Professional athletes seem to have it all: fame, adulation, and riches.
But once an athlete retires, it's a different story.
According to Sports Illustrated, 78 percent of retired NFL players go broke after two
years off the field.
Within five years, more than half of all professional NBA players have nothing left.
Bleak, right?
It seems hard to believe, but here's a look at some top-tier athletes who lost all their
cash.
Vin Baker
He was an NBA All-Star and an Olympian, but Vin Baker was also an alcoholic.
Despite earning nearly $100 million over the course of his career, Baker lost it all.
Drinking his way out of the league, Baker's house was foreclosed on and he eventually
sold his gold medal to pay the bills.
After hitting rock bottom, though, Baker was able to get sober.
He reached out to an old boss, former Supersonics owner Howard Schultz, who offered him a job.
Baker told WBUR,
"We met and we came up with a plan.
And we exercised that plan, and part of the plan was to make caramel macchiatos and serve
coffee at Starbucks."
It doesn't sound like much, but Baker told The Providence Journal it was the chance he
needed.
"I get energy from waking up in the morning and . . . not depending on alcohol, and not
being embarrassed or ashamed to know I have a family to take care of.
The show's got to go on."
Since then, Baker has moved on and up, working with the Milwaukee Bucks as a commentator.
Way to go, Vin!
William 'The Refrigerator' Perry
In the mid-80's, no NFL star was bigger than William "The Refrigerator" Perry, either literally
or figuratively.
A defensive lineman who moonlighted as the heaviest player to ever score a touchdown,
the Fridge was, as one Chicago Sun Times columnist put it at the time,
"The best use of fat since the invention of bacon."
By 2015, though, Perry had lost both his health and his fortune.
According to a Sports Illustrated profile, Perry lives in a retirement home, plagued
by severe diabetes and cognitive issues.
He also had to sell his Super Bowl ring, and subsists below the poverty line on social
security checks.
His old Bears coach, Mike Ditka, told SI,
"It's tragic.
I think he's given up.
And the question in my mind is, Why?"
Evander Holyfield
There's no easy exit strategy from the fight game, something Evander Holyfield found out
the hard way.
Despite earning what the BBC estimates to be $230 million over his career, including
a $33 million purse for fighting a famously violent Mike Tyson…
"I'm sorry Evander.
It's your ear."
Holyfield has spent a decade battling financial collapse.
With a lavish lifestyle that saw him a regular in the casinos of Vegas and Atlantic City,
and having 11 children by five different women, Holyfield found that even a fortune can disappear
when everyone's coming for it.
From the heights of Olympic glory, and heavyweight championships, ESPN reported that Holyfield
found himself unable to pay $3,000 alimony checks.
His house was foreclosed on, and all his sports memorabilia was put up for auction.
This massive debt forced the pugilist to hold on long past his expiration date, fighting
and losing matches into his 50s.
In 2012, Holyfield told The Independent,
"These are difficult days.
Dealing with all the mothers of all my kids –- there ain't no winning here, man, no
winning at all.
I've had no money to pay lawyers and had to fight on my own in court and that ain't easy."
He finally retired in 2014 at the age of 51.
Bernie Kosar
Cleveland browns legend Bernie Kosar was an All-pro superstar who earned millions over
the course of his career.
And yet according to court documents, when he filed for bankruptcy in 2009, he had amassed
millions in debt, and his checking account had all of $44 in it.
"You once told me that you've had $300 million, and you've had zero."
"Yup."
"How is that possible?"
Kosar told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that financial advisers mismanaged his money, and
too many people came looking for handouts.
He estimates he gave out over "eight figures" to ex-teammates, plus another eight figures
to friends and family without ever seeing a dime repaid.
And according to the ESPN documentary Broke, Kosar's own father siphoned off a fortune
for mortgages and car payments.
As a result, Kosar at one point owed millions to both his ex-wife - and his ex-team.
"I'm really good at makin' it, good at spending it, great at giving it away."
Antoine Walker
Over the course of his all-star NBA career, Antoine Walker earned over $110 million.
But just two years after he retired in 2008, Walker declared bankruptcy.
Besides a number of bad business investments, Walker blew his fortune on clothes and cars.
According to the Las Vegas Sun, it got so bad that Walker was convicted of passing bad
checks to casinos in 2010.
A plea agreement kept him out of jail and served as a wake-up call.
Nowadays, Walker works as a consultant for Morgan Stanley, advising young athletes on
what not to do with their money, a topic he's an expert in.
He told CNN Money,
"I thought I was set for the rest of my life.
My story is sad.
It's sad to see other guys work so hard throughout their life — and then they just lose it."
"I want to share those things, but also tell my story so people can see it as a learning
example."
Delonte West
From being arrested carrying loaded weapons, to an incident in which he was filmed wandering
outside a Jack in the Box in a hospital gown, when former NBA star Delonte West pops up
in the news, the stories are often concerning.
During the 2011 NBA lockout, he applied for a job at Home Depot, and told ESPN that he
was hoping to get another job selling knives.
And while he earned $16 million over his eight-year career in the league, by 2012 he was using
space heaters to keep his Maryland mansion warm because he couldn't afford to heat it.
In 2017, West, who has been diagnosed as bipolar, was photographed panhandling, sparking fears
that he was homeless.
While he denied the rumors, it's no wonder fans are worried for West once again.
Lenny Dykstra
For 80's baseball icon Lenny Dykstra, retirement actually seemed like a good thing at first,
as he turned a car wash franchise into an empire complete with a mansion and private
jet.
In 2009, though, he was forced to declare bankruptcy after a magazine start-up went
off the rails.
And that was just the start of his legal trouble.
In 2011, he was arrested for grand theft auto, possession of narcotics, federal bankruptcy
fraud, and indecent exposure.
By the end of the year, he was in jail.
After being released in 2013, Dykstra told The New York Times,
"I became addicted to money.
Money was my drug."
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