Feeding Your Family

Gilbert Arenas must be kicking himself right now.

With the economic downturn and families counting every penny, who wouldn’t want another $16 million coming in? Just over six months ago, Arenas signed a sub-maximal contract for $111 over six years with the Washington Wizards instead of the $127 million he was offered. Even so, it is still the sixth largest contract since the start of the collective bargaining agreement in 1999.

"What can I do for my family with $127 million that I can't do with $111 million?" he told The Washington Post.

At first glance, Arenas signing for less than the maximum contract so his team could sign higher quality supporting players seems like a rare selfless act for a professional athlete who for once wants to be a team player. However, on closer examination, it shows the disconnect between premier athletes with multi-million dollar contracts and the rest of society on multiple levels.

Sixteen million dollars is a lot of money regardless of how much you currently make. Most people won’t make sixteen million dollar in their lifetime, let alone in a single contract. But the number sixteen million is so abstract so here are some numbers that might put it in perspective: Sixteen million could buy you over 213,000 general admissions tickets to Wizards games that go for $75, or over 1000 pairs of club seats that sell for $7,500 each. It would take almost 1,000 hours for the minimum wage-earning janitor that cleans the MCI center after Wizard’s games to earn enough for just one.

According to an NBA players association statistic, about sixty percent of NBA players go broke within just five years of ending their playing careers. This group includes players who lived off of sweatshop wages like Latrell Sprewell who once turned down a $21 million dollar contract because he “had a family to feed.” Putting that $16 million aside into a savings account earning just 3% would leave Arenas with an annual income of $480,000. No, it’s not quite the same as the over eighteen million a year he’ll make with his current contract, but if he’s paid off his house and car – err, houses and cars, living off of $1,300 a day can’t be that hard when the world lives off of little more than that per year.

Perhaps the problem is the heights – in terms of fame and finances – to which we have elevated athletes. We take children without a college education and expect them to make wise decisions with money and fame and the same time Bernie Madoff is scamming educated investors out of $50 billion sounds as brilliant as third graders who have just completed a D.A.R.E. class to bring down Columbian drug cartels. When your first paycheck is for a million dollars, it’s hard to fathom that the money will someday stop flowing. While future NBA stars are serving their one year in college, perhaps they should be required to take a financial management class complete with guest lectures by Mike Tyson, Jack Clark, and Johnny Unitas. Properly done, that one class might be worth more than whatever “major” O.J. Mayo and Kevin Love had at USC and UCLA (multiple Google searches failed to turn up either of their majors).

I’m all for a free market and people earning all they can, but when a twenty-seven year old can blow off sixteen million dollars as chump change something’s awry. His team spirit is admirable for a pro athlete, but if the NBA – or any other professional league – is going to flourish, especially in economic downtimes, it’s not the players’ families who they will have to pay attention to, it’s the poor fans who are on the verge of being shut out of arenas because they can’t afford to sit in the nosebleeds with their kids.