For a player to make it to the NBA is a huge thing, the league is the highest level of basketball in the world and following the boom it has seen since Michael Jordan was top dog, the money that players make in the league has only gone up. While simply making it to the league is difficult enough, even fewer players get massive contracts right out of the gate, with only top draft picks making good money on their rookie deals.
Eddy Curry may not be a household name, but he was a Top 5 draft pick in the 2001 NBA draft and enjoyed over 10 seasons of being in the league, during which he signed a contract that paid him $60 million with the New York Knicks. Even his first contract was nearly $14 million, but he uniquely lost a chunk of that.
Curry got married in high school and ended up having a son with the woman he had married. When things didn’t work out between the two, he thought the split might be amicable, but instead, he ended up having a dragged-out divorce that saw him make massive payments in alimony and child support. He spoke about it in an interview with DJ Vlad.
“I got married in high school, bro. I got married I wanna say, my senior year. I got married, she got pregnant with our son, my oldest. And yeah, we got married right away.
“I tried to get divorced right away but she drug that sh*t out bro. Honestly, it was one of the worst things I ever did in my life. Like, honestly.
“I was f**ked up (financially). Everything that you think could happen, happened… I felt like such an idiot for letting her do that to me. And I don’t wanna put the blame on her because it takes two to do it but I really felt like I was doing the right thing… Me and her were best friends from way back… I assumed I would be able to just walk away from this. I figured she wouldn’t try to gouge me.
“That divorce drug out for probably two years… I ended up having to pay her, like, $16,000 a month in child support and another $8,000 or $9,000 in alimony. I ended up having to pay alimony for like 4 years, had to buy her a house, buy her a car. And I’m like man, this is crazy.”
NBA players make a lot of money and often that leaves them susceptible to situations like this. Curry himself should have known better than to make a decision of this nature and end up in this situation, but it’s still interesting to see how much he had to pay. Considering everything else that was going on in his career with the Knicks, it’s incredible to hear about this behind-the-situations.
