By DAVID WALLIS
NY Times
Published: May 9, 2012
DURING the New England Patriots’ 1982 training camp, several of Keith L. Lee’s teammates urged the second-string defensive back to push for a promotion. Mr. Lee, then a free agent pickup in his third year with the team, cornered his coach one day to lobby for the starter’s job. But his dream was dashed.
“You are not a draft pick, so you are always going to be a backup,” Mr. Lee recalls his coach told him. He then asked what would happen if an injury sidelined a starter. “You’ll play,” said his coach, “until we trade for somebody.” That revelation hit Mr. Lee harder than a 300-pound offensive lineman: “I realized how expendable I was.”
When he retired from the game four years later at age 29, the National Football League and its players union gave Mr. Lee no advice other than a two-page list of prospective employers’ telephone numbers. Mr. Lee, who started playing football when he was 9 years old, likened leaving the game to “witnessing my own social funeral.” People he met after retiring “unknowingly start talking to you in the past tense. ‘I remember when you played. Didn’t you used to be ...?’ ”
The toll on their bodies aside, some former professional athletes score big in their first round of retirement. The onetime New York Yankees catcher Joe Girardi now manages the team, and the former Lakers basketball player Magic Johnson recently bought a piece of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Famous ex-athletes can generate an income just signing memorabilia. But sometimes they and some lesser lights struggle after their playing days, with consequences for the rest of their lives. A 2009 University of Michigan survey of ex-N.F.L. players found that retirees ages 30 to 49 were twice as likely to live in poverty than other men with some college.
Most recently, the former National Basketball Association star Allen Iverson, the ex-New York Met Lenny Dykstra, and the former N.F.L. defensive tackle Warren Sapp, a probable Hall of Famer, have been in the news because of their financial problems.
The recipe for losing millions made while playing professional sports typically calls for a mix of immaturity, dubious investments, profligate spending and poor financial planning.
“The same things that make you a great athlete make you a terrible investor,” said Jeff Reboulet, a former utility infielder who became a financial adviser in 2003 after his retirement from the Pittsburgh Pirates. Without guidance, he said, athletes can suffer from an “I’ll make it happen” mentality in the business arena. “Guys just say, ‘I’m going to get in on this investment, and because I’m in, it’s going to get better,’ ” he said. “There’s a lot of train wrecks.”
To read the entire article, click here.