Why Athletes Do What They Do (and us, too)

(This is a repost from my 3.31.09 “Notes” articles. I often make the mistake of failing to realize the Notes are becoming too long and contain too many subjects to receive the full attention they need. I commit to separating each news short up from here on out. Thnak you for putting up with this editorial error for, ohhhh, the entire run of SOMM [lol!])

Recently, there was a fascinating article in Sports Illustrated titled, How (and why) Athletes Go Broke, by Pablo Torre. Just check out this short passage and the statistics that go along with it:What happens to many athletes and their money is indeed hard to believe. In this month alone Saints alltime leading rusher Deuce McAllister filed for bankruptcy protection for the Jackson, Miss., car dealership he owns; Panthers receiver Muhsin Muhammad put his mansion in Charlotte up for sale on eBay a month after news broke that his entertainment company was being sued by Wachovia Bank for overdue credit-card payments; and penniless former NFL running back Travis Henry was jailed for nonpayment of child support.

In a less public way, other athletes from the nation’s three biggest and most profitable leagues—the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball—are suffering from a financial pandemic. Although salaries have risen steadily during the last three decades, reports from a host of sources (athletes, players’ associations, agents and financial advisers) indicate that:

• By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.

• Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.

• Numerous retired MLB players have been similarly ruined, and the current economic crisis is taking a toll on some active players as well. Last month 10 current and former big leaguers—including outfielders Johnny Damon of the Yankees and Jacoby Ellsbury of the Red Sox and pitchers Mike Pelfrey of the Mets and Scott Eyre of the Phillies—discovered that at least some of their money is tied up in the $8 billion fraud allegedly perpetrated by Texas financier Robert Allen Stanford. Pelfrey told the New York Post that 99% of his fortune is frozen; Eyre admitted last month that he was broke, and the team quickly agreed to advance a portion of his $2 million salary.

The Wall Street meltdown is only the latest threat to athletes’ financial health. “Athletes have a different set of challenges from, say, entertainers,” says money manager Michael Seymour, the founder of Philadelphia-based UNI Private Wealth Strategies. “There’s a far shorter peak earnings period [in sports] than in any other profession, and in many cases they lack the time and desire to understand and monitor their investments.”

This morning, USA Today published an article by Larry Weisman detailing how continuing education classes, among other educational opportunities can bolster and in some cases establish business acumen for NFL players. The goal, obviously, is to understand how to maintain and grow the money these athletes accrue during their careers.

Interestingly, yesterday I had a long conversation with a prominent mainstream columnist about Terrell Owens specifically and professional athletes, in general. We discussed what factors within pro sports allow the games to maintain their exalted place in American society.

One of the extremely important conditions we identified is the leagues’ vested interest in keeping athletes ignorant. We agreed that to succeed, not on the field, but in the public’s eye, athletes must understand that team owners and agents improperly – for the athlete – stress short-term monetary gain over long-term financial solvency. The “get mine now” attitude of athletes in the “Big Three” American sports is more them parroting the words of people around them charged with procuring the best possible contract for their physical abilities.

The agent’s only real interest is the 3% fee the agent receives for all parties’ signatures on a contract. The owner’s interest lies in keeping athletes unconscious of the consequences of viewing their career as a means by which they can ensure that they are financially comfortable for the rest of their lives.

In the NFL the short-term perspective is exacerbated by the fact that, for the players, guaranteed contracts do not exist and players know well that the average NFL career lasts only 3.5 years.

Another important failing of many athletes is their failure to cultivate positive and real relationships with members of the sports media.

Again though, the leagues intervene here to ensure that the relationship between the athletes and the members of the media are strained. In rookie seminars straight through the moment a pro athlete retires he is warned repeatedly that his primary off-field adversary is the sports media. The message is so prevalent that most college coaches now relay this message to their players.

The reason for this misnomer is simple: control.

Team management, whether it is the coaches, general managers, public relations department or in college, sports information directors, or owners, the consensus is that the less information a players conveys to the press, the more control management can exert over the players. On the other hand, members of the media are more often than not privately warned by management that players are obstinate, self-centered, money-hungry, egomaniacs.

The result of this combined misinterpretation is, in the last 10 years, the near-death of the in-depth, on-on-one interview and the proliferation of sensationalist reporting through “sources” relative to athletes. There is no doubt that this is, in large part, due to sports teams’ insistence that the press is only “out to get” the athlete; to dig up “dirt” in the way of unsavory incidents, and project most athletes in the worst light whenever possible.

All of this short-term short-sighted behavior by athletes is a recipe for financial  – and personal – disaster.

The college experience is only a springboard for play in professional leagues, so no premium is placed on the education  experience. The leagues prey like sharks on this fact and use it to further mold the minds of athletes to the point where NFL players will uniformly vote for changes in their bargaining agreement that flies in the face of their best personal interests.

Presently, we are witnessing NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell push for additional television revenues in the form of additional games. The players, rather than concentrate on a fight for guaranteed contracts, are resigned to what they have been taught to perceive is the “fact” that guaranteed contracts will lead to the monetary demise of the league. With this alleged fact, is the additional “fact” that what matters to the success of the NFL is an undying belief in the “Shield;” that people do not identify with individuals but with the insignia on the helmet and the jersey, and not the athlete inside the helmet and uniform, and that the players are nothing more than interchangeable parts.

When the average NFL career is 3.5 years, an extra two games will, in three years, shave off the half year of that already far too brief 3.5 year career span.

And to ensure that they receive additional immediate revenues tha players almost unanimously voted for DeMaurice Smith, a lawyer with no ties to football on any level to head their union, rather than an ex-player who might urge them to trade fewer revenue dollars for a better post-career future with longer and more comnprehensive insurance policies in a sport where every player engaged in repeated contact suffers a life-style altering or permanently debilitating injury.

While the Times article painted a bleak picture of athletes, Weisman article was heartening. In it he says about 220 NFL players are involved in some way in continuing their education. However, the lessons learned in these classes are no match for the real business world. They are no match for predators who make it their business to hunt for people with money who are also gullible.

Nor are they a match for life experience.

How does the athlete, who has spent most of his teenage and adult years far away from the real world and cloistered in the hall of mirrors that is the cloistered world of athletics, suddenly learn that to be successful in the real world relationship building is of utmost importance? How does the athlete reconcile this fact when he has explicitly been told the opposite for 15 or so years – when that way has served him well and allowed him the single-mindedness necessary to pursue and excel at his sport? How does the athlete go about making correct choices about business partners when he has few people skills? Whne his perceptions of the outside world have been formed by the world of athletics in which he lives?

How does he realize that it will take nearly as much time to become business savvy  as it has to besome an elite athlete?

How is a professional athlete to know that to further his playing and post sporting career, and gain a modicum of leverage he must develop relation ships with the very members of the press he is told daily despise of him?

We live in a society in which we are told that there is no time for self-reflection; where we must drive down the road, communicate with others on our cell phones, while listening to the news on the radio, just to stay on top of our jobs and in touch with the world around us.

We live in a society where we are told that we are to be race neutral, gender neutral, speech neutral, even competition neutral, except on elite levels, yet where everyone is said to have a voice that should be listened to.

All of the life information above two paragraphs are lies, cruel tricks of light played on us by people who seek to control us just as the leagues, owners, and management below them seek to control collegiate and professional athletes.

And if live by false societal rules how can the athlete, sequestered from life to pursue continued sporting excellence and sequestered for the ends of controlling him, know these rules are false?

The problem is, they do not.

Yet somehow we expect these men to do what we fail at so miserably – accurately perceiving the world around us so that we might navigate our way through the lies meant to keep us bound and gagged and unable to become and remain individuals in a world of sheep.

We – society, the press, the sporting media, the athletes -  have a long way to go. But perhaps, just perhaps the beacon in the distance might just be the Internet despite itsd part in this societal ruse.

Perhaps as other writers, and I do not mean 140 character tweeters, or 300-word blog posters, but real writers who have studied and practiced the craft, and have a gift for it, will feel some freedom from the once-constraints of the 800-word column forced upon them by editors and a public that becomes mentally tired if they are subjected to anything more than 800 words. Perhaps they will allow themselves to begin their own blogs where they can expound on these and plenty of other important issues surrounding and influencing the nature of sports today.

And perhaps we can begin the slow, but necessary process of change.