A Lesson In Learning To Say "No"
A Lesson In Learning To Say "No"
Tim Keown ESPN Senior Writer
(Note: This Article can apply to Lotto-Winners, A Big Inheritance and Dinarians!)
HERE'S A CHALLENGE: Imagine what it feels like to be 21 years old, extremely successful, famously wealthy, wildly stressed and unbearably miserable. How, you might wonder, can all those conditions exist simultaneously?
Start here, with Cowboys All-Pro offensive tackle Tyron Smith, talking to his mother on the phone one day in 2012, his second year in the NFL, during a time of growing tension between him
"We've found a house," Frankie Pinkney told her son.
By this stage, wariness had become as intrinsic to Smith's identity as his brown eyes and bookcase shoulders. Silently, he awaited details. He had agreed to purchase a home in Southern California for his mother and stepfather. They would live in it; he would own it as an investment.
The agreed-upon budget was roughly $300,000, but over the course of the conversation, Frankie dropped the bomb. List price: more like $800,000.
Smith, now 23, is sitting at a polished wood table in the conference room of his lawyer's Dallas office. Surrounded by his girlfriend, accountant and lawyer, he fixes his eyes on a spot somewhere high on the floor-to-ceiling window. "Yeah, my parents wanted a house," Smith says. "But it was way bigger than mine and cost way more than mine."
It's not an easy topic for Smith to discuss -- recounting the conversation appears to be nearly as hard as being on the phone in the first place. He long ago gave up trying to pinpoint when it all went wrong, when the combination of family and money turned corrosive, when one ceased to exist without the other. He recites facts, stripped of emotion, as if determined to turn a painful time in his life into an after-action report.
"That call," he says. "That was the point where I said, 'That's enough.'"
At that precise moment, as he hung up the phone without giving his mother assent or encouragement, something hardened inside him. Reclaiming his finances, that was the easy part. Demystifying his new life -- being something other than a conduit for the wishes of those around him -- that was more complicated.
It works like this: We lack the linguistic dexterity to explain the myriad paths of young men who emerge from poverty -- or a simple lack of privilege -- and achieve riches by playing a game. When words fail us, a creation myth must fill the void, and so the modern professional athlete becomes our Sedna, a massive woman of Inuit legend who lives at the bottom of the ocean, controlling the underworld by providing fish to keep her people from going hungry.
Our version of Sedna frees himself from the streets -- the temptations, the poverty, the turbulent flow of every Bad Part of Town -- through a ceaseless, unquenchable devotion to his sport. Visions of The Escape accompany every rep on the bench press, every free throw in an empty gym. In short, his life is a series of made-in-Akron, Beats by Dre moments.
Yes, he will rise up to leave it all behind, but here's where the mythological sleight of hand appears: He'll bring it all with him too. He can't forget where he came from. The myth mandates loyalty and strikes down the ingrate.
And all those people who toiled alongside, those who believed in him and sheltered him and sacrificed for him? They'll also come along, for he's the sin-eater, absorbing all debts -- moral and financial -- so others can be absolved. And his people will never go hungry again.
Jeff Wilson His family's demands for money isn't an easy topic for Smith to discuss.
IT LONG AGO became easier for an athlete to subscribe to this myth than to defy it with his personal story. Easier to nod and smile and tacitly agree to be a benign receptacle for our society's need to bundle its fairy tales into color-coded boxes.
Why else would newly minted professional athletes -- and let's cut the pretense: It's nearly always young black athletes -- invariably be asked whether they've bought their mother a new house? Or a new car? Or both? Does anyone know whether Aaron Rodgers moved his stay-at-home mother and chiropractor father out of their Chico, California, home and into a beach mansion? Has anyone ever thought to ask?
But could it be possible, ever so slightly possible, that athletes who come from similar backgrounds can have wildly dissimilar stories?
Smith's story is best told chronologically. And it begins, as so many do, in a van filled with cleaning supplies rattling down a desolate highway somewhere in the Mojave Desert.
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