Bankrate: Do you ever talk to athletes about the financial end of their lives?
Mike Greenberg: Sure.
Bankrate: How do you find most athletes handle their money?
Mike Greenberg: I find that the smart ones don't even begin to try. The business of sports agents, which used to be about negotiating contracts, has totally changed, because these days all the contracts are preordained -- there are salary caps, slots, a rookie minimum. Anyone with any acumen can negotiate a contract. So sports agents make their money in two ways. One, by providing additional revenue for the players, which means marketing them and getting them commercials and other ancillary streams of revenue, which in many cases are more lucrative then what they make at the sport. Tiger Woods makes, I think, $10 million a year golfing, but he made $80 million from American Express alone. Then, as important, the agents handle their money. Ballplayers don't have the time or expertise to invest the amount of money a schoolteacher makes, much less what a professional athlete makes. So the smart ones hand their money over to someone they trust. Where they really get screwed is that a lot of times, ballplayers surround themselves with guys they grew up with, and these guys don't have the first clue how to handle money. That's why athletes wind up losing a lot of their money.
Bankrate: Do you think most athletes are the former or the latter?
Mike Greenberg: Increasingly, I think most of them are the former, because there are so many cautionary tales these days that any ballplayer making serious money -- high six or seven figures -- has got to be a complete idiot if he doesn't find someone who can handle his money for him.
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Bankrate: Who's the smartest athlete you know, as far as financial matters are concerned?
Mike Greenberg: I traveled with Michael Jordan for three and a half years at the height of his popularity, and he protected his image the way you might protect a newborn baby. He recognized that his image was worth an almost incalculable amount of money. He didn't handle his money, he had David Falk and all his business advisers getting him his endorsement deals, but the guy was making tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and he was smart enough to recognize that his earning potential was based not just on his talent as a basketball player, but just as importantly, his image.