Some Real News and some Fake News featuring…Darius Miles

It started innocently enough.  Perusing Twitter while finishing morning coffee….and then, just enough to warrant a new tab.

I went to Darius Miles' bankruptcy auction. It was as depressing as you can imagine. On another star going broke: https://t.co/8h09HSlsib

— Ben Frederickson (@Ben_Fred) December 16, 2016

In Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”, protagonist George Bailey is given a chance to see the present world as though he was excluded from its past.  The climax of the movie shows George at his breaking (conversion?) point.  He decides that his wife having no memory of him ever existing is a pain greater than any other earthly suffering the world can heap upon him and he gladly accepts his fate if it means his wife and family will once again look him in the eyes and know him.

Can’t you just see Darius Miles standing on the side of a snow-covered bridge, desperate…

“Clarence!  Help me Clarence!  Get me back!  Get me back I don’t care how reduced my role in the offense is.  Get me back to LeBron and Silas.  Help me Clarence…Please!”

This pose for Miles almost looks like he’s leaning on the rail of a bridge.

Miles doesn’t have an NBA home to return to and I doubt many Cleveland Fans can even recall his on-court impact.  If he walked the streets of Cleveland today, how many people would go up to him, ask for a selfie, and say “remember that time when you…”.

If he walked the mean streets of Riverside OH in 2011 he might run into at least one dude that remembered him.

For myself, the Cleveland Pro Basketball Franchise that I know must have existed sometime after Terrell Brandon was traded for Shawn Kemp but before LeBron walked up to the podium in that hideous white suit is not shrouded in a fuzzy haze.  No.  There’s just nothing there.  Without looking at Basketball-reference I can’t place players with other players or coaches.  I know that the Cavs employed a Coach named “Randee Whitman”.  I also know Randy Wittman – the coach that was on the hot seat for what seemed like half a decade before being mercifully exiled from DC this year.  Until five minutes ago, I didn’t realize they were the same person!

Such is the fate of the rosters, coaches, and personalities that collected checks before “The Chosen One” descended like an asteroid on our collective consciousness.  Wiping out everything insignificant and leaving us with only the memories of the impressive species that went extinct.  You know their names: they’re in the rafters, or on TV, or they’re honored during half-time celebrations.  But Darius Miles, Jumaine Jones, and Milt Palacio?  They’re just the transition.  The  spalacotheroids of which little fossil evidence remains.  They won’t make a cameo in Jurassic Park 4 or The Land Before Time 27: Escape from the The Great Mountain of Fire.

The most fitting irony for Darius Miles and my little concocted Capra analogy is that had it not been for the Cavs trading Andre Miller* for Darius Miles, it’s very unlikely the Cavs would have secured the worst record in the NBA and, by extension, the highest lottery odds for landing the kid from Akron.  Honestly, a world without Darius Miles wearing the pastel blue and black may be an alternate reality too terrible to imagine for Cavs fans.

You’re reading about Darius Miles today because I read about Darius Miles today because Darius Miles’ stuff was just auctioned off to pay back creditors.

The Belleville News-Democrat reported in September that Miles had filed for bankruptcy, the byproduct of unpaid child support, tax debt, a failed real estate deal and flat-out overspending. The profit from Wednesday’s auction will go to his creditors.

While unfortunate, this isn’t particularly shocking to anyone.  If something like this had happened, to say, Denzel Washington or David Robinson, the new data point would incite a lot of cognitive dissonance.  But Miles?  Come on he fits the profile almost perfectly.  Drafted out of high school, you know, without ever having that college coach to teach him how to be a responsible adult or however the argument goes.  A young pup that finds himself filthy rich right away.  Someone with a documented lack of discipline or accountability:

ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith reported that Cheeks is contemplating resigning as a result of the incident. Cheeks has been frustrated all season by Miles’ frequent tardiness and other behavioral problems, Smith reported.   The Trail Blazers would not comment on the nature of the confrontation, except to say there was one.  “He blew up in the film session,” said Cheeks, who characterized Miles’ comments as inappropriate.  According to The (Portland) Oregonian newspaper, Miles repeatedly called Cheeks a racial epithet.

No, finding Darius Miles in my timeline in 2016 for his selling his “stunning” collection of karaoke equipment for pennies on the dollar is no more surprising than Darius Miles appearing in my timeline in 2011 for trying to bring a loaded gun through airport security.

No, not surprising at all.  In fact, the impetus for this piece is not Darius Miles, but what has followed my reading of this piece about Darius Miles going broke.  The little bow that the author uses to fold the Darius Miles story into a larger narrative is this nugget:

An estimated 60 percent of former NBA players are broke within five years of retirement, Sports Illustrated reported in 2009. That same report noted that 78 percent of NFL players are bankrupt or under financial stress by the time they have been retired for two years.

Wait, the author was stunned by the extent of a multimillionaire’s karaoke fetish?  SIXTY PERCENT?  SIX – OH?  How in the he..WAIT.  SEVENTY EIGHT PERCENT OF NFL PLAYERS ARE BANKRUPT after just TWO YEARS!!!?

The Browns haven’t won a game in two years.  You are telling me there is a 78% chance that Peyton Hillis will be broke in a few weeks?  There’s a 78% chance that Brady Quinn is broke?  (::checks google::  Quinn is doing fine.)

This isn’t a decimal error?  It’s not 7.8%?  I mean, even that seems kinda high, yet still believable given all the stories I’ve heard over the years.  From the NBA I know there’s Antonine Walker, and Vin Baker, and Allen Iverson…and I think Shawn Kemp.

60% of NBA Players are broke within 5 years of retirement.  78% of NFL players are bankrupt or whatever “under financial stress” means within just two years of retirement.  This is patently insane!  What does the graph with %Chance bankruptcy as the Y-Axis and Years since Retirement as the X-axis look like?  Does it ramp up like the Michael Mann Global Warming Hockey Stick curve?  Does it taper off after 10 years?

This can’t be real.  How can this be real?  Why would anyone with a quarter of a brain ever play pro football if there was less than a quarter of a chance of having any money only two years after hanging up the cleats?  Alright, further investigation is needed.  ::Googles ‘Athletes Going Broke’::  OK, some clickbait blogs…ah ha!  Wikipedia.  Article title: ‘Personal Finances of Professional American Athletes’ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finances_of_professional_American_athletes]  Alright.  Yep.  There it is, a reference to the 2009 Sports Illustrated Article.  And…wait, what’s this new devilry?!  “Suicide”!?

Ok, now I’m on Twitter wondering aloud what the venn diagram of this 78% looks like.  How many people are just bankrupt?  How many have committed suicide?  How many committed suicide because they were bankrupt?  This is getting insanely more unbelievable by the minute.  Who wrote this article?  Pablo S. Torre.  Alright let’s read this article.  […]

[Done.]  First of all, the word ‘suicide’ does not appear in this article.  Someone hijacked this Wikipedia entry and added suicide to the stat because I guess 78% being bankrupt wasn’t shocking enough to drive home the narrative.  I’m reading this Torre article and I’m struck by how many numbers and figures and anecdotes and quotes he has.  This is not some amateur shooting from the hip on www.daaaBearsdahhtwordpress.com.  But no specific mention of where these outrageous percentages emerged from.  All we have is this:

reports from a host of sources (athletes, players’ associations, agents and financial advisers) indicate that:

I guess the use of “or are under financial stress [because of things that can cause financial stress]” could be a hedge against thinking that 78% of former NFL players are flat out exhausted of their money.  Like, they are forced to downsize to the $800,000 home and sell the yacht because their wife is leaving them and it’s causing “financial stress”.  Maybe that’s like, I dunno, 50% of former players and the other 28% are actually bankrupt?  My heart tells me that even 28% is outrageously high.  And of course my head takes me to the very next line which says, in no uncertain terms, that 60% of retired NBA players are BROKE within five years of retirement.  Not “broke or”.  Broke.  Adjective.  “Having completely run out of money.”  Synonyms include: penniless, insolvent, moneyless.

Someone needs to tell Wikipedia that Mr. Torre never mentioned suicide.  Alright, I can’t take it any more.  I need to do my own study.  I’m going to Google random names of former NBA players that have been out of the league for five years and the word “broke” and see if at least 60% of my guesses (which aren’t random at all) turn up hits.  ::Googles ‘Vin Baker Broke’::  Wasn’t Baker like a Barista now or something?  […]

OK, yep, Vin Baker is broke, which I was almost positive about.  Starbucks…..yeah – there it is.  Here’s an article from TIME Magazine, oh! and it has a top 10 list to boot.  Of course!  Mike Tyson how could I forget.  Hey look, the TIME article references the SI article and….

Damn it!  “6 to 8% had lost huge sums of money or were having trouble making ends meet.”  Torre’s SI article with its Gondorian Stack of Texts as sources was off by an order of magnitude.  And that’s if we’re being kind and allowing “lost huge sums of money” and “were having trouble making ends meet” to mean the same thing as “broke” and “bankrupt” which is being generous because they don’t mean the same thing.   The national bankruptcy rate in 2015 was 0.27%, or 2.7 out of every thousand people.  Do a search of “American struggling to make ends meet” and you will see polls ranging from “Four out of Five people can’t make ends meet” from the ever reliable Huffington Post to the most recent Marist Poll where 1/3 of people claimed to have trouble making ends meet.  

“6 to 8%.”  Goodness gracious.  I’m flabbergasted.  Why must we invent things to entice?  Why can’t we just tell the truth and let the truth be interpreted in a perspective largely unadulterated by our desires to manipulate or sell?  Why can’t we just be a bunch of boring Commander Data’s, constantly ruining things with “well actually”s.  Imagine how different our human condition if Satan had just said “look, this apple is hype, and you’re gonna suddenly know a lot of new things, but, not gonna lie, it’s not that important, and you’re gonna be banished and stuff.  Your call.”

I don’t know if Torre has issued a retraction, but his piece was written in 2009 and an article about Darius Miles written in 2016 is referencing it as truth.  And a wikipedia article in 2016 is throwing in SUICIDE for good measure, cus why not?

This is also fake news.  Sure, it wasn’t created by some clickbait bloggers in Egypt and shared on your facebook timeline with an obviously questionable premise.  [The Pope endorsed Trump?  LOL bro do you even Papacy?]  No.  This should be sobering.  Honestly, had Torre used a number like 25% I might have just accepted it as fact, thought about how horrible this crisis is, and carried that with me to future blog posts, radio segments, dinner conversations, youth coaching sessions etc.  It’s only because I have a modicum of common sense that the 78% number was so eye-poppingly ridiculous I defiantly tried to track down its source.  How often does this happen, though?  How many die-hard Cavs fans, to this day, believe Danny Ferry refused to deal J.J. Hickson for Amare Stoudemire?  Hopefully not that many.  I think we’ve brought it up on here a few times.  I remember vividly listening to Steve Kerr (Suns GM at the time) debunk that rumor on TV or a podcast or something.  But I keep seeing it resurface every couple years.  Here is the only print version of the truth I can find, from CtB friend and Cavs Beat Writer, Bob Finan:  http://www.morningjournal.com/article/MJ/20120128/NEWS/301289974

Rumors surfaced all over the league that the deal was nixed because then Cavs general manager Danny Ferry wouldn’t part with the promising Hickson.

Let’s finally set the record straight on that one: It was the Suns who vetoed the trade.

If it had gone through, who knows what would have happened. Maybe Stoudemire would have signed a new contract with the Cavs. Maybe LeBron James would have stayed with the Cavs. Maybe the Cavs would have won a championship.

I was having a conversation the other day with a co-worker and he mused about how you know a commercial is geared towards our parents or grandparents generation if you see a celebrity staring right into the camera and asking you to trust them about this product or “talk to your doctor” about this new wonder drug.  I thought about it for a second and then he continued.  “And watch the commercials geared towards you and I – sarcasm, defiance.  If there is trust to be found it’s in technology.  Sure, there are celebrities in commercials, but that’s just to get you to look.”  I don’t know if he’s got it right or not, but I will say that I have never clicked on even a legitimate advertisement on the internet, much less fallen for a nigerian 419 email.

It’s old people and John Podesta that fall for phishing scams, not you and I.  We are inherently distrustful of just about everything thrown at us.  Unless, [long dramatic pause] it has some ‘data’ behind it.  Now I’d like to count myself cynical enough to know that data can be completely fabricated and even when it is not, it can be filtered, spliced, positioned, and interpreted to create a narrative that does not offer an honest/(often boring) perspective.  But where I see our generation being the most gullible is that we are skeptical up until the moment “a study has shown” and then we completely drop our guard.  I get it.  It’s exhausting to constantly be skeptical of everything we read.  This is why the popularity of “fact checkers” has grown so immensely.  There’s only one problem: the fact checkers interpret things very perversely at times and/or, people are too lazy to read the entire description of the fact check and just focus on the bottom line: “is this dude’s pants on fire or not?”.

Well, Mr. Pablo S. Torre, I feel comfortable saying your pants are on fire.  Wikipedia entry, I know your pants are on fire because I could independently verify with just one click and a little bit of scrolling that you did not accurately transcribe your source.

I don’t know how to end this rant.  Be safe out there.

*Andre Miller led the NBA in assists per game the previous season and lead the Cavs in Win Shares at 10.3.  The next closest was Wesley Person at 6.9.  Whether or not the Miller trade was stealth tanking or not, the Cavs tanked.