The person, whose name Sanchez did not mention, embezzled over $170,000 of the money he earned in the UFC Octagon. This was reality giving Sanchez a harsh slap in the face.
“I let some bad influences get into my life and it was a downward spiral. It was like a tornado sucking everything in,” he recalled. “I let a person that I thought was a friend, a real close friend, someone that would help me with finances, I had him helping me out with stuff. Turned out I got embezzled for over $170,000. He conned me. I got conned so bad. And in the same time when I got conned, I was just wasting the money that I had earned.”
Being taken for significant sums of money is not uncommon. Far too many athletes fall into the trap of letting friends or family run their finances. Any number of things can go wrong, from a person who can barely balance a check book suddenly being put in charge of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars and not understanding proper fiscal management to the slow bleed of embezzlement.
These athletes didn’t get to the pinnacle of the sport by being “numbers guys” so they trust that they’re being taken care of, leaving themselves open to the kind of trap that Ryan Sheckler fell into.
Skateboarding pro Sheckler hired family friend Matthew Mercuro as CFO of two of his business units, only to see Mercuro transfer over $350,000 into several personal accounts.
Mercuro’s punishment? A plea for 18 days in jail and an order to pay back $100,000 to have the charges reduced to misdemeanors.
Hype or Die, Inspirational or Sobering?
The threat of post-career financial hardship is, obviously, not limited to those at the championship and title contender level.
Many fans saw the story of Pat Barry’s hardships before his win and Fight of the Night/Knockout of the Night performance against Antoni Hardonk as inspirational. Barry said that he was on the verge of being evicted and had been reduced to eating ketchup and rice before scoring the knockout win and $120,000 in fight bonuses.
The story of a disheveled Barry having to convince the bank teller that the check was legit was fun, but it seemed to make people miss the real point: Barry was fighting on the biggest stage in the sport and was barely able to eat and keep a roof over his head.
This was his third fight in under a year and he would only fight once more in the next 14 months, earning a disclosed payday of $11,000 for his loss to Mirko Filipovic. While he may have been able to live with considerably more comfort during that time thanks to the Hardonk fight and the bonuses it provided, Barry is almost certainly not in a position where he’ll be able to retire off the money he made from fighting.
That’s not to say that the UFC should be paying out huge sums of money up and down the card to set these guys up for life. They shouldn’t unless they want to go out of business. But it does show that most guys in this sport will not make enough money to retire on after spending most of their prime earning years fighting. This will lead to guys bouncing around the local circuits for far too long and having to try to find other ways to earn after the career is over.
