Being Rich
I’ve probably lost between $600,000 and $700,000 lending money to my friends and relatives. Most of the friends I’ve loaned money to won’t even speak to me now. It’s the strangest damned thing. It’s weird being rich and black because you’re caught between two worlds. Being rich really puts you in a predominantly white world. Overwhelmingly, everybody you work with outside of sports is white. But you don’t just stop liking things about the life you’ve lived, your old friends and your boys. You’ve outgrown most of them, really, but you really want to maintain relationships. And they want to borrow money and you do it. You say yes and it’s almost like buying friendship to stay in good with ’em. And then they turn on you, too. If you say no, it’s like, “You’re not going to give me any more money?”
And the line they use on you is, “Oh, you ain’t the same guy anymore!” They tell you how you’ve gone big-time and how they know you don’t want to be around them anymore. Next thing you know you’ve lent them hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I’m not exaggerating. I’ve got the receipts to prove it. But you know what? I’m not going to ever ask their asses for my money. And the money, on some level, is irrelevant because I can do without the money. But it bothers me more that I’ve lost those friendships. You’re just caught, not really certain what to do.
Guys in similar situations joke about it, how you’ve got to watch your family, too. Man, your family goes through money like crazy. We all know guys in the NBA, great guys, who have a lot of brothers and sisters and they’re all driving Mercedeses. Hey, you can get your brother a Hyundai. Everybody in the house doesn’t have to have a Mercedes-Benz.
I built my mother and grandmother houses, and my brothers houses, and I’ve bought them two or three cars at least. I had to get to a point where I said, “No, hey, that’s enough.” As much as I love my family, I have to say, “We’ve got to stop this.” You hear some real horror stories from your teammates. I’m fortunate because I played a long time and made great money. But the average career is four, five years. And those guys aren’t necessarily making a ton of money. But guys don’t think to themselves, “Hey, I might only be in the league two or three years and I better really watch what I’m doing.” No, guys think, “Well, I’m making several million dollars a year; I won’t ever be able to spend it all.” But after you take out taxes, even on $10 million a year, and support all your freeloaders, you’re like, “I’d better get on the right track with this.” I tell them, “When it’s over, make sure you’ve got something.”
I’ve got guys right now who had a deal with Nike, and now call me to get them shoes from Nike. When you’re out, you’re out. We call them “owls” because when they call after they retire the person at the other end of the phone says, “Who?” When the party is over, there are no more shoes, no more free tickets. Ex-NBA players don’t get free tickets to games. You need to have saved and invested. I was very fortunate when I was a young player to have veteran guys pull me aside and counsel me on what to do. My first agent cheated me out of a lot of money. Luckily, Julius Erving and Moses Malone taught me so much about a lot of things, including money.
I don’t know if it’s a black thing or not . . . maybe it’s just because most of the guys in the NBA are black and that was my environment. But when I first got to the pros, I bought something like six cars. And Doc and Moses made me sell ’em. They told me, “Look, man, you can only drive one car. What the hell are you doing with six? If you drive one car, sell the other five and invest that money wisely and just let the damn money grow, that will become enough money to buy twenty cars in five to ten years.” Something else they told me that was very important, and I’m glad they didn’t just sit back and tell me what I wanted to hear. They told me, “You don’t have to drive a lot of flashy, expensive cars, spend a lot of money on jewelry to get attention. Stop trying to impress people; everybody already knows who the hell you are.” And it was really profound. They were right, of course. You don’t need to drive a Bentley; you’d be better served with the money being wisely invested. I’ve got my expensive hobbies. I like to go to Las Vegas and gamble, which everybody knows, and I love golf. But I have two cars now, SUVs, and I don’t have any entourages.
The first time it hit me that my life was probably going to change—I mean be really different and that I wasn’t going to have to be poor—was the day I left home for college. I had only left Alabama a couple of times before my first road trip playing college basketball. My mom and I went to visit some in-laws in Youngstown, Ohio, one summer. But hell, that was a bad neighborhood also. And I went to Compton, California, one summer before I went to high school. I went to visit my dad one summer and almost got killed in some gang thing.
I don’t know if there were Crips and Bloods then, I don’t know what or who it was. We got into a fight with some guys and ended up running, and I’ve never been that scared in my life. I never went back either. That was my first experience in California. Some guys I was with, we just wound up wandering through some bad neighborhood and met up with some guys . . . and we couldn’t do anything about it. The police couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything about it either. But that’s what happens in all-black neighborhoods. It wouldn’t happen in Buckhead in Atlanta, I’ll tell you that.
I went to Buckhead a couple of weeks after the Ray Lewis incident happened. I got there on a Sunday night, and Buckhead was closed down. They closed the clubs for a while, the restaurants, everything. I asked a guy what was going on and he said Buckhead was shut down, completely locked down for a while on Sunday nights. They weren’t going to let people tear up Buckhead. That’s the power and influence that result from having wealth.
Sometimes you need a reality check, just to be reconnected to everyday life. You need to be reminded of just how much money you have, and the issues you used to have to consider before you had any money. Sometimes friends will say, “Hey, man, I’m coming to visit you in two months.” And I’ll say, “Why the hell are you telling me that now?” And they’ll say, “Because I had to buy my airline tickets today, asshole, so it won’t cost a million dollars.” See, I have no perception of that now, because I never flew on a plane when I was on welfare, and now I’ve been rich for a long time and haven’t had to consider that. And since September 11, I’ve pretty much been flying in private planes. So it’s definitely a reality check when somebody calls me saying, “I need to keep this airfare under $200.” And I’m like, “Damn, you need to buy a ticket two months in advance to fly on this ratty airline? In coach?” See, I have no perception of that.
I’ll tell you another reality check: Enron and WorldCom. Half the executives at Enron have participated in congressional hearings, but nobody’s in jail yet. They’ve stolen millions of dollars and hid it real good. And all those working people, some of them just working-class poor people, have lost their jobs, their pensions, their 401(k) plans, and they’re waiting there, like, “What’s next?”
Nothing’s next, that’s what’s next.
They stole poor people’s money. Rich people can steal shit and get away with it, that’s how the game works. How many people at fault for what happened at Enron and WorldCom are going to jail? And whoever does go to jail is going to one of those little fluff prisons for five years, and when he gets out he’s getting most of his money anyway. Who’s worse off, the guy who spent every damn cent he’s got to put his kids through school and doesn’t have his pension anymore or some rich thief who’s coming out of a fluff prison to pick up a couple of million?
I’m a little sensitive about this whole thing because I’ve got so many friends from my playing days in Houston who worked for Enron. They’re all walking around like zombies, saying, “Hey, man, I lost my job, I lost my pension.” I know between fifteen and twenty people who worked at Enron, good friends in Houston. Lost their life’s savings. What recourse do they have?
So even though I need a reality check every once in a while, I never lose sight of the fact that we make a lot of money. The average salary in the NBA now is approximately $3 million per year. Guys who can’t play a lick can make that. But it’s short-lived, and people are making a lot more money off of us than we’re making. Guys think they’re controlling the process, when all they’re getting is royalties. I know how much money I’ve made, and I know I was getting, like, 2 percent of shoe sales. And I’m thinking, “Damn, if I’m only getting 2 percent, and never more than 5 percent on anything, and I’m getting a $700,000 royalty check from the sale of shoes that cost $125 a pair, then a lot of people are making money on me.”
And that’s nothing compared to what people have made off Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Everybody has made money on them. Look at the boost television has gotten from Tiger Woods. The television executives must lose their minds if Tiger isn’t on the leader board on Sunday, because he’s the money generator. I know they made a ton of money on me because I see my jerseys and shoes everywhere.
The guys producing this stuff, the guys who own these companies and teams, are way too smart to be losing money. And we ain’t getting the first cut. They’re all megamillionaires. Remember what Jerry Krause said when he broke up the Chicago Bulls. He said, “It ain’t the players, it’s the organization.” The organization ran the greatest player ever out of Chicago. The club is still doing well financially. The team is appreciating. They’ve got a new arena. That’s the perfect example of sports being a business more than anything else. Everybody who plays professionally ought to stop and think, “If they did that to Michael Jordan they’ll sure as hell do it to me.” Was I shocked? No. I remember when Michael got his first $30 million contract, in 1996. We were in Lake Tahoe. And he said, “Can you believe Jerry Reinsdorf told me, ‘There’s no man that’s worth this much money’?” This is the guy who made Jerry Reinsdorf, the Bulls chairman, a billionaire, made it so that the franchise is playing in a shiny new arena, gave an identity to a team that didn’t exist on any national level before Michael got there, and damn sure hadn’t won anything. He played at Kmart prices, relatively speaking, before that. It’s the best example ever of sports being a business first and foremost. It’s the best example of what revenues are generated, what owners take away and what players take away.
As long as the Bulls were getting Michael for below-market value, everything was cool. But then when they had to start paying him, no. So when Scottie’s contract was up, it’s like, “Nope, we’re not paying both of y’all.” The biggest thing of all in this is merchandising. It’s a billion-dollar-plus business. Tell me they weren’t making money. If Michael could have gotten one dollar for every No. 23 jersey I’ve seen with my own eyes in my travels, he’d have more money than most Third World countries.
The funny thing about this is that Michael is so damn cheap. Michael ain’t the most popular guy in Las Vegas. He’ll win $1 million in the casino and not tip the people. I don’t like to just walk by homeless people. If I see a homeless person, I want to give them some money, even if it’s just a little something. Michael saw me giving a homeless person some money one day and grabbed me and said, “Quit doing that. If they’re able to ask you for some spare change they can say, ‘Welcome to McDonald’s, can I help you please?’ “
As important as money is in the business of professional sports, there’s real irony in that you can’t allow it to be in the equation when you walk into the gym for practice or for games or for a meeting or workouts. You just can’t. Athletes are just like anybody else. We’ve always cared about money. We care about setting ourselves up for life and being able to take care of our families and friends, and we want to afford nice things and a great lifestyle. But we did not talk seriously about contracts in the locker room for most of my career. Lately, that’s started to change. You’ve got guys now talking about whether they’re going to get the max, or whether they’re going to opt out of their contracts. We never discussed that stuff during the season, and it never mattered when we got in a room as a team. If a guy even thought he was going to discuss that stuff, we’d say, “Hey, let’s go and play, and all that stuff will be worked out when the season’s over, ’cause you can’t change it today. If you can play, if you go out there and perform and we play and have a good season, you’ll always get your money in the end.” All this “I’m a free agent, let me see what I can get on the open market” stuff, or “I can get the max if they’ll let my agent work out a sign-and-trade.” When you’ve got your best players talking about that stuff, you’ve got a problem.
And Michael probably deserves more credit for keeping that stuff out of the mix than anybody, because he was a guy who was clearly underpaid for the first ten years of his career, but never bitched or talked about any of it. And guys had to fall in line behind him on that issue. How are they going to bring that up in a locker room if Michael didn’t? If the best player in the league handles that privately, and sends a signal publicly that he’s going to give them—the fans—their money’s worth first and foremost, then guys around the league have to pretty much follow his lead. I think that’s an important part of greatness, believing that if you make yourself the best you can be, you will be compensated. And not the other way around.
Johnny Miller said something real crazy during an NBC golf telecast one day. He said that Tiger’s under no pressure out there because he already had his financial life set, everything in place. I think it’s the total opposite. Look at all these young boys now, in every sport, individual and team sports, who play a few years and get out. They get all the money early and they lose their obsession and after a few years they just don’t have it in ’em to go out there and work as hard as they did earlier. Money isn’t what Tiger’s playing for. Hell yeah, he wants it and deserves it. But it can’t be what he’s playing for. His motivation runs so much deeper than that. The pressure on Tiger, like the pressure on Michael, is to be the greatest ever every time he steps to the tee or stands over a putt.