$30K: IS THE RECESSION THAT BAD?

Lost in the furor over former USC basketball player O.J. Mayo reportedly receiving about $30,000 in cash and gifts over the past four years -- none of that is exactly, you know, legal -- is one minor, nagging detail.

Thirty-thousand dollars?

Like, that's it?

For one of the top basketball recruits in the nation?

Really?

Look, 30 large isn't chump change. But it's not quite Sultan of Brunei money, either. (Heck, it's probably not even Sultan of Brunei bar-tab money.) It won't buy you a mansion or a tricked-out Hummer. It's more like the down payment on a decent suburban family home, or a 2008 Honda Accord, or, in this case, Mayo. Which in turn suggests two things:

(a) Mayo has been literally selling himself short.
(b) The slumping economy is worse than anyone thought.

Think of it this way: Almost two decades ago, Chris Webber was one of the most sought-after prep basketball stars in the country. To secure Webber's services, Michigan booster Ed Martin gave him a reported $280,000 during his time as a Wolverine -- almost 10 times what Mayo received. And that's in 1988-93 dollars! At the front end of one of the largest economic expansions in American history! In his prime pre-professional earning years, Webber made more than the annual salary of Michigan's governor; in the here and now, Mayo allegedly parlayed his athletic celebrity into clothes, meals, airline tickets, phone service and a flat-screen television -- ho-hum items he just as easily could have obtained by maxing out a half-dozen introductory-rate credit cards, easy enough for any college student to get.

So what gives?

Maybe Mayo should have taken Econ 101. Maybe he didn't realize his value, didn't understand that if Matt Freakin' Nover could get a duffel bag of cash and a tractor in "Blue Chips," he could get so much more.

Maybe Mayo didn't see that fellow Trojan phenom Reggie Bush put out his palm and reportedly ended up with an entire house -- at the height of the housing bubble, no less -- not just a hotel room.

Alternately, it could be that Mayo grabbed as much as he could and that the professional basketball futures market has tanked like everything else. If so, bad for him. But potentially good for the rest of us. After all, that would mean the buy-in for influencing the hoops fortunes of your alma mater has never been cheaper. And with federal stimulus checks already arriving in the mail ... well, you can do the math from here.
-- Patrick Hruby

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