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Essay on Escalating Professional Athlete Salaries

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Escalating Professional Athlete Salaries
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In recent years, with the growing popularity of sports, athletes salaries have escalated like that of a superb stock equity. Athletes are taking full advantage of their position, causing the average man to wonder how high will they go. Some feel that athletes are greedy people who have lost care for the true meaning of their salary, the love of the game.

Others feel that if a person is able to earn that kind of money, why shouldn't they? Increases in athlete salaries will bring up the question on whether athletes are worth the money by researching the NBA?s new collective bargaining agreement (before and after the approval), by observing the current salaries of …show more content…

The problem is they want to do that immediately. "In a couple years, after Garnett develops into a superstar, people will be saying ?Boy, I?m glad we signed him [Garnett].?" Rosen thinks that it was undoubtedly necessary to have rookie salary caps. "If there weren?t those rookie caps, kids out of college, even high school like KG [Kevin Garnett], would be signing these multi-million dollar contracts right after the draft. There is no doubt in my mind that that was a good thing to do." He also feels that these high salaries are good because it shows that revenue is going up (Rosen). Sports salaries have sky rocketed in the past ten to fifteen years. Professional athletes have moved from six figure salaries to nine figure salaries in what seems like a snap of a finger. Michael Jordan, for example, got paid about $35 million a year not counting endorsements. Let?s put that in easier terms: - $439,000 a game - $12,500 a minute played, assuming he plays about 35 minutes per game - $209 a second played - almost $40,000 a jumpshot, assuming he makes 11 jumpshots per game That is a ton of money when one looks at it this way. If one includes the endorsements he gets, which are from Nike, Gatorade, Hanes, Ballpark hot dogs, Jordan shoes and clothing, Rayovac Batteries, and Michael Jordan cologne, he makes about one million dollars per game. Now this is a little too much, even if it is, in fact, Michael Jordan, probably the best basketball

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