Since we talked last, it came to light that several years ago a young man took out a simple mortgage. The collateral consisted of his skills as an basketball player, and the advance (paid out over several years) came in the form of tens of thousands of dollars in cash and goods. The agreement, in principle, was that the creditor would someday collect an agent's cut of a virtually assured professional contract, a slice of a multi-million-dollar pie.
It's an innocuous enough transaction, free of its context and actual signifiers -- it's the same kind of advance on future earnings that happens every day in your local bank's loan department. But the story of young O.J. Mayo is a tremendous scandal in the making, and it'll keep most of the people in my profession busy for the foreseeable future. Set and printed rules were broken, "allegedly" or not... people will be punished, fired, blacklisted for this. It's still in the debate stage, though, and which of them allegedly deserve to take the hit is still entirely up to you.
We're been dealing with athletics-related loans all decade. Nearly every major sport in the world has been rocked -- rocked! -- with stories of athletes who have traded scary and uncertain futures for today's world-beating performances, as well as the medals, statistics and riches that can follow. The risks of performance-enhancing drugs are well-known enough to define this as yet another kind of now-for-later deal. So it's one thing to quibble about perceived "authenticity" and "cheating," but look at it this way -- you won't be the one with the high blood pressure, heart disease and/or cancer when the bill comes due. (Or the shriveled balls.)
Mortgaging an uncertain later for a cushy now is part of a much wider pattern here in our nation, you don't have to live in or near a foreclosed house to see that. A lot of modern American problems can be boiled down into the act of trading instant or short-term gratification for an I.O.U., followed by the inherent problems of that particular transaction type. The credit card world is imploding into millions of defaults, and displaced homeowners are living out of mini-storage units. In the macro view, our country pays its bills with loans from scary places like China, Singapore and Europe. We've gladly traded the sweet comfort of automotive isolation for massive environmental damage, and it's too late to turn back now.
This isn't another sermon, though. I'm just trying to figure out a unified approach to the now-for-later deal, which has been heretofore impossible. As a society, we haven't come to any sort of consensus on what types of mortgages are okay, which are not so okay, and which are downright criminal. (It would seem, generally, that the risky checks we ourselves write are acceptable, while those of others are not.) Should the mortgage that O.J. Mayo took out on his talent, or the ones that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens took out on their future health and well-being, be viewed any differently than the bad loans of various types we've entered into? At root, they're all deals with some sort of devil.
When we look back at this decade, if we all survive it together, I'm positively certain that we'll refer to it as the I.O.U. Era. We'll remember this as a time when we wrote a lot of checks, and got in a lot of trouble when our asses couldn't cash them. Hopefully, we'll recognize the pattern before then, and figure out that trading tomorrow for today is pretty dumb, no matter what form the transaction takes.
