Antoine Walker Documentary "Gone In An Instant"

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Antoine Walker

Antoine Walker has a NCAA championship, a NBA Championship, he made the All-Star team 3 times during his 15 career, he was engaged to Evelyn Lozada, had the shimmy and career earnings over $110 million.  He was even paid over $8 million by the T-Wolves and Grizzlies and I'm sure you don't even remember Walker with those teams.  What you do remember is Walker becoming the poster child for players going broke.

That poster child will soon be on a poster for an upcoming documentary called "Gone In An Instant."  The documentary will focus on the financial problems of Walker who said he spent an average of 250 to 300 thousand dollars a year just on clothes, lost over 4 million by gambling and wasted almost 9 million on his "entourage."

In a recent interview this week, Walker also talked about his ex.

"My thing with Evelyn is she reaped a lot of benefits of my wealth. And when it got tight, she chose to go a different direction. So that’s the problem that I have with Evelyn … I dated Evelyn for 10 years … So she got to reap the full benefits of the whole process. She played her part. You think someone will have your back and that’s my whole thing. It’s tough when you take care of some people and you make sure that they’re good, their family, their daughters and then they just go left field."

Lozada responded to Walker via Twitter,

“I don’t talk about you, why talk about me?! Move on. It’s been 5 years! He was still playing in the league when I chalked up the deuces and before he filed bankruptcy, so please quit with the lies. He got left because he was cheating.”

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Walker also did an interview with Scoop Jackson, who is also in the film, about the film. Here's a few highlights but make sure you read the full interview here.

Scoop: And you aren't the first person or the last athlete who is going to go through this.

Walker: There's a time and place for it. There's a time period where we all go through this first. We need to save early. It's different now. Contracts are not guaranteed, [NBA players] are only two years in guaranteed money. We're really like football players [without the signing bonuses] until you can get that max deal or that next big deal. And that's for basketball, but what I'm saying is for all sports. Start slow, build before you go out and spend. You can't spend it and get it at the same time. It's tough to do it that way.

Scoop: So to you this is beyond just a cautionary tale; it's time to learn because really situations like yours have been going on in sports too long.

Walker: Yeah, but the thing is, we are already in that mindset. Take, for example, I remember when I started going through my situation, I'm buying a house, I'm buying a Maybach -- $350,000 to $400,000 for a car. That's a home! But at least [the] house, it holds some value and I can maybe make some money back off of it. The Maybach, once I drive it off the lot, is worth about $250,000 [Walker laughs]. That's $100,000 gone. Money I can't ever get back. So it's just the small things about us being educated on that we don't really think about. I think we are being told but we are competitive and always trying to outdo each other. And those things add up to us making these bad decisions. I been through it all, I've seen it all. I'm kinda the expert in the field; I know how this goes.

Scoop: And you weren't passionate about money.

Walker: I wasn't passionate about it when I was playing; it just looked good to me on paper. I was like, "OK, we're about to make this money, we're about to chop up $400,000 and make it $2 [million] -- the numbers just made sense to me. And when [the recession] hit, the lawyers were like, "The banks want all of their money." They don't want empty lots [laugh]. The banks are not into real estate, they are into money. Dollars and cents. They don't want more property, they are like, "We not [about] to build a condo on this land [laugh]!" And that's a message I have to get across to these young players.

Scoop: What about the gambling? Your gambling rep got big out here.

Walker: That's another thing that people don't really know. The gambling thing in this whole situation was so small. And that was really one incident. Over a six-week period I lost, what, $800,000. But just the year before that, I won $800,000 in the same period of time. So when I lost the $800 [thousand], I'm like, "Oh, s---  -- I'm about to tear my credit lines up." And the casino got mad. It gets a little deeper than that. I could have gone into debt and blamed the casino saying they robbed me and things like that, but really that's on me, take my responsibility for it. And really, technically, you have to pay that money back within 45 days. So if you don't pay them back in 45 days, they can take [pause] --

Scoop: Everything!

							

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