Terry Bradshaw bares all in ‘Failure to Launch’

Happy ‘doin’ nuthin’’
Bradshaw openly talks about being diagnosed with clinical depression and ADHD — a combo, he says, that “makes for a pretty screwed-up dude.”

He’s been through “tons of therapy” and Paxil CR has worked for him, but he’s been off it for eight months — which has led to some recent headaches, chest pains, rapid pulse and shortness of breath.

He knows he’ll get back on it, but in the meantime: “I’ll just deal with it. I’ll just deal with it through prayer. I’ll just pray about it. Me and God. God’ll get me through this. ... [It’s] not going to kill me.”

What makes him happiest is two weeks of “doin’ nuthin’!” — which entails enjoying his house and four dogs, spending time with his brothers, playing golf and fishing with his dad. “Just being a bum, just being lazy. I love that.” It also includes spending time with his teenage daughters.

And what’s the one thing people would be shocked to find out about him?

“That I’m quiet,” he says, explaining that when he golfs with his friends, “I’m not screamin’ and hollerin’ — I hardly say a word.”

But what the rest of the world sees from him most of the time goes back to that vulnerability he long felt.

“You find out in life that people really like you funny. So what do you give ’em? Humor. And then if you show them the other side, they don’t like you as much. I find, too, that I can hide behind the idiot’s mask being funny, and you never see the sorrow or the pain.”

Some of that suffering dates back to his playing days in the ’70s, when the Dallas Cowboys’ Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson said Bradshaw “couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him the ‘c’ and the ‘t.”’

And it still hurts, Bradshaw says. “I could go into a tirade. But it has scarred me forever. Absolutely. It hurts.”

The pro football hall of famer feels some people always will think of him as the Bayou Bumpkin, even though no quarterback has more Super Bowl rings nor has done better on TV over the years.

“If Peyton Manning never wins a Super Bowl, he’s gonna be smarter than me. Elway, Montana, everybody’s smarter than me,” he says, then laughs: “Yet I’m the one that’s on the ‘Tonight’ show.”

Given his success, Bradshaw may be dumb like a — well, you know, unless you need to spotted the “f” and the “x.”

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