Pro Athlete Salaries

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Professional athletes are some of the most admired, most popular people on earth. They have been the center of entertainment for decades. However, so have their salaries. Over the years, it has become increasingly more evident that professional athletes seem to be playing less for the love of the game and more for the love of the pay check. Professional sports are no longer played on grass, dirt and hardwood floors but on calculators and cash registers. Pro athlete’s salaries must be reduced. Professional athletes are paid way too much. CBS Sports reported that in 2005-06 the minimum wage for a 2 year NBA veteran was $719,373; the minimum salary of $1,138,500 for a 10 year veteran. In the 1996-1997 season, NBA’s Michael Jordan was paid $33,450,000 for the year, or just over $1.06 per second, an outrageous amount of money for a player to play the game he loves to play. He was paid $178,000 a day whether he played or not. There is no doubt that professional athletes are talented, but when Kevin Garnett, who is not even a college graduate, makes over 16 million dollars a year, that becomes a problem. While that may seem outrageous, deliberations over pro athletes salaries are nothing new. When baseball’s Babe Ruth was reportedly asked about earning a larger salary than the United States President Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression in the 1930’s Ruth defended his salary in response, “Why not? I had a better year than (Herbert Hoover) did.” Ruth earned $785,900 for 14 years in the MLB which hardly compares to New York Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez who will make $33,000,000 in one year, not including endorsements. Even the best Olympic athletes don’t make as much as these American sports athletes, such as Usain Bolt, who won gold in every event he participated in, yet makes substantially less than any of the American Athletes. Also, another problem caused by these

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