An Athlete’s Decision: Antoine Walker & Sam Bradford

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I have had 100 ideas floating through my mind in the past week about college basketball.  I am inundated in college basketball statistics and references, but I wanted to focus my post on a couple of trendy conversations in the world of sports today.  One, Sam Bradford and his decision to come back to school.  Two, Antoine Walker and his relative new life of being in debt.  I would love to discuss three, sports, agents and money, but I am going to save that for another time.

Sam Bradford hurts shoulder vs BYU.  Generally, Sam was believed to be highest rated quarterback from last year’s class.  Early reports claimed that he could have potentially been the first selection of the Detroit Lions in the 2009 NFL Draft.  He decides to come back to school, thus forfeiting $40 million guaranteed money to come back to OU to win a national championship.  The problem with coming back started with week one, a bum shoulder, a loss.  Then, a loss to Miami, a quick comeback, a decent game versus Baylor, excitement built around the Red River Rivalry and eventually, another injury to his shoulder and a loss to the Longhorns.  This week, Sam decided to have surgery and focus on the 2010 NFL Draft, where he has already declared.  Most of you that know that amount of information already.  What most of you don’t know, however, is what it is like to the be quarterback at OU.

Most of us like to say that we would like a lot of money, be able to travel, run a company, on and on.  Sam wanted to be the quarterback for the Oklahoma Sooners and win a national championship, at least that is what he said about coming back to school.  Does that mean that he never wanted to make guaranteed cash at the conclusion of his OU career, or that I am naive enough to believe that knowing all the circumstances now that he would decide to come back to school today?  See, most of us are always chasing the thing that we always “wanted to do” but will probably never get a chance to do.  That’s just being an average human being in the world today (these are Bobby Seigle numbers, not actual figures) – 1% of us are really dumb, really poor, 1% of us are really smart and super rich, and the other 98% of us are somewhere in between.  Basically, 98% of us will never be the guy that gets to make the decision to stay in school or go pro, but we can learn a little something from Sam for our future – Sam made his decision for Sam; to do something that he enjoyed thoroughly and to do it for one more year when he was eligible to do so.  In your life, as you make decisions about what you want to do, remember that being in the position you’re in right now might be the best thing that’s ever happened to you – no matter what you’ve given up to be doing it.  I respect you, Sam, and I respect you if you’ve been in Sam’s shoes in your own life.

Antoine Walker! Boy, I only watched about 5 minutes of Colin Cowherd in the hotel in DC one day this week, but Colin absolutely torched Antoine and the-walker-shimmyAntoine’s mom.  The story behind it all is that Antoine owes upwards of $5 million to several banks across the country and several casinos.  He’s broke, he’s out of the league and he is under investigation for felony charges of writing falty checks and other financial misjudgments.  Colin Cowherd does not feel sorry for Antoine Walker, but I do.  I feel sorry for him because ever since he was 10 he could probably dribble a basketball and dunk.  I feel sorry for him because in high school, in Chicago, he could probably score at will, had girls all over him, couldn’t count the number of scholarships he’d received, never attended class and to top it all off, was given advice from inherently bad people.  That advice in his pre-teen and teen years has cost him during his 33rd year of life.
See, when I was a coach at the collegiate level, and I was for only two years, it was my belief that an 18 year old is old enough to make his own decisions and dumb enough to make his own decisions.  I have heard, with my own two ears, guys speak of how many girls they can get in the sack, how many points they can score, how many classes they can skip, when they can get the girls to do their homework for them – are those all relegated to college basketball stars?  No, it’s a college guy thing and considered “a right of passage.”  The problem is that when you add money and fame to your “right of passage” suddenly you see the world through a different set of eyes. And those eyes enable you to believe that what you do has absolutely no consequences.  Antoine Walker made over $100 million in his NBA career and is now in debt for $5 million.  How can that happen?  We who have had tremendous influences in our life, such as our dads, our coaches, our uncles, brother-in-laws, brothers, and grandfathers know how special our male-male relationships have been.  We have made bad decisions in our pre-teen and teen years where one of those men came to us and said, “boy, you keep acting like that and you won’t see the light of day for a week” or something along the lines of keeping us on the straight and narrow.  We wander, a male influence led us back to reality.  Antoine, as a big stud in high school, college and in the pros never had that. But by the time he had gotten to all those places, the time to influence him had passed.  That is what I find sad about Antoine’s situation and for each millionaire-gone-broke story I read. That is why I feel lucky to have my dad in my life.  And it’s why I feel lucky that the foundation I grew up with was not “get rich, have fun, no consequences.”

Going forward, I hope you at least see a couple things to apply to your own life.  I remember sitting with someone in New Orleans about a year ago and hearing him say – “In America, we want to be able to sin without consequences.  We want to be able to get drunk without hangovers, have sex without having babies, and spend money without paying the bills.  Eventually, sometime, somewhere, it catches up to you.”