Former NFL player Phillip Buchanon reveals mother demanded he pay $1 million for raising him

A former NFL player has revealed that his mother demanded he pay her one million dollars as the cost for ‘raising him for the last 18 years’ after he was drafted into the professional league.

Phillip Buchanon was a first-round draft pick for the Oakland Raiders, and seventeenth overall, when his mother made the request in 2002.

Buchanon, who also played for the Houston Texans, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Detroit Lions and Washington Redskins before retiring in 2011, discussed the incident in his recently released book New Money: Stay Rich.

‘If my mother taught me anything, it’s that this is the most desperate demand that a parent can make on a child,’ he wrote in an exclusive excerpt released to Fox Sports.

‘The covenant of having a child is simply that you give your child everything possible, and they owe you nothing beyond a normal amount of love and respect.’

But after years, Buchanon said he realized that his mother and family members were different – especially when money became involved.

He told Fox Sports that he wrote the book to make sure ‘the next generation of athletes doesn’t make the same mistakes’ he did when he finally got paid the big NFL bucks.

Buchanon said he followed the ‘unwritten NFL New Money Millionaire’ rule and instead bought his mother a brand new big house, as well as paid for all her finances that did not include food or entertainment.

But he soon realized that gift would come with its own problems.

Instead of selling her old house, like he advised, Buchanon’s mother rented it to his aunt. This left Buchanon paying for mortgage and maintenance payments for both houses for seven years.

Buchanon asks rookies to consider certain questions before buying their family ‘big-ticket purchases’, such as whether the family member would be able to make the payments if they couldn’t, or if the family member expected them to pay for upkeep 20 years later.

The former football star said his mother never offered him the money she made from her sister’s rent, and later blamed him for ‘messing up her life’ after he kicked her boyfriend out of the house he paid for.

‘What she didn’t see was that her boyfriend was pimping her and me out,’ he wrote. ‘He wasn’t bringing anything to the table, just taking.’

Buchanon said he eventually became fed up and told his mother he would stop paying for her new house’s upkeep after he paid off the mortgage.

When his mother said the house was too large for her to afford the maintenance, he offered to buy her a smaller house that he would pay for with cash and put in his name, protecting her from loans and giving his brothers and sisters a stable home.

Instead, his mother asked for $15,000 in cash. She ended up losing the home.

‘She told me that if the new house didn’t have space for two living room sets, she didn’t want it,’ Buchanon writes.

Buchanon said he moved out of his house at 17 because he no longer ‘felt secure’ in a home where his mother let people ‘come in and out of the house and take what they wanted’.

And the football player said he soon realized it wouldn’t just be his mother asking him for money, but his relatives as well, who often had ‘family emergencies’.

Buchanon said at first he would just write his relatives a check, which he said would ‘always get cashed’ even as the problems never got fixed.

That’s when Buchanon said he started offering to pay for the ’emergencies’ directly to the mechanics or companies the money was supposedly owed to, only to have his relatives say ‘forget about it’.

Buchanon said he spent ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ before learning how to deal with his family’s monetary demands.

But he said it was the way his mother treated him that ended up teaching Buchanon ‘the most important lessons in life’.

‘The mothers and fathers of the world have been rearing their kids for generations – in every culture imaginable – and it’s a one-way street when it comes to money,’ he writes.

‘If they pay you back someday, and you really are going through hard times, then that’s just a bonus, a gratuity for being a great mother or father.’

Source: The DailyMail