It reminds me of this dad from the past and his athlete son.
^^What a sad tale. This is what could happen when a pushy parent lives his pro sports fantasy vicariously though the kid.
@BunsenBurner, wasn’t sure if anyone would remember this person and his father’s plan for him to be a NFL quarterback.
Chris Evert used to say that a big red flag for the appearance of a toxic tennis parent was when the father quit his job. That was a sure sign that trouble was ahead. As far as I can tell, Lavar Ball never had a job once his own limited athletic career was over. His career since then has been promoting and managing his sons. Toxic more or less from the start.
Amazingly, Todd Marinovich is playing again at 48 years old.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/sports/football/todd-marinovich.html
He looks like he is 60.
Thanks for posting those articles! This is from one of the NYT comments:
“All parents of children with athletic talent should read about what Marv Marinovich did to Todd as a cautionary tale of what not to do when raising their children.”
Amen.
Begs the question…why the blinking bloop is a career in professional athletics tied to higher education anyway? It makes as much sense as tying health insurance to your employment. Just because we’ve ‘done it that way’ doesn’t mean it makes sense.
“why the blinking bloop is a career in professional athletics tied to higher education anyway?”
The reasons are partly historical and partly financial. The historical part is that pro sports grew out of college sports. College sports got going back in the late 1800s. Except for baseball which was earlier, pro sports didn’t get rolling until about the 1920s and didn’t become popular until the 1940s and 50s. So over time it just naturally evolved that college sports became feeders for pro sports.
The reason why it stays this way is the finanicial part. College sports stays the main feeder for pro sports, especially the NBA and NFL, because the pro leagues want it that way. College sports functions as free minor league farm teams to the NFL and NBA and to a much lesser extent for MLB and pro golf and tennis. Since MLB developed and got big before college baseball did, MLB established and still maintains at considerable expense its own large minor league farm system to develop and season the talent. NFL and NBA gets the same thing free from the colleges. So why would they want to give that up? It’s hugely in their interest to keep the free farm system alive. The system continues because money talks, and there are billions of dollars at stake here.
^^Amen!
The NBA hasn’t ‘always’ been tied to college sports. As recently as LeBron, players could enter the NBA directly from high school, but now have to wait one year. And I don’t think ‘one and dones’ do all that well in the NBA.
I think for most college athletes, getting a college education is the priority, and the path to going pro works. I wouldn’t want to see the system changed for idiots like Lavar Ball. In most sports there is no requirement to go to college or wait any time before going pro - tennis, hockey, baseball, soccer all allow 16 year olds who are good enough to go pro, but rarely are teens good enough to jump from playing against other 9th graders to playing against adults with 6 years of experience. Maybe a golfer can do it (rarely) but not a football player.
Besides, what would the 500 employees of the NCAA do?
and the article was written 3 years ago.
“The NBA hasn’t ‘always’ been tied to college sports. As recently as LeBron, players could enter the NBA directly from high school, but now have to wait one year.”
"Darryl Dawkins, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and the handful of other players who went to the NBA straight from high school during that era are the exceptions that proved the rule - the rule that the NBA was and still is highly dependent on the colleges for a large majority of its talent development.
Instead of the few high school kids who managed to make it in the NBA, better example of a non-college source of talent for the NBA is the Europeans. A lot more NBA players have come to the NBA out of European pro teams than ever made it straight out of US high schools.
One thing I’m taking away from this story is that a young person’s misbehavior can suddenly make a lot more sense when we see how the parent behaves. We are usually looking at the fallen apple without thinking about the tree. I want to remember to think about the tree.