It's sad when a MMA fighter talks to an NFL or NBA player about how much money they make. That's embarrassing. You tell them how much you make and they laugh.
Everybody in the Olympics is paid. Lindsay Vonn is going to make a million dollars whether she skis or not.
No doubt, I am earning more money with my endorsements than I ever earned playing soccer.
I don't have all this money people think Olympic athletes have.
I've lost count of the times I've been asked what I do for a living. When I say rugby people say: 'Yes, but what's your other job?'
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
It's not like being a professional basketball player where you're in a big house. Maybe three, four or five guys make a couple million bucks a year, but that's it. The rest of them have second jobs.
I think my top salary was maybe in 1966. I made $17,000 and 11 of that came from selling other players' equipment.
People think all wrestlers are millionaires. It's really a blue-collar existence.
I haven't played tennis since 2006, and tennis is one of those sports where if you don't play, you don't get paid.
The reason people wear the things that they wear and accept the standards that they accept is because most athletes make a good portion of their money in advertising and doing campaigns afterwards.
You can play professional lacrosse, but they make less than a teacher's salary now. I always thought about that. And it's a very difficult career, a short career, as a pro athlete.
It's common knowledge that professional athletes earn extraordinary incomes. What is less known or understood is how the advent of these riches has seeped into the conscious and unconscious ways in which our society now parents children.
