As Nick Papagiorgio said, “an entourage is expensive.”
yup...read this story (except for some verbal diarrhea in the middle its a great article) about Tyron Smith of the Dallas Cowboys from November last year on ESPN...he basically told his family “no more”...showed it to a friend who was working 80 hours a week and bankrolling her family on $60K a year- she said “enough” after reading it...
Financial requests overwhelm Smith
HERE’S A CHALLENGE: Imagine what it feels like to be 21 years old, extremely successful, famously wealthy, wildly stressed and unbearably miserable. How, you might wonder, can all those conditions exist simultaneously?
Start here, with Cowboys All-Pro offensive tackle Tyron Smith, talking to his mother on the phone one day in 2012, his second year in the NFL, during a time of growing tension between him and his family over money issues.
“We’ve found a house,” Frankie Pinkney told her son.
By this stage, wariness had become as intrinsic to Smith’s identity as his brown eyes and bookcase shoulders. Silently, he awaited details. He had agreed to purchase a home in Southern California for his mother and stepfather. They would live in it; he would own it as an investment. The agreed-upon budget was roughly $300,000, but over the course of the conversation, Frankie dropped the bomb. List price: more like $800,000.
Smith, now 23, is sitting at a polished wood table in the conference room of his lawyer’s Dallas office. Surrounded by his girlfriend, financial adviser and lawyer, he fixes his eyes on a spot somewhere high on the floor-to-ceiling window. “Yeah, my parents wanted a house,” Smith says. “But it was way bigger than mine and cost way more than mine.”
It’s not an easy topic for Smith to discuss — recounting the conversation appears to be nearly as hard as being on the phone in the first place. He long ago gave up trying to pinpoint when it all went wrong, when the combination of family and money turned corrosive, when one ceased to exist without the other. He recites facts, stripped of emotion, as if determined to turn a painful time in his life into an after-action report.
“That call,” he says. “That was the point where I said, ‘That’s enough.’”
At that precise moment, as he hung up the phone without giving his mother assent or encouragement, something hardened inside him. Reclaiming his finances, that was the easy part. Demystifying his new life — being something other than a conduit for the wishes of those around him — that was more complicated.
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HE PLAYED ALONG with the myth. Everyone else was, so what choice did he have? When he was chosen No. 9 in the draft, he was 20, the youngest player in the NFL. He signed a four-year, $12.5 million contract, bought his mom a Range Rover and vowed to pay off his parents’ mortgage and retire the family’s debts. “I didn’t think I owed them anything,” Smith says. “I just really wanted to help out. I know how hard the struggle is, and growing up we always had to worry about debt. That was my thing: Use this money to pay off your house, pay your debt and be free of all that stuff.”
Later, Smith discovered the money he provided wasn’t used for those purposes. Asked how it was spent, Smith shrugs, betraying no emotion. “We don’t know,” he says. A direct line could be drawn connecting that moment to the moment he hung up the phone because it marked the beginning of a gradual erosion of trust and control. His humanity vanished beneath a barrage of requests. He was no longer son or brother or friend. He began to feel like a human Santa list, robbed of his capacity to be generous.
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AFTER HIS ROOKIE year, Smith was moved from right tackle to left, a huge promotion in an offensive lineman’s world. When he texted his parents to tell them, the response he received did not convey joy or congratulations. Instead, it referenced his next contract and how it would be bigger now that he was playing a more valuable position. “It was hard to have a straight-up conversation,” Smith says. “I love my family — I do — but I didn’t love what they became.”
A financial adviser who works with numerous professional athletes says, “As players get more, their families want to be paid more. People lose their humanity. We call some family members ‘backup point guards’ because that’s how they believe they should be paid.”