NON-PAYMENT WATCH

I have spent years getting late night messages from athletes stranded in far away lands, holding contracts that may as well be coloring book pages. The money was promised….but it’s not coming. And when they ask around about what to do, you are left on "read”.

The agent goes quiet because he wants the next placement. The league goes quiet because it's their league they are trying to protect. And the player goes quiet because he is convinced that opening his mouth is a one way ticket to never getting signed again. So the club sits on the money, waits him out, knows he will fly home broke before he fights, and then runs the exact same play on the next athlete next season.

I am done being quiet about it. Starting now, every Monday, this is Non-Payment Watch.

Here is how I am kicking it off, and I am not making a word of it up. FIBA has a tribunal called the BAT. A player takes a club there, the tribunal rules the club owes him money, and if the club still refuses to pay, FIBA publicly bans them from signing new players. They post the list. Anybody on earth can read it…but almost nobody does.

There are close to forty Turkish clubs sitting on that sanctioned list right now, banned for refusing to honor tribunal awards that a tribunal already said they owed. Some are repeat customers with four and five bans stacked on top of each other like a Cluck U order I forgot to pick up. One country.

And the ugly truth is that the list only captures the athletes who filed, won, and still got stiffed. It leaves out everybody who never filed, everybody who took ten cents on the dollar just to get a flight home, everybody who swallowed it and moved on. That number is the floor…the real one is worse.

I am not naming individual clubs today off my own mouth. When I name one, the receipt comes stapled to it. FIBA's list is the receipt for today.

From here we build the rest the right way, verified and documented, with nothing posted that I cannot back up.

So here is the standing deal, every Monday from now until I lose my voice. Owed money overseas? Send me the details and the docs. We verify everything. We protect the athletes who come forward. And I will not post a single thing I cannot stand behind.

Nobody else does this because the relationships scare them. They have never scared me.

Pull up a fucking chair.