Kanye West’s never been one to mince words to minimize shock value. So it was with a grain of salt that most took his quasi-introspective lines about being young and rich in the song “Clique†on the G.O.O.D. Music compilation album: “You know white people get money, don’t spend it. Or they get money, buy a business … I’d rather buy eighty gold chains and go ig’nant.â€
Westian ignorance, here, can safely be described as the lavish spending of many who never had anything at all. Many times it’s those folks who lose it all — fast and often in spectacular fashion. On Tuesday, October 2, ESPN’s 30 for 30 series will air the documentary Broke, the latest installment of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series which chronicles the head-shaking stories of athletes who squandered away their fortunes. BlackEnterprise.com talked with Broke producer and Rakontur Films co-founder Alfred Spellman by phone from Miami. Spellman dishes on race, how the issue isn’t just limited to men and considers the extent to which the major sports leagues are responsible for its players’ financial behavior.
BlackEnterprise.com: I don’t think I have to ask if you’re excited or not.
Alfred Spellman: [Laughs.] Well the editor just delivered the movie on Saturday. So it came right down to the wire for us, but three days before [Tuesday] but we got it done.
You finished the movie on Saturday?
Yeah, we just finished the movie on Saturday.
Wow.
What happened was, we did a works-in-progress screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. And you can’t go a week without opening the newspaper and seeing you know, troubles with a new athlete or celebrity who are suddenly in financial straits. We wanted the movie to be as up to date as possible so we shot a few new interviews over the summer and literally we’ve been editing up until Saturday.
It must have been tough to get people to talk about this topic.
I think first off it’s a matter of access. We wanted to get as many personal stories as we could get. In our documentaries — Cocaine Cowboys, The U — we always try for the first person account. For us, it was a matter of figuring out who’s going to talk to us. There’s hardly a more sensitive subject to try and get people to talk about. Maybe religion or politics. But money is certainly right up there. It was really a matter of trying to find people who would be willing to open up and luckily we got a lot of great stories. I hope that ultimately the documentary starts a discussion about this issue. I think most people just say, ‘You’ve got to be dumb to blow through $100 million,’ when the fact is it’s much easier than you think to end up in financial straits. I hope we get that across in the documentary.
Speaking of access. Were there stories you wanted that you didn’t get?
One story that I was really interested in that occurred over the summer was Curt Schilling’s story. Here’s a guy who comes across very well on television, he’s a well-spoken guy. He had a great Major League Baseball career. The story of his video game studio is tragic. He’ll be okay and everybody will end up all right but with some of these stories you just shake your head. It’s really tragic not just for the athletes but for their families and everybody else whose been dependent upon them or being helped out. When the money dries up it becomes a very difficult thing for a lot of these guys.
It’s interesting you bring up Schilling, and of course there’s someone like Lenny Dykstra — because I think there’s a tendency to view this sort of through a racial lens, that this is a black issue.
Yeah, well, look. I think it’s a much better way to view this issue as a socio-economic/class issue. Which is really what it is. Like I said if you grow up not having a lot of money and all of a sudden you have a lot of money, that is a very difficult thing to manage. I think there’s a much more apt way of looking at this and that’s more of a socio-economic prism than a racial prism.
What do most athletes who often literally become millionaires overnight not understand about money?
It’s referred to as the ‘Sudden Wealth Effect.’ You see it with people who win the lottery, people who get a large inheritance. And really what it has to do with this upside down triange of earning. So if you’re a guy who goes to school, you get a job in your ’20s  … in your 40s and 50s most men in this country are going to earn the most they’ll ever earn in their lifetime. Well, for athletes the triangle is turned on its head. They earn the most money they’ll ever earn in their lives in their mid-to-late twenties. Particularly if you come from a background of not having money it’s really, really very hard. Who among us if we didn’t have a couple million bucks. I know I spent money on dumb things in my twenties. It’s understandable. Then there’s all the associated risks with family and friends, you know, who use you as an ATM machine. You get hit to get involved in businesses whether they’re legitimate or not. There’s all these kind of people who come out of the woodwork and it’s very difficult to say no.
Is there a disconnect? Or will there be another Broke in 15 years?
There’s a couple problems. First there’s the ide
a of this locker room culture. You’ve got guys coming in the locker room with custom suits. And another guy is trying to one-up the other. When you’re a professional athlete, even if you’re the 25th man on a 25-man baseball roster you were probably the best player not only in your school, but in your district and probably even your state, okay? So if you’re in professional sports you’re really damn good at what you do and you’ve been great at it since you were a little kid and you know this. You’re a competitor by nature and so I think you see some of these competitive instincts rear themselvees when it comes to whose got the best car in the parking lot or whose got the most custom suits, who spent the most money at the club last night, who’s buying a new restaurant, who’s got the latest investment scheme their uncle brought to them or whatever. So I think what you’re seeing is competition. It’s got to become cool to keep your money and not spend it. At some point it should matter what in the bottom line of your bank account than it does who spent the most at the restaurant last night. Hopefully it’ll start some conversation and change the paradigm so where that, you know, spending is not so cool as it is to be a saver.
Alfred Morris from the Redskins is still driving a 1991 Mazda, so there may be hope.
Right! I saw that on SportsCenter the other day, it’s like a $1,500 coupe or something that he drives. He’s got his shit together. I mean, really at the end of the day if you’re only going to make money for so long … that’s the other thing, too: If you play in the NFL you’re contract’s not guaranteed so if you get hurt, that’s it. Not only do you get hurt, but if you get hurt bad your medical bills start to add up later on in life. The average NFL career is shorter than team sports … so for Morris that’s probably the wisest decision that he could make.
People on the internet fall on a couple of different sides with the Morris story, but don’t you have to look at how much money he’s actually making before you pass judgment?
We really wanted to make an effort on that point and it’s one that we really wanted to bring into Broke. Â Because these days when you hear of these astronomical salaries the conversation is all about bankers, people like Romney with a lot of private equity who don’t pay a lot of taxes — well, these athletes are in the highest tax bracket there is. Not only are they paying 35 percent in taxes to the federal government, then they’re paying their agents and even playing taxes in every state that they play in. If you’ve got a game in New York you’re paying New York state income tax. By the time these guys get done, the question becomes, What’s a million dollars? Is it $450,000? A million dollars isn’t even a million dollars. It’s not a question of how much they’re making but how much of it are they taking home? And it’s not as much as people who are heading up banks and people in private equity guys who are paying very little in taxes.
Did you figure out over the course of making this film why people are so intrigued by this topic?
We talk about it around the office as our Great Recession doc. For the first time in
any of our lifetimes, unless you’re old enough to have experienced the Great Depression, this is the first time that any of us has seen widespread financial devastation running through all classes of people. This is not just a recession where the poor people are worse off, but the middle class is hanging in there — this recession has devastated a wide swath of people. Either you were rich and you lost a lot of money in the market or you lost a lot through real estate investment or through businesses that went belly up. This is an unusual marker in American history that’s gone on. That’s because this is the type of recession where everybody is affected in some way or another. I think there’s a lot of interest in seeing how celebrities are coping or managing. It seems like everybody in the country is very attuned to the new financial realities. It’s just a particular time and place for this type of subject to get discussed. No one’s going to talk about this stuff when the stock market is booming and everyone’s making money and living the good life.Was there one piece or anecdote stood out to you that said, you know, We’ve got something here.
I think Andre Rison was particularly poignant because I grew up during his era of dominance. He was married to Left Eye and was a celebrity in his own right and I think that hearing his story, you totally get how this happened. There’s the spiraling nature of spending. He’s got a line in the doc where he says that his people all of a sudden all had bank accounts where you could put in at any time and pull out at any time … the check went in and everything else came out. Now, any guy in their twenties could probably add up all the stupid things you spend money on, given away or wasted. I think it’s something that really resonates, and if just have a lot more of it the scale is just that much more grand. Between Andre’s business investments, record labels, restaurants and these kinds of things it’s really demonstrated how quickly the money leaves the account.
Why were the leagues themselves hesitant to let you guys use their footage and do they have any culpability in your mind?
At the end of the day everybody has to take responsibility for themselves, their own choices and decisions. And a lot of the athletes that we interviewed own up to that fact. Now, are there things that the leagues and players unions could do more of? Absolutely. There could be more education, there could be more programs. Part of this — and this is what’s interesting about the structure of the doc — is that we looked at about how it came to be that there’s all this money in professional sports. It’s a really a phenomenon of the last 30 years. Salaries really exploded in the early nineties in all four major team sports. I think we’re seeing the first wave of guys who made a lot of money as professional athletes who are now having
problems. Hopefully the younger guys of the next generation to come through and start to earn these tremendous paychecks. This is really a product of guys coming into the leagues in the eighties and nineties making all this money so quickly. I think the leagues weren’t really prepared for the fallout and fell short when it came to really addressing these issues. They’re starting to make more efforts now but certainly there’s a lot more to be done.It does say something about our society, right, when this is such a common phenomenon?
What’s particularly interesting here is that we’ve just coming off an era where everybody wildly overspent. Not just athletes but anybody that got a mortgage or credit card bill that they couldn’t pay — was kind of this era of conspicous consumption. It was the McMansion or “MTV Cribs†era of America. I think that really kind of drove a lot of debt-driven spending. And it didn’t matter if you make fifty-grand or thirty-grand a year or if you make $10 million a year, you were probably involved with it in some way or another.
It’s not always talked about but female athletes —
Well, there are certainly examples. Marion Jones. Sheryl Swoopes has had some financial problems. Dorothy Hamill is another famous example. In terms of covering it in a 77-minute film … it was the shortest documentary we’ve ever made. It fits into an hour-and-a-half ESPN time slot. So by no means is the film comprehensive. I think our goal was kind of to get a conversation started. There’s not the same financial considerations as the major sports leagues, which we were kind of focused on covering. I don’t want to get in trouble with my girlfriend here [laughs], but are there differences in the way that men and women spend money? Sure. I think we haven’t seen as many examples but it might be by virtue of a smaller sample size.
Ultimately, do you think viewers will be sympathetic or angry when they see this movie?
The knee-jerk reaction is to say, ‘Boy, well how do you blow a hundred million dollars?’ It’s kind of tough to feel bad for someone in that situation. It’s easy to dismiss this as an issue to discuss since it’s limited to a specific group of athletes who really don’t know any better. The truth is that it’s so much more obvious in the way that it happens than anybody takes the time to think about. The stories and the scenarios are varied but all share very common themes. I hope people might come away with a different level of appreciation of the issue and realize money certainly is not the answer. A lot of these guys say that they’re much happier now that they don’t have the burden of managing and dealing with that amount of financial success.