Ray Lewis, the famous Baltimore Ravens football player, sat there Monday evening in a corner of the lobby of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, in a suit that might have cost more than your monthly mortgage payment. He was there to talk about professional athletes and money. This led to the mention of a name: Jim Parker.
“You remember him?” Lewis was asked.
He thought about this for a moment, and then asked, “You mean the football player?”
Yes, the Baltimore Colts Hall of Fame blocker. Parker broke in with the Colts in 1957, in a distant era before kids coming out of college signed million-dollar contracts. Parker signed for about $12,000 and thought it was pretty decent money. But he had a sense of perspective. One day he was asked the biggest difference between college ball and the pros.
“When I joined the Colts,” Parker said, “I had to take a cut in pay.”
Now Ray Lewis laughed aloud at the story. He remembered signing with the Baltimore Ravens roughly a decade ago for $1.2 million, which is considered peanuts compared with some signing bonuses today. He also remembers undergraduate, under-the-table money similar to Parker’s, slipped his way when Lewis was still playing at the University of Miami, in what is still known in some places as amateur football.
“Oh, my lord,” Lewis said, recalling his college days. “Somebody’d say, ‘Have dinner with this person.’ There’d be $10,000 in a briefcase. ‘Have dinner with this person.’ More money.”
“Wait a minute. Ten thousand dollars?”
“Sure,” Lewis said. “That’s small. You’re signing papers and don’t know what you’re signing. These agents, they’re dealing with kids who don’t know anything. That’s why I’ve been through seven agents already. When you’re an athlete, you’re getting pulled so many ways.
“They’re telling you, ‘I can get you this much.’ ‘I can get you this much.’ Well, nobody gets you anything. You get your own. But most kids don’t know this. They get pulled in by some agent who winds up getting the sweet end of it.”
“How did you avoid getting suckered in?”
Lewis laughed aloud. “That’s why I’ve been through seven agents,” he said. “Because I was smart enough to play along with them.”
That’s also what brought him to the Reginald Lewis museum Monday evening. Lewis – Ray, that is – is partners in Allied Athlete Group, created to help professional athletes deal with the sudden abundance of money in their lives, and the sudden disappearance of it faced by so many.
Among his partners: Duane Starks, former Ravens defensive back, who joined Lewis at the museum, where they awaited roughly a score of active players for a recruiting pitch for AAG.
In a time when working people are losing their jobs by the hundreds of thousands, and their homes by the hundreds of thousands, who has time to worry about a bunch of wealthy athletes? Nobody much. And that’s why it’s fallen on the athletes to look out for each other.
“You come into the NFL with money like you’ve never seen before,” Starks was saying now. He remembered his signing bonus: $3.1 million, of which the government left him with $1.9 million.
“I knew there were guys in the NFL who made bigger money than that,” he said, “and they ran out of money. It’s still going on. We know that 78 percent of NFL players are bankrupt or divorced – or both – within three or four years after they retire. We have so much leverage. But it’s in somebody else’s hands.”
AAG is designed to protect these athletes from unscrupulous representatives, or friends and relatives who grab with both hands, or their own naivete.
“What happens to a lot of athletes,” said Ray Lewis, “is the relationships they form. They’re created by somebody else. By lawyers, by agents. And there you are, just a kid. What we’re saying is, we’ve been through this. We want to protect you from the time you’re a rookie. There’s all these issues, and nobody ever slows things down long enough to make you understand the problems.
“It’s not just agents, either. It’s family and friends. They’re all picking from the fruit of the tree, and nobody wants to water the tree.”
Lewis remembers signing his first pro contract, when “it seemed like all the money in the world to me. I went home and said, ‘Mom, guess what? We’re not on welfare any more.’ I took care of my whole family.”
But he’s also taken care of himself, with several lucrative business ventures. The secret?
“Money comes and goes,” he said. “But good relationships are formed, and hold on.”
