As Trent Richardson attempts to get back into the NFL, he’s reflecting on some of the things that went wrong as a he flamed out with the Browns and the Colts. One problem, he admits, is that he got lazy. Another is that as soon as he started making money, his friends and family treated his money as their money.
Richardson told AL.com that friends and family asked for money so often that dealing with all of those requests exhausted him and made it harder for him to focus on football.
After signing a four-year, $20.5 million contract with the Browns, multiple people asked Richardson to buy them cars. He obliged. Five different people came to him with sob stories about how they couldn’t pay for a family member’s funeral, and so Richardson picked up the tabs for five different funerals, each costing more than $12,000. Richardson took family on a week-long trip to Disney World, not that they were grateful.
“And people still had the nerve to complain about the trip,” Richardson said.
Richardson now says he has cut off most of the people who had their hands out. That’s wise. Although Richardson has already made more money than most people make in their entire lives, it’s easy for NFL players to go broke when their friends and family treat them like piggy banks. And as Richardson tries to break back into the NFL with the Ravens, he’s going to need to focus on football, and not get stressed by constant requests for money from people who view his financial windfall as theirs.