It is in no way rare for recently drafted NFL players to buy members of their family houses or cars or any number of other niceties.
It is rare, however, for those gifts to come as a result of a direct demand from said family members - usually the player is just attempting to do something nice for the people who helped them in their quest to get to the point of being drafted.
For former NFL cornerback Phillip Buchanon, being drafted 17th-overall by the Oakland Raiders in the 2002 NFL Draft went quickly from a moment of pure elation to utter disbelief.
Why?
His mother promptly called him after the draft demanding exactly $1 million, according to FOX Sports, something which Buchanon details in his new book, "New Money: Staying Rich."
"Soon after the draft, she told me that I owed her a million dollars for raising me for the past 18 years. Well, that was news to me. If my mother taught me anything, it's that this is the most desperate demand that a parent can make on a child. 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. There is no financial arrangement. If you get old and infirm, and your kids are around to help you out at that point, then you're lucky. It's not written in the social contract. 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. 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."
Buchanon's book delves deeply into the exhilarating and oftentimes terrifying world of being a professional athlete. He wrote it, in part, he said, because he wants to educate the players who will follow in his footsteps.
"When I got to the NFL, I was all dollars and no sense," Buchanon said recently, per FOX Sports. "I want to make sure the next generation of athletes doesn't make the same mistakes."
Buchanon, who was adamant that a lot of the financial issues he faced both during and after his time in the league were born of his own stupidity, refers to his dependent family members as Adult Abusers - sycophants who were always dealing with one "family emergency" or another - his mother chief amongst them.
"My mother had said my debt to her was a million dollars before, but this time she was more serious than ever. If you do the math, one million dollars divided by 18 years of raising me was approximately $55,555.55 a year in restitution. Except, at age 17 I decided to move out of my mom's house, choosing to live with a close friend and his father because I no longer felt secure in my own home. Why, you ask? Because my mother let people come in and out of our house and take what they wanted. So technically, even if we went by her logic, I only owed her $944,444.44 for her services over 17 years.
"Is it petty that I'm knocking a year off her calculation? The fact that I have written this paragraph enrages me, merely because I'm entertaining the thought that her argument had any logic at all. Maybe if I had become super rich, I could have written the check and been done with it. But, like blackmail, there is never any end, is there?"
After buying his mother a house, Buchanon says he suggested she sell the one in which he grew up. She did not. Instead, she rented it to his aunt, collecting the money from her rent while simultaneously living in a house completely paid for by Buchanon.
"Anger built up inside me as my mother collected rent from our old house and never offered a cent to offset the expenses. It got to a point that I had to kick her boyfriend out. She accused me of messing up her life. What she didn't see was that her boyfriend was pimping her and me out. He wasn't bringing anything to the table, just taking."
In the end, Buchanon says he learned an incredibly valuable - if expensive - lesson.
