I think we’ve all found ourselves in the situation Charles Oakley was in the other night. You walk out of a Chicago nightclub at 3:30 a.m., pile into a limousine and realize that the Gucci bag you left in the car is gone–the Gucci bag with the $30,000 Franck Muller watch and the $16,000 Cartier watch in it. The Gucci bag with the DVD player in it. The Gucci bag containing not one, not two, but three cell phones.
I hate when that happens to me.
We occasionally get reminders that we’re not living on the same planet as professional athletes. Monday provided one of those reminders. That was the day Oakley failed to show up for the Bulls’ team photo shoot because he was filing a police report on the aforementioned stolen property.
The best athletes often are different from the rest of us–not just physically and financially, but also in their outlook on life. These guys are so disconnected from reality, they use UFO radios to send messages to one another through the fillings in Shirley MacLaine’s molars.
“This is everyday life,” Oakley said Tuesday, meaning that people have things stolen from them all the time.
But not like this, Oak. Most people don’t leave expensive timepieces in a limo while they sit in a club. Most people wouldn’t think of cruising Chicago streets with $50,000 in valuables any more than they would think of wearing a sign that said, “I’m lost, defenseless and filthy rich.”
Of course, most people don’t need three cell phones either. The official slogan of the pro athlete: When in doubt, accessorize. It probably made all the sense in the world to him to be carrying accessories worth that much money.
Oakley will earn $7.3 million this season, so $50,000 in losses is a drop in the diamond-encrusted bucket for him, though it likely will be the insurance company’s bucket.
Let’s not pick on Oakley. His losses aren’t even close to being the biggest on the athletes’ stolen-property tour. But he gets demerits for not learning from those who already have made charitable donations to needy felons.
If Oakley had been smart, he would have looked across the Bulls’ locker room to teammate Jalen Rose, who had $250,000 worth of jewelry stolen from him last year at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee when he was with the Indiana Pacers.
Why would anyone be carrying $250,000 in jewelry? That’s the question most of us living in the real world would ask ourselves. The answer is simple: Because other athletes do. Because in the war of one-upmanship, outward signs of wealth are the weapons.
Because it must feel good to be so fat from conspicuous consumption.
Bill Romanowski, then with the Denver Broncos, had a carry-on bag containing $250,000 worth of jewelry stolen at Miami International Airport in 1998.
Two years ago in Chicago, robbers relieved the Boston Celtics’ Antoine Walker of a $55,000 watch at gunpoint.
Before heading out the other night, Oakley should have called New York Giants cornerback Will Allen, who was attacked by three armed men last year and reluctantly gave up $150,000 worth of jewelry. We know he gave up the jewelry reluctantly because one of the men threatened to douse him with gasoline and light a match if Allen didn’t cooperate.
Included in the haul was a $120,000, 51-carat platinum and diamond bracelet. It was so heavy it doubled as a home gym.
Athletes obviously are targets, which is leading more athletes to carry weapons, which is leading to more tragedies. I don’t think gaudy jewelry is the root cause of violence in this country because if it were, Liberace would have died years before he did. But more athletes are carrying weapons these days to protect what is theirs.
Here’s a suggestion, fellas: Understatement. Feel invulnerable and indestructible all you want, but don’t advertise it with diamonds.
Maybe Oakley and the others aren’t to blame. Maybe the world is to blame. Yeah, that’s it. I know there are times I get so disgusted with the human condition that I want to fire my super-agent, hang my hangers-on, stop devoting two-thirds of the day to my Game Boy and join an organization that makes a difference in people’s lives, such as Club Med.
Pretty soon, a guy won’t be able to leave the keys in the ignition of his unlocked Lexus outside his unlocked mansion. What’s this world coming to?
