Since retiring from the NFL nearly 20 years ago, Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee Shannon Sharpe has blossomed into one of the most prominent figures in television. His daily duels with Skip Bayless on Fox Sports 1’s Skip and Shannon: Undisputed provide box office-level entertainment for sports fanatics, and with the pandemic putting us all in a headlock, he’s expanded his multimedia empire to include the popular podcast Club Shay Shay.
Each week, the biggest LeBron James evangelist on planet Earth is joined by some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment. And on the latest episode, he’s joined by none other than fellow Hall of Famer Terrell Owens, who couldn’t resist the opportunity to speak on his long-standing beef with his former teammate, Philadelphia Eagles legend Donovan McNabb.
As sports heads are acutely aware, the history between the two is extremely long and contentious, with the primary source of their beef stemming from McNabb’s lackluster play in Super Bowl XXXIX—and the former superstar receiver’s insistence that his quarterback went out drinking the night before the biggest game of their careers.
“A lot of people speculate as to what happened but I think over the years now, people see that I wasn’t really the problem in Philly,” Owens told Adam Schein in December on Mad Dog Radio. “People said that Donovan and I had some friction. Maybe he had some friction with me, but I didn’t have any with him. From my understanding, he had a problem with the way the city embraced me and not the way they embraced him. I am going by what I’ve heard in the streets.”
For his part, McNabb has tried to take the high road throughout the years (and pretend like other teammates didn’t see him throwing up on the field, too during that fateful Super Bowl). But because Owens will choose violence every single time when it comes to their feud, he’s now decided to up the stakes and revealed as much to Shannon Sharpe. While discussing a potential celebrity boxing match, the six-time All-Pro revealed his ideal opponent.
“I said Donovan McNabb,” Owens said in his signature Alabama drawl. “And I’m dead serious. Shannon, I’ll knock him out. Because there’d be so much pent-up (anger). [...] I’ll go in there and I’ll be controlled. It’ll be controlled anger. I’d be like a Navy Seal. I’d be a Navy Seal because you know they’re cool, calm under all conditions. But there would be a fire burning inside of me.”
“So you’d literally try to knock the man out?” Sharpe asked.
“Clean out,” Owens replied. “I’d knock the Chunky Soup from him. From 2004, trust me.”
Considering celebrity boxing matches have found renewed popularity in recent months, and this war has been raging between the former teammates for nearly 20 years, I’m all for the two finally squashing their beef like men and stepping in the ring.
Triller, cut that check and make it happen.