Age of the megadeal: Do athletes make too much money?
There were undoubtedly winter nights in the late 1950s when some of the patrons at Ruggeri’s, an Italian restaurant in St. Louis, did a double take at the sight of a short, squat man with jug-handle ears framing his familiar face bringing their meals to the table. It must have seemed terribly out of context, after all, to see him serving them dinner plates instead of crouching behind home plate. But there was no mistaking him, even out of his regular uniform. Their waiter for the evening was Yogi Berra, the All-Star catcher for the New York Yankees.
Legend has it that it was at Ruggeri’s, which has since been renamed Favazza’s, that Berra coined one of his famous malaprops in talking about a competing eatery: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” But other than coming up with memorable quotes, the Yankees superstar wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary by waiting tables. It was quite common for athletes of his era to work another job when their sport wasn’t in season. As difficult as it may be to believe now, when professional athletes’ contracts continue to skyrocket ever higher into the hundreds of millions of dollars, it wasn’t that long ago that players routinely needed a second income to help make ends meet.
Instead of spending their offseasons training or vacationing, professional baseball, football, and basketball players once tended to take their place in the traditional workforce. During the 1950s, Brooklyn Dodgers outfielder Carl Furillo ran a Queens deli in the winter, and Hall of Fame New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle sold insurance in the summer. In the 1960s, Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown worked as a sales rep for Pepsi when he wasn’t breaking tackles. A few weeks after Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer shut out the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 2 of the 1966 World Series, he reported to his winter job selling suits at a men’s clothing store for $150 a week.
Multimillionaire backup QBsTesty with the mediaSoaring TV revenueThe money has to go somewhere
