The Bad Boy Detroit Pistons of the late 1980s are remembered for mostly unsavory reasons. They won two championships, but their physical style of play and feuds with major rivals from that era gave them a bad reputation.
Vinnie Johnson, nicknamed ‘The Microwave,’ provided those Pistons teams with crucial scoring off the bench. He was rarely hated for being dirty or anything of the sort, but his greatest accomplishment came after his time in the NBA.
In 1992, Vinnie Johnson retired from the league as a member of the San Antonio Spurs. He had career earnings of about $6 million, and while that was significant money, he wanted to grow it. In 1995, Johnson started his company, called the Piston Group, which made packaging supplies for automakers.
Johnson’s big break came when his company got into business with General Motors, and they switched to automotive assembly supply. The company is now worth nearly $3 billion, and Vinnie Johnson, as the CEO and Chairman of the company, is worth $420 million. His story is one of the more incredible examples of an NBA player turning their sizeable earnings into a massive fortune.
For a lot of players from the 80s and 90s, they didn’t earn the amounts that even role players in today’s NBA do. But the ones that invested in the right things at that time ended up remaining wealthy and amassing assets that have kept them rich for their whole lives.
Junior Bridgeman Is The Biggest NBA Success Story Of This Nature
Michael Jordan is famously the richest NBA player ever, he leveraged his immense brand and incredible ability to become a billionaire. LeBron James has followed in his footsteps, and even Magic Johnson and Shaquille O’Neal have built sizeable fortunes. But these were all big names in their times, players who would be considered Top 10 all-time, unlike Vinnie Johnson or Junior Bridgeman.
Ulysses ‘Junior’ Bridgeman played a similar sixth-man role to Johnson during his time in the NBA in the 1970s and 80s. His career earnings were modest, about $350,000, but he had turned it into $600 million as of 2021. Our writer, Titan Frey, did a profile on Bridgeman, documenting how he earned all of his money.
For the NBA players of today, especially the ones who aren’t earning star-level money, Vinnie Johnson and Junior Bridgeman are the men to look up to. NBA careers end pretty early by normal people’s standards, and even a decent amount of money earned in the league can be turned into generational wealth with the right idea and an interest in hustling.
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