Ja Morant’s father, Tee Morant, recently admitted on his own podcast that he rejected an offer of $750,000 from an agent to represent his son just so that he could be by his side instead and not risk his NCAA eligibility.
He said this while he was discussing NIL earnings on his podcast in an episode with a former NBA player, Brandon Jennings. Jennings revealed his struggles to raise funds to facilitate a basketball career and how people were asking him for his money back when he went to Italy instead of the NBA in 2008.
Following this, Tee Morant admitted how he “went through it but didn’t go through” the same thing as Jennings when his own son was in college, getting ready to be drafted to the NBA.
“Yeah. Like it was people offering crazy money… My brother and sister-in-law, my wife, and I were Ja’s back, and if you were trying to recruit my son, Ja channelled everything through us.
“So it was people that were saying, ‘Okay, I’ll give you $500,000 to represent your son right now.’ He’s at Murray. My biggest fear was that I didn’t want to be the reason why Ja wasn’t eligible. No NIL then.”
“But I said nah, I’m not going to do that because I’m thinking, okay, if you’re paying me $500,000, how much are you trying to make on my son on the back end? I told him no.”
“He called back like 30 minutes later, like, ‘Okay, $750,000.’ I’m like, ‘Nah, we’re gonna go through this process, as a group.’ Yeah. You know, so we never took anything. Never.”
Ja Morant was the second overall pick by the Memphis Grizzlies in 2019, who stormed into the NBA world with his elite athleticism, despite being from Murray State University, a college not very famous for its basketball program.
He could have gone first overall that year if not for Zion Williamson, who seemed like a generational talent back then. Morant ended up winning the Rookie of the Year over Williamson while averaging 17.8 points, 7.3 assists, and 3.9 rebounds in his first NBA season.
The NIL compensation for basketball players in college was initiated in 2019 and began its implementation in 2021. Before that, they were not receiving any share of the salary or revenue from endorsements or any other use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL).
Therefore, Tee Morant admitted that he stood by his family, and even when he was offered a lot of money to take a step back in his son’s professional career, he refused to do so, even when he had a lot of incentive to keep his mouth shut.
If the news came out back then that he took any money, his son could lose everything he had worked for so far in his basketball career and risk his career tanking with potential consequences like suspension of eligibility and recruitment restrictions.
Tee Morant gave up a potential basketball career himself when his Ja Morant’s mother became pregnant with him. He stayed back instead of going overseas and became a barber. This shows that the All-Star grew up in a very closely knit home, and his father has sacrificed a lot to bring him where he is today.
