by Ted Sherman

Created on: April 16, 2009

Pro athletes in America have always been overpaid. Babe Ruth negotiated for a then-enormous salary of $100,000 after his record-breaking 60 home runs in the Yankees' 1927 season. When a reporter posed the question, "Babe, Calvin Coolidge was only paid $75,000 this year. Do you think you deserve to make more than the President of the United States?" Babe's response was, "Sure, I had a better year!

The Babe was alone in his lofty salary for another ten or 15 years, when others joined the $100,000 plus ranks, including Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. Then, as TV advertising took hold in the 1950s and 1960s, Major League team owners began to reap huge profits from their enterprises, which at first they could keep most of them. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, sports agents and attorneys took over negotiations each year for all the major sports arthletes, primarily first-tier baseball, basketball and football. Because of their legal efforts, along with intense personal greed, pro athlete salaries of the three principal sports began to escalate almost exponentially.

By the 1980s, pro athletes were no longer individual jocks, and each become a one-man business center. Each found it necessary to hire personal help, including sports agent, attorney, financial adviser, physician, trainer and perhaps another half-dozen bodyguards, go-fers and other hangers-on. By that stage of a pro athlete's career, an annual salary of $100,000 wouldn't even cover the expenses of paying his personal crew. By the 1990s, pro player salaries hit a million dollars a year and continue to climb. Today, top pro athletes aren't just overpaid, each gets an obscenely high salary annually of tens of millions that could run the budget of a mid-sized city.

It isn't unusual for a seven-foot-tell high school basketball star to be signed on by an National Basketball Association team with a $5 million bonus. Once the lawyers quickly move in like hungry sharks, the teenager can be guarateed that amount or more as salary for five years, no matter how well or badly he plays in his first year. The grossly-overpaid salaries, with some of the most productive and popular players now getting $25 to $50 million a year, are paid to young men, many from very poor boyhoods, who aren't equipped mentally and emotionally to handle such huge amounts of money. The millions of available dollars supply the incentive to use enhancement and other illegal drugs, run up heavy gambling debts and surround themselves with unsavory gambling figures.

Of course, pro athletes are grossly overpaid. But does any sports fan really care? I can remember my big brother taking me to Philly's Shibe Park in 1941 to see Joe DiMaggio continue his 52-game hitting streak against the Athletics. Since my brother had a job, he treated me to a grandstand seat for the first time. It cost him three whole dollars, instead of the 50 cents per seat in the bleachers where we usually sat. The last time I went to a Major League Baseball game (and it will be my very last time), I paid $50 for a grandstand seat. I probably should have bought a bleacher's ticket for the low, low price of $25, and saved my money to buy a $10 hot dog and $5 paper cup of Coke.

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