Movie of the Week: ESPN 30 for 30: Broke

Another in the absorbing series of ESPN 30 from 30 documentaries, director Billy Corben explores the failure of many American professional athletes to keep the seemingly enormous sums of money that they have earnt from their varying sports, despite the massive increases in remuneration that these sports have experienced in recent decades.

 The numbers vary, but what is certain is that a large percentage of athletes in the NFL, the NBA and the MLB end up broke within 5 years of retirement.

Broke is an absorbing ride, Corben's approach is to divide the film into sections with each section outlining one of the ways that athletes struggle to deal with the income that they have and how it gets away from them. Interviews with many former players such as Curt Schilling, Keith McCants, Bernie Kosar and Andre Rison along with financial experts and commentators form the core of the film.

Corben appears to be more interested in presenting that individual stories of the players than in conducting a systematic analysis of why the problem exists or what can be done to resolve it. It's a discussion starter. Only Curt Schilling was at all familiar to me so the stories had to stand on their own merits and they did.

Looking at the stories as presented by Corben, some of the problem is that the players themselves are young and living shallow lives as many young people would, spending big, partying hard, attracting women and generally having a great time without thinking about tomorrow. An additional difficulty is that that athletes don't have the types of tax deductions available to companies and businessmen so they're actually paying their fair share of tax and lose more than they expect to it.

The athletes that have the most trouble seem to be those from disadvantaged backgrounds whose families never had to worry about the need to teach their children how to handle having too much money. While there's more blacks than whites getting in trouble, as there are also more blacks than whites in the NBA and the NFL, that's not a huge shock and the number of whites in trouble was enough to demonstrate that labelling the problem as a racial one is too simplistic by far.

Athletes found themselves unable to deal with the demands for money from family, friends and the communities they were raised in, it's easy for them to acquire large entourages while the money is there Injuries also proved to be a big problem, the salaries didn't last as long as they had expected and so they didn't end up make the sort of money they actually budgeted for when they got their first contract or 2. 

Most of us will tend to live a much more expensive lifestyle if given a larger income. For young athletes in American sports, this has proved to be quite the mixed blessing, as too much money often is. Billy Corben's Broke presents an absorbing account of the people behind the cliche of the spoilt, broke, former athlete. 7/10