At 11:35 AM -0400 8/27/96, Brian D. Walrath wrote: > I just read that Jason Botterill has turned down a $500,000 signing bonus > from the Dallas stars so he can return to Michigan. > ... > It is nice to see that greed doesn't effect all players. Jason has said all > along that he wants to finish his education and appears that he will do just > that. Although many of us would have been more than happy to seem him go. Sort of a side note here - I agree that it's great that he wants to get his degree. Yet I would challenge the suggestion that a player who does decide to leave has to be greedy. A number of things could happen - for example, he could suffer a career ending injury. This happened to someone I knew when I was at RPI - he could have signed for a lot of money after RPI won the NCAA championship as some of his teammates did, but he decided to return for his senior year. Midway through, in a game at Yale, he went in one on one against a defenseman who hit him low right in the knee. Initial prognosis was that he would never skate again. That turned out to be false, and he did return to finish the season and even make it to the NHL. But with that close call, I would bet that if he had it to do over, he would have taken the money, and I believe I remember him saying so at the time. I don't believe that the contract he wound up with matched the one he could have signed the year before (although part of that was that 1985 was the year of the NHL, really Detroit, spending spree on college free agents and the teams became very conservative after the players didn't pan out right away). I sure can't blame anyone for leaving early. Whether a player decides to sign or to stay in school, everyone's decision is made based on his own circumstances. There are reasons to go and reasons to stay. My personal opinion is that because the money might not be there in a year if you get hurt or your stock drops, then if it were me and the offer was good enough, I would almost certainly take it. I don't think that's greed, rather, it seems like a sound financial decision. School is always there; not necessarily so for pro hockey and hundreds of thousands of dollars. An undergrad degree can be considered a means to an end - either a (possibly well-paying) career or an advanced degree. Here, that end is achievable without the degree. Say a college student is offered an extremely high-paying job in exchange for him agreeing to stop going to school full-time and start working for the employer. Should it matter if that employer is IBM, Peat Marwick or the NHL? And remember, there's nothing that says you have to finish your degree in four years. My best friend left school early in 1988 to play pro baseball, which he did for eight years, but for the first two years immediately following his signing, he returned to UMass in the fall to complete his degree, paid for by the team. He used it to step into a good job right after he retired last year. He and I wound up finishing our undergrad degrees about the same time - him because of leaving early to play baseball, me because I went through co-op. If his decision was one of greed, I don't know what to say about mine - since two big reasons why I opted for co-op were the ability to earn money for school and to gain experience that would help me land a good job. I haven't read the stories about Botterill, but he could be staying because he really likes Michigan, because he does want to finish his degree before embarking on a pro career, or because he thinks he can increase his value even more. But his decision to stay isn't any better or worse than decisions made by other players who do sign. It's just what is right for him based on what is important to him and his circumstances. If Botterill made the best decision for him, then I'm happy for him, but I don't feel any differently about his decision than I do about Mike Grier's and Steve McKenna's decisions to take the money and go pro. --- --- Mike Machnik [log in to unmask] *HMM* 11/13/93 ***** Unofficial Merrimack Hockey home page located at: ***** ***** http://www.tiac.net/users/machnik/MChockey/MChockey.html ***** HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.