Travis Kelce has made more than $70 million throughout his career in the National Football League, but he still remembers how he spent his first paycheck.
“I had my eyes on a pair of size 13 Nike Air MAG ‘Marty McFlys’ — the coolest shoes that I’d ever seen in my life,” Kelce said in his weekly “New Heights” podcast in May. “As soon as I got my check, I immediately went online and sourced them.”
Kelce says he spent around $10,000 on the limited-edition sneaker, which are replicas of the futuristic shoes Michael J. Fox wore in “Back to the Future Part II.” Only 1,500 pairs were ever released.
“I’ve always been a big Nike guy and then you know, watching ‘Back to the Future’ so many frickin’ times — goddamn it, those were sweet,” Kelce said on the podcast, which is co-hosted with his brother and Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce.
The sneakers turned out to be a good investment, as they now routinely sell for $20,000 to $30,000 on reseller and auction websites.
Even so, Kelce said he was frivolous with money during his rookie year. “I spent way too much money in clubs, and I was avoiding the rent lady,” he said. All he has to show for his first season as a pro are “some of my favorite shoes.”
It wasn’t that way for long. Following a five-year $46 million contract extension in 2016, Kelce signed another four-year extension in 2020, worth just over $57 million. He also makes an estimated $3 million a year outside of football, Forbes reports. As of fall 2023, Kelce has an estimated net worth of $30 million, according to Insider.
Kelce isn’t the only athlete to recall their first big pay day. Here’s a look at how other top athletes spent their first paychecks.
When he was 20, Shaquille O’Neal blew through $1 million within hours of receiving a check for his first million-dollar trading card contract.
He bought a $150,000 Mercedes Benz for himself, then another one for his dad, followed by a smaller $100,000 one for his mom. The rest of the money went toward paying off his mom’s house and doing “what all the homeboys do — gotta buy rings and diamonds and earrings and this and that,” he told Business Insider in 2017.
At that time, he didn’t really understand how taxes worked, and he wasn’t carefully tracking how much he spent. A bank manager had to tell him that he was around $50,000 “in the hole.”
“After that, I said, ’You know what? I need to get me a business manager,” O’Neal said.
Since then, O’Neal has become a successful investor, with early stakes in companies such as Google and Lyft. In 2016, Forbes estimated his net worth at over $400 million.