The 12-Million-Dollar Family Man

There's a strange thing happening amongst professional athletes, a sort of delayed shock syndrome when they suddenly realize they're human beings. They have families, they have feelings...they have dogs named Skip. They barbecue, change light bulbs and use the same brand of Charmin that you and I can buy at the corner store. And they want to be treated just like you and me, with sympathy and support, understanding when they're down and not playing well and maybe even a warm hug after a tough loss.

Oh, and they'll take their millions by direct deposit, just like any other average Joe.

The latest Forbes 500 sob story to lament his hard blue-collar lot in life is new Chicago Bull Antonio Davis, former disgruntled Toronto Raptor and now happy father, who just wants people to take a look at the world through his gold-plated Ray Bans and have us see that he's a hard-working schmuck who wants to be there to take his kids to school, see them when they come home, make some popcorn and gather around the plasma screen to watch It's a Wonderful Life; all the warm happy trappings of the nuclear family and the American dream.

Strike up the band, raise the flag, shed a tear...here, have a tissue.

Now this is the same man who before signing a gargantuan long-term contract that would have him being overpaid well into his nineties (well, actually 37, which in NBA terms is the same thing), was busy telling anyone who would listen that as a concerned father he was worried that by going to a Canadian public school his children would learn something as radical as the metric system, and felt that perhaps it would be better if they were enrolled in the same school system that has newest Raptor (and Davis replacement) Donyell Marshall thinking that Mongolia is in Europe.

Now I can understand Antonio's concerns here, as I have never liked thinking of myself as being 173 centimetres tall (images of many-legged insects keep popping into my head) and I see no need to quibble over a few thousand miles of misplaced geography (though it might get nasty if a troop of touristy Texans shows up in Paris expecting to see a yurt). Yet when it came to signing that last big contract, he took two extra million a year and stayed in the land of curiously large numbered speed limit signs.

We are not talking about choosing between minimum wage and free tickets to a Cubs game in the off-season as opposed to two million dollars. We are talking about the difference between 10 million and 12 million dollars a year. To put that in good-old, lunch-bucket, working-man terms, that's the difference between a dentist's income and a doctor's per game! Now call me crazy, but I think the kiddies would not have been hitting the breadlines had Daddy gone for the humiliating 10 million and swallowed his pride so he could be there with fresh-baked cookies after school.

And they would also be blissfully unaware that there are actually people on this planet who drink fermented horse's milk (yes, they do that in Mongolia).

No, Mr. Davis said "Show me the money!" and then went into a two-year pout. His wife didn't like it in Canada; the team wasn't doing well; it's hard; hug me. And he's not the only one. The world has seen a misunderstood Alex Rodriguez, a persecuted Barry Bonds, a maligned Jose Theodore, and an apparently under-appreciated and put-upon Drew Bledsoe who has most of Buffalo pulling out their Ginsu knives and studying Seppuku for the next Bills game.

The modern professional athlete is a child with too much money, too many toys and too little upstairs to consider that there is a difference between a long-haul trucker and a traveling millionaire who happens to have a knack for doing creative things with a rubber ball.

Antonio Davis opined: "For any man that's living in another city, working, trying to support his family, who doesn't get a chance to see his kids off too school and wake up with his wife every morning, if you asked that man would he rather be at home and things be different, I think he'd say yeah."

He'd say, "Show me the money!" Antonio...just like you did.