What I've learned from the world's elite is that hustle culture has it all wrong

Yeah, I don't really see the big deal about this. Taking a better contract isn't proof that he didn't love Detroit; it's not like an athlete can only love playing for one specific team/location, and even if that weren't the case, I don't think that's a good reason to refuse a better offer (especially since sometimes a team won't want to resign a player for various reasons, e.g. not having the budget to pay the player as much as they would get elsewhere, or having signed a younger promising player in the same position). I think this is a fairly non-controversial opinion on Hacker News for software engineers (i.e. the company you work for doesn't have any specific loyalty to you and would happily replace you with someone cheaper who does equivalent work if they could), and as much as I have emotional attachment to my favorite sports team and don't really think that the difference between $10 million/year and $15 million/year will make that big a difference in someone's life, I don't see why the same principal wouldn't apply to them/

It's less the team than the city with me. Detroiters get disrespected so much that we have a bit of a chip on our soldier. I actually don't follow pro football in the least because if I did I'd have to follow the Lions who are arguably the biggest losers in the sport.

There are players who have no allegiance to the city. They're not out in the restaurants or clubs. They're not volunteering with city's charities. So when they leave for more money it's just not that big a deal.

Some of my heroes as a kid were Detroit Tigers baseball players like Al Kaline, Willie Horton and Mickey Lolich who spent their entire careers with the team. The city rewarded whatever money they might have passed up with business success after they were done playing.

Vinnie 'the microwave' Johnson from the Detroit Pistons started a auto parts company after his playing career and has made hundreds of millions of dollars. He was from Brooklyn and could easily have returned there to equal opportunities in business.

>You shouldn't let it negate the emotions you felt when he played for your team.

for the life of me, I can't figure why people care about multimillionaires playing games with other multimillionaires, in teams owned by billionairs.

How to people get excited by that? Why does anyone care, let alone get emotional if some millionaire playing a game paid by a billionaire, should come or go?

Weird.

If anything the fact that it took a non-trivial pay bump to get him to move is probably a good sign he did like (or at least not dislike) the city. Now if someone took a pay cut to play on a different team, that might be a slap in the face.