Hey Y'all it has been a MINUTE since I have posted on this blog. I know, I know! I need to cut it out.
But hopefully I am back for a while.
I wanted to write today something as a reminder to the fans out there. We invest a lot in the games that we like to watch. We invest in the athletes and the leagues and organizations that build these sports up. But we tend to forget that when it comes to the game, we are consumers, and that there are real people who's lives are always impacted by what happens to them on the court, field etc.
I just watched a movie about a Football player who had lost his position on a team and was struggling to get signed by another team. The movie opened with an interesting statistic: "78% of NFL players end up divorced, file for bankruptcy or are unemployed after the first two years of leaving the league." I don't need to validate the statistic to understand that this is a real thing. We think about how many people actually make the teams that we love. There are probably a third of organizations who are not even known. They play on the practice squad and barely make any money. They aren't the superstars that get paid the millions of dollars to play the game. In the balance are their families, their bills and really their lives.
We see too often that when an athlete retires, that we don't really know what they do next. Some of the athletes especially when they are young Black males might not have finished their college degrees (probably more of a fact for NBA stars) so what education do they have after they retire. What jobs do they get when many of them might not have worked through college because their focus was playing and making that their career. Not enough of the big named athletes get to spend time as a commentator on the big time networks, so what happens next for them?
I love the game just as much as the next person, but I think we have to consider as fans what happens when there are no more filled arenas, when there are no more bright lights on Sunday, Monday and Thursday nights. We get to continue loving the game that we love, but the players are stuck dealing with the bigger problems.
My heart is in working one day for the NFL.. I don't know when that day will come, but I would love to do something, some work that would continue to focus the athletes, the organization and the fans into what comes after the game is over?
Just some food for thought...
That's all she wrote
