ENTERTAINMENT & SPORTS PLUS

The NBA player's ignorance of his own affairs is not unique. According to Bob Young, the managing director of Apex Wealth Management in Doylestown, Pa., "You'll say to a player, 'How are you doing?' A lot of the time they'll respond, 'I have no idea.' All the bills are paid by someone else, and none of the statements go to [the athlete]."

In fact, according to the NFL Players Association, at least 78 players lost a total of more than $42 million between 1999 and 2002 because they trusted money to financial advisers with questionable backgrounds. In this rogues' gallery Robert Allen Stanford looks almost presidential—and shows that even when athletes trust financiers of high repute, things can go disastrously wrong. The dubious advisers included Luigi DiFonzo—a former felon who claimed he was an Italian count and defrauded players such as Hall of Fame running back Eric Dickerson before committing suicide in August 2000—and disgraced agent William (Tank) Black, who built a pyramid scheme that took a total of about $15 million from at least a dozen players, including Patriots running back Fred Taylor.

Just last May, Atlanta hedge fund manager Kirk Wright was convicted on 47 counts of fraud and money laundering in a scheme involving more than $150 million. His client list included at least eight NFL players; former safeties Blaine Bishop (who lost $4 million, according to court documents) and Steve Atwater (who lost $2.7 million) had recruited former Broncos stars Terrell Davis and Rod Smith to Wright's firm, unwittingly making them victims too. Soon after his conviction Wright committed suicide in prison.

In October, Atwater himself received an investment pitch from a fellow athlete. Former quarterback Jeff Blake sent 102 other retired players an e-mail on behalf of Triton Financial, an investment firm in Austin, whose "athlete services" department Blake directs along with three other ex-QBs: Chris Weinke and the brothers Detmer, Ty and Koy. In the e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by SI, Blake claimed without caveat that "Triton is averaging 32% annualized return on its investments within the past five years."

Triton is an official partner of the Heisman Trophy Trust and the sponsor of the Triton Financial Classic, a PGA senior tour event. Its CEO, Kurt Barton, told SI that the firm manages "about $300 million" in assets, and he claimed that Triton registered with the SEC (as is required by law of investment adviser firms with at least $25 million in assets under management) "roughly six months ago, around October." But the Texas State Securities Board and Triton chief compliance officer David Tuckfield said that the company has not, in fact, done so. "Right now, we're only registered with Texas," Tuckfield said. "But we're passing the [assets] threshold, and we're confident that we'll need to file this year."

Says Paul Cohen, a real estate investor who owns properties in Austin, "In this economy, especially in real estate, anything you bought in the last two years is deeply underwater. I guess what [Triton is] saying could happen. But then again, I could target the moon with my rifle and shoot, but I ain't gonna hit it." (Barton did not dispute the e-mail's 32% figure, but he and Tuckfield admitted to SI that Blake should not have sent it out. Barton also conceded that Triton was "not supposed to publish specific numbers about past performance" without significant disclaimers, including a disclosure of what the company had invested in.)

On a much smaller scale, Torii Hunter and Astros pitcher LaTroy Hawkins recall the story of a former major leaguer from the Dominican Republic whose adviser took care of all his financial matters. One day the player's mail came to the clubhouse and Hunter playfully asked to see it. "It turns out he was paying this guy $5,000 a month on insurance for two cars in the Dominican Republic," Hunter says. "I got three cars, and I only pay $250 a month. He'd been with and trusted this guy [for almost 18 years]!"

Advisers warn that such overcharging is the most common form of financial bloodletting for athletes. "It's basically large-scale shoplifting," Butowsky says. "Athletes don't know industry standards, so virtually every one of them is being robbed." Brokers will encourage them to buy bonds with longer maturities because the commissions on them are often larger. Or they'll overcharge on portfolios—2% or 3% instead of the customary 1%.

A few years ago, Butowsky recalls, he met with a former high-round NFL pick whose adviser, also a former player, said that he couldn't reveal how much he was charging to manage the athlete's tax-exempt municipal bonds "because of the Patriot Act." According to Butowsky, he was taking $146,000 every year.

III. FAMILY MATTERS

IN 1996, when Panthers owner Jerry Richardson—a former NFL flanker turned businessman—addressed his players, one of them asked, What's the most dangerous thing that could happen to us financially? "Without blinking an eye," Ismail recalls, "Mr. Richardson said, 'Divorce.'"

Players today would not disagree. In a survey reported by the financial-services firm Rothstein Kass in December, more than 80% of the 178 athletes polled—each with a minimum net worth of $5 million and two thirds under the age of 30—said they were "concerned about being involved in unjust lawsuits and/or divorce proceedings." By common estimates among athletes and agents, the divorce rate for pro athletes ranges from 60% to 80%.

In divorce proceedings, of course, husbands routinely lose half of their net worth. But for athletes there is an aggravating factor: when the divorce happens. Most splits occur in retirement, when the player's peak earnings period is long over and making a comparable living is virtually impossible. Such timing is no accident. "There's this huge lifestyle change," says former NBA center Mark West, a licensed stockbroker who is now the Suns' vice president of player programs. "You and your wife are suddenly always at home, bugging each other. Before, you'd always say, 'I gotta go to practice.' Now you don't have to practice. You have to finish conversations."

Which often involve an incendiary subject: infidelity. "A friend of mine is a football player, and I asked him why he cheated on his wife," says Anita Hawkins, LaTroy's wife of 11 years. "He just said, 'I love her dearly, but I feel like I got married too early and didn't get to do what I wanted to do when I was young.'"

Given all the pressures on a pro athlete's marriage, one safety valve might be the prenuptial agreement—something "very strongly" recommended by agent David Falk, who surged to prominence representing Michael Jordan (who did not have one). "The percentage of prenups amongst athletes is appreciably lower compared with nonathletes at the same economic level," says celebrity divorce lawyer Raoul Felder, who has represented the ex-wives of Patrick Ewing, Jason Kidd and Mike Tyson.

In 1994, when NBA center Dikembe Mutombo was engaged to Michelle Roberts, a med student, Roberts refused to sign a premarital contract the day before the wedding. Five hundred guests—including a large party from Mutombo's native Democratic Republic of Congo—had begun flying in to Washington. "[Roberts] never signed," Falk says, "and Mutombo never married the girl." Calling off the nuptials reportedly cost him $250,000.

It's no coincidence that the woman a pro athlete often chooses to marry—and often at a young age—is his hometown sweetheart. For that reason he can't envision a ruinous divorce. "That was how you could tell if she really liked you, if she knew you before you made it," says West. But when a player does make it? "The question [for the athlete] becomes, When you get off the farm and see Paris, so to speak, can you really go back to the farm?"

Children almost always complicate the issue. How to limit paternity obligations is a challenge for pro athletes. Former NBA forward Shawn Kemp (who has at least seven children by six women) and, more recently, Travis Henry (nine by nine) have seen their fortunes sapped by monthly child-support payments in the tens of thousands of dollars. Last month Henry, who reportedly earned almost $11 million over seven years in the NFL, tried and failed to temporarily reduce one of his nine child-support payments by arguing that he could no longer afford the $3,000 every month. Two weeks later he was jailed for falling $16,600 behind in payments for his child in Frostproof, Fla.

An aversion to family planning goes hand in hand with neglect of other forms of financial foresight, which can affect what happens to athletes' fortunes even after they die. Hall of Fame linebacker Derrick Thomas, who died at 33 following a January 2000 car crash, had ignored the urging of his financial adviser to make a will, and his entire estate was left for the court to divide, touching off a legal battle among the five mothers of his seven children. (Of the estimated $30 million Thomas had earned in the NFL, he had only $1.16 million in valued assets at the time of his death.)

"Derrick didn't care about meeting with his planner, and we tried to set him up to do it 10 times," says Steinberg, who was his agent. "The sad truth is that there was a certain group of athletes who actually believed that if they ever sat down to write their wills, they were going to die."

IV. GREAT EXPECTATIONS

THE THORNIEST question for a pro athlete, however, isn't how he handles himself and those closest to him. It's "how you handle the new people suddenly emerging in your life," says Richard Lapchick, director of the University of Central Florida's DeVos Sport Business Management program. "They'll be expecting help or money or jobs. Often players don't know how to say no."

It's all part of that ossified notion of how a pro athlete should live and provide for those around him. If he isn't consuming conspicuously, then he hasn't made it. "When I was a young buck," says Hawkins, "I was trying to spend all my money. Now I try to preach to young guys in the clubhouse who are like that. I've got all this stuff from 10 years ago—jewelry, rims—that I think, Why the f--- did I even buy this?"

Two years ago Rockets forward Ron Artest had a similar change of heart. He dismissed six friends who were involved with his record label and doing odd jobs for him while they lived in a house he was leasing for $30,000 a year. This entourage's "level of helpfulness," said Artest's publicist, Heidi Buech, "was 50 percent." (The house they occupied had also been broken into while Artest was abroad.)

As soon as an athlete goes pro, people in search of handouts tend to stretch the definitions of family and friends. When Hunter went to his hometown of Pine Bluff, Ark., for his grandmother's funeral last August, he found Old St. James Baptist Church packed, the line of cars outside stretching for blocks. "But my grandma didn't know anybody," Hunter says. "She just lived at home." When he stepped outside the church, people "came running, all dressed up, chasing after me," Hunter says. "They were throwing CDs, projects, letters.... They were yelling, My sister's brother went to school with you!"

A different but equally potent pressure operates in the workplace—the clubhouse, the locker room and the team plane. "For rookies, it's like an unspoken initiation," says Strickland. "You're trying to get in good with the veterans, so you go beyond your means. You drive the nice car, splurge on a house."

The veterans don't mind giving explicit instructions. "I got ripped my first three years in the NFL, every day," says Tubbs. "I got on planes with a cassette player, and [a teammate] would tell me, 'They make CD players. You're in the NFL now.'"

Perhaps the upper limit on spending was set by the famously profligate Shaquille O'Neal, who—according to a document obtained by the Palm Beach Post during O'Neal's canceled divorce filing in January 2008—spends a total of $875,015 each month, including $26,500 for child care, $24,300 for gas and $17,220 for clothing. But O'Neal, who also has been known to fund charities anonymously and cover medical bills for complete strangers, has the wherewithal to remain solvent.

Imitators have been less fortunate. When former NBA guard Kenny Anderson filed for bankruptcy in October 2005, he detailed how the estimated $60 million he earned in the league had dwindled to nothing. He bought eight cars and rang up monthly expenses of $41,000, including outlays for child support, his mother's mortgage and his own five-bedroom house in Beverly Hills, Calif.—not to mention $10,000 in what he dubbed "hanging-out money." He also regularly handed out $3,000 to $5,000 to friends and relatives. (Along with Ismail, he enlisted as both a Slamball coach and a Pros vs. Joes participant last year.) Former big league slugger Jack Clark filed for bankruptcy in July 1992 while still playing, listing debts of $6.7 million and ownership of 18 cars—17 of which still had outstanding payments.

Financial advisers have come to call it "the problem of the $20,000 Rolex." If a 22-year-old spends $20,000 on a watch or on a big night out at a nightclub, that money is either depreciating or gone. "But if they invested in a five percent, Triple A insured, tax-free municipal bond for a period of 30 years," money manager Seymour says, "that $20,000 would be worth $86,000 at that tax-free rate of return. And needless to say, they buy more than one $20,000 Rolex."

Four years ago future NBA Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen unsuccessfully sued his former law firm for allegedly losing $27 million of his money through poor investments. (He had earned about $110 million in salary alone over a 17-year career.) In February 2007—around the same time as Pippen's failed NBA comeback attempt—the Missouri Court of Appeals upheld a ruling that the player owed U.S. Bank more than $5 million in principal, interest and attorneys' fees from a dispute regarding a Grumman Gulfstream II corporate jet that he'd purchased in 2001.

In an era in which banks are lambasted for using taxpayers' money to fly their executives on luxury private planes, it's a smart bet for players not to use their own cash to do the same. "In this economy, especially, the goal shouldn't be living that kind of lifestyle or trying to get richer," says West. "It needs to be about trying to maintain the wealth."

SOMETIMES, THOUGH, a jock just can't shake the temptation to try to hit the jackpot. Butowsky believes that "there's something in an athlete's mentality" that drives him to swing for the fences financially—usually at his own peril. "The solution to the problem is, without a doubt, education," the adviser says. "Change won't happen until grown men start wanting to learn."

Old habits die hard. Despite all his dreadful experiences, and lessons absorbed the hard way, not even Ismail is done yet. This time around, the project in which he's invested $250,000 is a special mouth guard—available online for $79.95—that's designed to help the body "physiologically perform at the highest level," he says. The science behind it involves relieving pressure on the temporomandibular joint and holding the jaw in an "optimal" position. (Ismail made the investment before he began consulting with Butowsky.)

It might sound familiar, Rocket admits, but there's at least one distinction between this and his previous six ventures: He didn't embark on it so blindly. He actually used the mouth guard during his playing career. He says he's close friends with the guy who designed it. ("He's my boy.") And, perhaps most important, Ismail saw the plan develop from the ground up.

Hours after Butowsky's boot camp in Dallas is over, Rocket calmly lays out his rationale: "You know that statistic we heard about how one in 30 private equity investments works?" He smiles broadly. "Well, Lord willing, this is going to be my one."

Somewhere heads are nodding.