. This inference is not merely false – it is logically flawed. And it has big implications not merely for athletics, but for the entire issue of race relations in the 21st Century.

To see how, let us examine success not in the sprints but in distance running, for this is also dominated by black athletes. Kenya has won an astonishing 63 medals at the Olympic Games in races of 800m and above, 21 of them gold, since 1968. Little wonder that one commentator once described distance running as “a Kenyan monopoly”.

But it turns out that it is not Kenya as a whole that usually wins these medals, but individuals from a tiny region in the Rift Valley called Nandi. As one writer put it: “Most of Kenya’s runners call Nandi home.”
Florence Griffith Joyner Florence Griffith-Joyner was hugely successful – but generalisations tell us little

Seen in this context, the notion that black people are naturally superior distance runners seems bizarre. Far from being a “black” phenomenon, or even a Kenyan phenomenon, distance running is actually a Nandi phenomenon. Or, to put it another way, “black” distance running success is focused on the tiniest of pinpricks on the map of Africa, with the vast majority of the continent underrepresented.

The same analysis applies to the sprints, where success is focused on Jamaicans and African-Americans. Africa, as a continent, has almost no success at all. Not even West Africans win much.

The combined forces of Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, the Republic of Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Togo, Niger, Benin, Mali, the Gambia, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Gabon, Senegal, Congo and Angola have not won a single sprinting medal at the Olympics or World Championships.

The fallacy, then, is simple. Just because some black people are good at something does not imply that black people in general will be good at it.

Labelled box

Imagine a similar argument using the Central African Bambuti, a black tribe more commonly known as Pygmies. With an average height of 4ft we could assert that the Bambuti are naturally better at walking under low doors. Would it be legitimate to extrapolate that black people in general have a natural advantage at walking under low doors?

Our tendency to generalise rests on a deeper fallacy – the idea that “black” refers to a genetic type. We put people of dark skin in a box labelled black and assume that a trait shared by some is shared by all.

The truth is rather different. There is far more genetic variation within racial groups (around 85%) than there is between racial groups (just 15%). Indeed, surface appearance is often a highly misleading way of assessing the genetic distance between populations.

This evidence demonstrates how absurd it is to engage in racial generalisations – how crazy it is to witness a tiny group of black people winning at, say, the 10,000m and to infer that all people who share the same skin colour share an aptitude for 10,000m running.

But our subconscious assumptions about race have more than merely sporting implications.

Consider an experiment in 2003 by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, two American economists. They drafted 5,000 CVs and placed archetypal “black” names such as Tyrone or Latoya on half of them and “white” names such as Brendan or Alison on the other half. They then divided the white CVs into high and low quality and did the same with the black CVs.

A few weeks later the offers came rolling in from employers, and guess what? The “black” candidates were 50% less likely to be invited to interview. Employers were using skin colour as a marker for employment potential, despite the fact that the candidates’ CVs were identical.

But that’s not all. The researchers also found that although high-quality “white” candidates were preferred to low-quality “white” candidates, the relative quality of “black” CVs made no difference whatsoever.

It was as if employers saw three categories – high-quality white, low-quality white and black candidates. To put it another way, the subliminal assumption that causes us to think that black people are all the same has powerful real-world consequences.

For many economists, this assumption, which gets under the radar of our conscious thought, explains why black people still lag behind white people in economic development more than four decades after the introduction of race-relations legislation.

Recognising that we have these biases is a good place to start in trying to combat them. And a good way of tracking progress is to watch a 100m final and see whether we fall into the trap, when seeing eight contestants with black skin, of inferring that black people are naturally better sprinters.

Matthew Syed is the author of Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

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Ryan O’Neal was set to join the cast, but his publicist said the actor had not yet fully recovered from recent knee-replacement surgery.

The new cast members will perform their first dance routines on the season premiere on Sept. 19. The first celebrity contestant will be eliminated on Sept. 20.

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Photos: Serena Williams’ plunging minidress steals show at ESPYsTo say Serena Williams stole the show at the ESPYs suggests that there was a show to steal. The world No. 172 walked the red carpet in a dazzling, low-cut pink minidress that accentuated her curvy physique. The gold Christian Louboutin heels added at least four inches to Serena’s 5-foot-9 frame.

[Photos: Serena Williams at the ESPYs]

Despite playing in two tournaments since last year’s show, Serena was awarded the ESPY award for best female tennis player, which is like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences giving an Oscar to Al Pacino for this year’s sure-to-be stinker “Jack and Jill” because he was fantastic in “The Godfather II.” Yes, we know; it’s useless to complain about a meaningless, arbitrary award like an ESPY. Still, you’d think ESPN could have lured Serena to the show with the promise of something else (a lifetime achievement award, a montage of her comeback, a shawl) rather than a prize for playing no matches during the voting period. Not that there were many other candidates for the prize but surely there was someone.

What about wheelchair tennis great Esther Vergeer, who’s won more than 400 matches in a row? Or mom- turned-champion Kim Clijsters? Or those ladies who always play doubles at the court down the street from you because, you know, they played tennis this year. Serena is playing some World TeamTennis events for the Washington Kastles this month before returning to tournament play July 25 in Stanford. She’s set to play three more tournaments before the U.S. Open.

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The president also offered commentary during part of the CBS broadcast of the game. He said that he typically does not have time to watch entire college basketball games, but stays up to date by watching SportsCenter. He’ll make an exception for the Final Four and watch all of the games.

POTUS attends a basketball game at the Verizon Center between Georgetown University and Duke University. Seated in a cushioned folding chair mere feet from the basketball court, POTUS studiously remained dispassionate and impartial even as fans of the Georgetown University team all around him went absolutely berserk. Just to his left was a line of shirtless students smeared with gray and blue body paint, some wearing frenzied blue wigs and screaming like they were possessed. In response to a call that was apparently unfavorable to the Georgetown University team, one of the shirtless fans tried starting a cheer unfit for a family newspaper. But just as it started to get off the ground, a second shirtless student — no doubt a nerd — scolded, “Dude, the President of the United States is right there!” Which effectively killed that cheer. Anyway, POTUS did not appear to have noticed the offending cheer. He remain hunched forward, elbows on his knees, watching intently but carefully avoiding any hint about which team he might wish to see prevail. POTUS perked up for the first time a few minutes into the contest during some kind of break in play when the Georgetown University Women’s Rowing Team was introduced, standing on the big blue “G” painted in the middle of the court. At least they got a polite applause from POTUS. During another break in play as both basketball teams huddled about something, a referee sauntered beneath the basket nearest POTUS. Holding the ball in one hand, he shouted toward POTUS, “Sir. Sir!” When POTUS looked up, the referee nodded his head toward the ball in his hand and then the basket, gesturing POTUS might want to take a shot. POTUS smiled broadly and then both men laughed heartily. Apparently, it was also bring-your-son-to-the-office-outing day. Both Robert Gibbs and Rahm Emanuel showed up with their sons. Shortly after kick-off, VPOTUS appeared from behind the stands. He strode right up to the court and sat beside POTUS. He wore the collar of his sports coat up, giving him a decidedly European look. His son, Hunter, was also in tow. Also seated with POTUS was David Axelrod. Reggie Love was in attendance but not sitting with POTUS. At halftime, POTUS got up from his seat and shook hands with some of the fans seated around him and VPOTUS posed for pictures.

During second half of the basketball game, POTUS moved halfway down the court to sit with the announcers for a little commentary on the game. He was welcomed and asked about his love of the game. POTUS lamented that with all his other duties, he “can’t watch a full game, unfortunately.” During the playoffs, however, he watches all the games. Asked his opinion of the contest between Georgetown University and Duke University, POTUS remained studiously impartial. “Obviously, two great teams,” he said. The guards from Georgetown were particularly noteworthy, he said, especially during the first half. In the second half, he said, the guards were getting a bit “sloppy” and the Duke team was “picking up its ‘D’.” Then they started talking about some other basketball teams when POTUS seemed to take a shot at East Coast liberal elitism. “If the Buckeyes are bragging about beating an Ivy League team, then that tells you something,” he said. Asked if he wanted to call a play, POTUS looked up in time to see a player running down the court, jumping up right as he approached the basket and throwing the ball up. “This was a turnaround and he didn’t get any spinback,” POTUS said. This analysis was admired by the professional announcers, who said POTUS could have a career in announcing if, you know, things didn’t work out. Realizing they had really stepped in it, they backed up and said that, of course, POTUS has a job and will for as long as he wishes. Exhibiting his trademark modesty, POTUS acknowledged he could easily do their jobs and joked that he would be coming after them as soon as he wrapped up his current gig. “You have either three more years or seven,” clearly suggesting he might CHOOSE not to pursue a second term. On a roll, one of the announcers decided to talk a little more politics. “You are obviously a left hander,” he said to POTUS. “Any problem going to the right?” Unclear what exactly that meant. But POTUS replied that just yesterday he went to Baltimore to speak to Republicans at their annual retreat. And then he said indeed he is stronger on the left. Before signing off, POTUS said people’s thoughts should be with the troops in the field and with those helping victims of the earthquake in Haiti.

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]]> http://www.harlemenglish.com/2010/01/video-photos-of-barack-obama-at-college-game/feed/ 0 http://www.harlemenglish.com/2009/09/runner-ignores-gender-scandal-gets-a-glam-makeover/ http://www.harlemenglish.com/2009/09/runner-ignores-gender-scandal-gets-a-glam-makeover/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:12:11 +0000 admin http://www.harlemenglish.com/?p=551 Now this is what they call moxy. What a strong minded young woman….  Story by Emerald Catron. In a perfect world, you’d know Caster Semenya as the teenage woman who can run half a mile in under two minutes. What you probably know her as is the athlete whose muscular physique prompted officials to order a test to verify her gender. But her femininity isn’t a question at all in the “after” shots of her makeover from South African magazine You.

Smiling Despite a Scandal
The makeover proved to be a learning experience for Semenya, 18, who admits she doesn’t know how to put on makeup. The photo shoots also gave her the rare opportunity to get dressed up, something a girl who’s in school and race training doesn’t get the chance to do very often. Says Semenya, “I didn’t do this to prove a point but rather to have fun. I don’t give a damn what people say about me. I like me the way I am, and who cares what other people say?”

Regardless of the controversy, South Africa has embraced its daughter since she took gold in the 800-meter race at the World Championships in Germany last month, She even met with Nelson Mandela, who praised her.

Testing Comes Under Fire
Presently the results of the gender test required by the International Association of Athletics Federation are still being analyzed, so an independent panel of experts has been called in to decipher the results. Her coach quit this week, admitting that he didn’t tell Semenya that her gender was being tested — he told her she was being screened for steroids and other illicit substances.

Semenya may suffer from a rare chromosomal disorder that causes her body to produce too much testosterone. This isn’t the first time an athlete’s gender has been questioned or a genetic condition has wreaked havoc on qualifying tests. Whether or not that extra dose of testosterone gives her an edge over her competitors will have to be decided.

The results of the medical test will not be made public, since they warrant patient confidentiality. Regardless of what the results say, there’s at least one teenage girl out there who likes herself just the way she is — and we love that.

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