How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke
cnnsi.printthis.clickability.com
cnnsi.printthis.clickability.com
That sums it up right there and by "it," I mean "all of it." The problem. The problem with our society. The problem with the educational system. The problem with our national debt. With our dependence on foreign oil.
Why don't people want to learn anymore? I don't understand why it seems so easy, so obvious, that "this" just isn't the way.
Am I the only one frustrated by the continued bad decision making? We sell these poor athletes, and I mean poor in every sense, the illusion of wealth and fame and happiness and then rip the carpet right out from under them. It takes years, decades of dedication to a dream and then they are bankrupt. Not only do they not have the millions they were "promised," but they have no education, no skills applicable outside sports, their bodies are too old to do the only thing they can do.
Why do we keep doing this to people?
It's really sad. It makes me really sad.
What's going to happen? I can't see anything good coming from this. I can't see any good future down this path. It feels so much like the wrong path. I feel like I'm being taken down this bad path against my will. I don't want to go down this path, but it's like I'm stuck in this huge pack of people all stampeding toward a huge cliff and I don't want to run over the cliff. "There's a cliff ahead!!" I yell and no one hears it, they're too busy running, not even knowing where they are going.
What am I supposed to do? What are people who don't want to go off the cliff supposed to do?
Sometimes we're not the ones who come up with them, and sometimes we just suffer while somebody else is busy solving problems, but that's life.
I look at it like this: taken at an individual level, each person is a precious gift: unique, special, etc. Taken as a group level, as a generic, people are really stupid. Over and over again I've seen really smart people do really dumb things. It's amazing. So when a bunch of PhDs or other smart people do idiotic things, it's not surprising that some hoop-shooter or pigskin jockey would be the same way. We're all stupid, just in different ways. : ) Somehow the race keeps on solving problems anyway.
You keep talking about herd mentality - "our" society, "this huge pack of people" etc. Who are these people? I don't particularly feel like you and I are associated in any way. "We" aren't doing anything to anybody. If you feel like you are contributing to an unethical enterprise, and you don't feel good about that, then stop doing it.
Likewise, if you feel like you aren't producing value and doing the hard work and learning anymore, then this is a problem that you must fix. I'm over here producing value and doing hard work and learning. I can't speak as to whether what you're doing is worth anything - that's your problem.
The question, more generally, is how do we change society's definition of value. How do we convince the world to spend more on teachers than it spends on athletes? Did you know in ancient Greece, philosophers were exempt from taxation because they were so valued by society? In the past, thought was valued above all.
We need to go back there and revive thinking as a valued contribution to society.
Editted - forgot I wasn't on /irc/ =]
Most of these athletes never did.
They are the opposite of us. While we were misunderstood for all those years working our butts off in anonymity, they were getting their butts kissed. From the time they were toddlers. All the way through school where they were promoted along whether or not they ever went to class.
When you have nothing left for the ass kissers to kiss, then what are you going to do?
When in the States there is so much societal pressure to be athletic/look athletic/enjoy the spectacle of sports, I think we are in trouble where Asian tigers like China have societal pressure and strong peer approval to study hard and aspire to become engineers.
The strongest push in the US (and it's not even close) is to make money. The intense materialism here will insulate the country from most of its truly dangerous fools simply because capitalism works so well. Tocqueville, back in the early 19th century, made a note of the anti-intellectual streak in the US and said that a scholar would generally be happier in Europe unless they could occupy themselves with the challenge of earning dough.
Times have not changed. Except for a burst of scientific enthusiasm at the peak of the Cold War (1946-1964), commerce has driven most innovation.
The bad thing is everything having to do with the student athletes.
So why not just make college sports professional. Just like the NFL and the NBA, this would simply be another league, made up of college branded teams.
Ah, but we can't do that, we can't call a spade a spade. Society has to maintain a charade. It's like collectively we're in the closet. And we're very passionate about college sports but we just can not get out of the closet and say fuck it, just make the sports program professional.
[No, I don't think reputation is everything. But, if that's what they wanted to improve, sports may have been a very efficient mechanism for all the wrong reasons.]
This comic: http://gibsonandlily.com/comics/index.cgi?id=13
sums up what I mean (sortof).
For me, I have tech. or politics, or science to keep myself occupied. That is what my group talks about. While group B is having a spirited debate about the one team of ball-throwers vs another team of ball-throwers, we might be having a debate about one group of politicians vs another.
Its the same thing.
For a technology standpoint, my friends and I all support one another. If I'm having a problem with a specific thing that one of my friends is particularily good at, I go to them to help me with it (there was a project recently where a friend was working on a REALLY large data set of climate information and was having trouble walking around in it. I, luckily, have a friend that works in the Computer Science department of a local Univ. specifically on these sorts of problems. She was the one that I asked to help us).
Some people have friendships based on skills in basketball, I have friendships based on skills in technology. It is the same thing, my friends just have much less luck with the ladies :(.
There are extremely few elite athletes who can simply step into their sport with little training and discipline and perform to their max, in the same way that very few startups ever take off on pure luck and little work. For the majority of athletes, however, they apply the same level of startup-like discipline and drive to their sport to maximize their own individual talents, and I think it's ridiculous for you to claim that the attention they get is somehow undeserved or out of place. You certainly wouldn't be shouting about undeserved attention and "butt kissing" if a YC startup was acquired for millions and had tons of PR coverage.
In the same fashion that you chose to sacrifice athletic achievement to delve into learning, some athletes chose to give up some learning to dive into athletic achievement. Regardless, this whole nerd vs. athlete nonsense really needs to stop. Both are simply two groups of people who have been given different talents who are working equally hard trying to maximize those talents.
I never meant to imply that athletes don't work. Quite the contrary. My apologies.
But I stand by my "butt kissing" remarks.
Nobody ever paid much attention to me or anyone like me just because someone else was bigger or taller and could do cool things with a ball. Make no mistake about it: hero worship of athletes is way out of whack. They're so used to having their butts kissed, they simply do not know how to function in any other environment.
"You certainly wouldn't be shouting about undeserved attention and "butt kissing" if a YC startup was acquired for millions and had tons of PR coverage."
Maybe. Maybe not. The difference is that the butt kissing would be because of the money, not the work, which few people understand anyway.
Excuse me while I paint my face, jump up and down, and act like an idiot while I watch the guy in the next cubicle crank out a bubble sort in one loop :-)
They (he, I'm assuming) wasn't implying that athletes dont' work, what he was implying is that those that DO get lots and lots and lots and LOTS of recognition for it.
If a geek accomplishes something extraordinary...nobody outside of his or her industry really cares beyond "is this going to help me get to espn.com faster?". Its sad, but it's true. It is cliche' because it is true.
I've sat through the classes as the coach brought in a "life coach" to explain money, contracts, and being an adult. Most will absorb the information and understand. You get the few wayward knuckleheads where nothing matters. If you present a real life case of misfortune they will imagine a scenario where they dance around. Example:
Coach: ...this star athlete let his best friend be his money manager. He mishandled it and our athlete was broke and owned the government $100ks in taxes.
Knucklehead: That won't happen to me. I'd let my mom handle the money, she's good with numbers.
Coach: Son that's not the point. YOU have to be aware of YOUR finances or you could find yourself in the same situation.
Knucklehead: Nah, I trust my mom. She'd never do me like that.
>> Not the actual conversation but similar.
If they were in the 40s or 50s when star athletes were starting to post large numbers I could feel a little sympathy. They might not have known, but if you are in the 20s or 30s chances are someone has given you the speech on protecting your interests first.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530151
It sure looks like the same article. It's hard to tell at a glance with this kind of URL, which evidently doesn't trigger duplicate detection.
I wonder if this happens to founders? Surely there are some twentysomethings who saw their balance go from three digits to seven in a day. They probably do not have seven kids or a poverty mindset to be unlearned, but surely some have problems.
None of those people paid to do it. I wasn't aware that anyone actually paid to do a Masters. I always assumed that grants, scholarships, fellowships and research dollars paid for a masters.
Do people, outside of an MBA*, actually pay for their Masters degree?
Yes, it's pretty common to pay for a master's. A lot of departments will only fund PhD students (automatically). Master's only people usually have to "pay their own way", although that might consist of finding their own research or teaching assistantship, etc.
Instead of VCs, I should have been pitching football players.
Your idea wouldn't go very well, stick to VCs.
But flotation devices for furniture? Inspirational movies? Restaurants? Missing prenuptials?
I grant that athletes might tend towards more physical goods, but I'll bet you good money there has been a lot invested in less tangible ones as well.
Actually I've given up on VCs for now. Their track records are worse than mine. Bootstrapping is much more logical for technology in this climate.