In this day and age of escalated salaries in professional sports, it would seem that some athletes could just be playing for the money. I seriously doubt that is the primary reason. If suddenly there were no professional sports you would find these same athletes playing a pickup game somewhere.

Of course, they want to get paid. It is their livelihood. The escalated salaries are due to the people paying them. The athletes are just getting what the market will bear. Isn’t that the American Way?

Television and other media run the show. They pay huge amounts of money to get the rights to cover the world of sports. It must be good business or they wouldn’t do it. If it isn’t we should be seeing some kind of collapse in the system.

We have witnessed the same kind of spending for years in the movie world. Huge money for the star performers per picture. Someone is in the backroom crunching the numbers. It is just business—the entertainment business.

Maybe what people are really complaining about is the behavior of the “newly rich.” And, maybe some of the complaints are voiced by people who resent the big percentage of those athletes that are black, brown and yellow. Are people really those colors?

We know the history of those who have won the lottery. Dismal. I doubt that any of those athletes ever saw themselves in their early development as people who could earn those large sums of money and how to manage them if it did happen.

This I do know. To reach the level of performance that has someone want to pay you all that money, you have to love doing what you are doing. However, when someone feels that they have to prove they are worth it they are in trouble. Just check how often their behavior sabotages them. Very few have ever seen themselves as millionaire people before they were.

My question is this—do owners create an environment that protects their investments? Or, are they contributors to the sabotage that regularly occurs?

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