Becoming a professional athlete is like winning the lottery twice.
First, athletes get to focus their lives on playing a game that they love.
And second, many of them earn salaries in the $100 million-plus range, and that's not
even counting the extra bucks they rake in from sneaker and hot dog commercials.
However, managing a fortune requires a completely different set of skills, and many athletes
are too busy perfecting their game to take any financial planning classes.
With that in mind, here are some world-class athletes whose bank accounts may not be what
you thought.
Curt Schilling
Over the course of a 20-year Major League Baseball career, Curt Schilling reportedly
earned in the neighborhood of $115 million.
It was all worth it for Red Sox fans, as the pitcher was instrumental in the team's historic
curse-breaking 2004 World Series win.
However, by the time he hung up his cleats in 2009, he had lost an alarming $50 million
of his savings.
Schilling had invested the vast majority of his fortune in a failed video game company
called 38 Studios.
In 2012, after the company defaulted on $75 million worth of state loans, he told Boston
Magazine,
"My whole life was spent doing things that people didn't believe were possible...I carried
that same mentality into everything I did here."
Marion Jones
At the 2000 Summer Olympics, track and field star Marion Jones won a remarkable five medals,
including three gold.
But just three years later she was linked to BALCO, a company raided by the feds for
allegedly distributing performance-enhancing drugs.
Jones racked up a lot of legal fees fighting the doping scandal, and by 2006, her finances
were in dire straits.
A bank foreclosed on her $2.5 million mansion, and she had to sell another home where her
mother lived.
By 2007, she claimed she had a bank balance of just $2,000.
That same year, she pleaded guilty to lying about steroid use to federal investigators.
In the years since, Jones has mostly remained out of the spotlight.
She now resides in Texas with her husband and three children and has transitioned into
a business career.
"We all go through challenging times in our lives.
It’s really how you rebound from that, and how you kind of turn all of that into something
very positive.”
Allen Iverson
Sports star Allen Iverson had a basketball career for the ages.
When he closed up shop, the Hall of Famer concluded a run that earned him a Rookie of
the Year crown, an MVP award, and four scoring titles.
Iverson amassed roughly $200 million during his career, but blew through most of it.
His 50-man entourage wasn't cheap to maintain, and he also allegedly stored his money in
garbage bags that sometimes went missing.
But he did make at least one solid financial decision.
In 2001, he signed a contract with Reebok that set aside $32 million in a trust fund
that he couldn't access until he turns 55 in 2030, but that deal went badly, too.
He had to forfeit the entire trust to his ex-wife for violating the terms of a postnuptial
agreement, although she later agreed to share half of it with him.
Since 2017, Iverson has been keeping busy with BIG3, a 3-on-3 professional basketball
league.
Boris Becker
Tennis star Boris Becker was one of the top players in the '80s and '90s.
He won the first of his three singles titles at Wimbledon in 1985 when he was only 17.
By the time he retired in 1996, he had won 49 singles and 15 doubles titles.
The master of the one-on-one sport also liked to go one-on-one with beautiful ladies.
He married actress and model Barbara Feltus in 1993 and had two kids with her, but he
cheated on her with model Angela Ermakova and had a kid with her, too.
Becker's divorce and paternity predicaments cost him about $25 million in 2001.
He was then convicted of tax evasion and had to pay out another approximate $3 million
in 2002.
Becker declared bankruptcy in 2017, telling a Swiss newspaper, quote, "It's crazy to think
I'm broke."
Dennis Rodman
Before he inexplicably became BFFs with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Dennis Rodman was
just a quirky, heavily-tattooed, referee-head-butting basketball player.
He dated Madonna, married Carmen Electra, announced his intentions to marry himself,
and dyed his hair bright colors.
He is also one of the best defensive players in NBA history, having led the league in rebounds
for seven straight seasons.
His impressive stats allowed Rodman to command a huge salary.
Over 12 seasons, he earned an estimated $27 million.
It's not all gone, but he's now down to just a fraction of that.
As of 2018, his net worth was reportedly $500,000.
Evander Holyfield
Two of boxing's biggest heavyweight stars squared off in November 1996 when Evander
Holyfield scored a TKO over the heavily favored Mike Tyson in one of the most anticipated
boxing matches ever.
At a rematch just seven months later, Tyson was famously disqualified when he bit off
a chunk of Holyfield's ear.
Tyson's trouble inside and outside the ring are well-documented, but not everyone realizes
that Holyfield also sabotaged his own success.
The heavyweight champion earned about $230 million over his career, and he clearly had
a lot of fun spending it.
He dropped a reported $10 million on a 54,000-square-foot mansion in Georgia that cost him $1 million
a year just to maintain.
Holyfield was reportedly more than $14 million in debt by 2012, when the bank bought his
epic house off him for $7.5 million.
His cash was also drained by legal settlements and child support, as he has quite a few children
by six women and was married and divorced three times.
"I do love my kids, and I do want them to get a better education than I have, and I
do all that I can support 'em."
Holyfield now runs a promotional company called Real Deal Sports and Entertainment.
Darryl Strawberry
The 1986 New York Mets are one of the most memorable teams in the last few decades of
baseball.
That year, All-Stars like Darryl Strawberry led them to a team-record 108 wins and a World
Series victory.
But Strawberry also made headlines off the field, as he apparently wasn't paying his
taxes.
According to court documents, Strawberry owed more than half a million dollars from income
earned between 1987 and 1990, and another 80 grand from 2003 and 2004.
When the IRS came to collect in 2014, they garnished his future earnings in the form
of an unpaid portion of a $7.2 million contract he'd signed with the Mets in 1985.
Strawberry has made headlines most recently for his 2017 memoir, Don't Give Up on Me:
Shedding Light on Addiction.