Former Redskins running back Clinton Portis once lived a lavish lifestyle but just five years after announcing his retirement Portis claims he’s dead broke and blames his financial advisors for squandering a majority of his $40 million career earnings. Today, Sports Illustrated published a lengthy profile on Portis’s financial ruin since leaving the NFL.
In the piece, Portis tells the story of how he hit rock bottom in 2012 and planned to murder the financial advisors who robbed him blind during his playing career.
The men who duped him were shamed publicly and stripped of their right to work in the financial industry, but Portis was livid that they walked free while he was left to rebuild from relative financial ruin. “No jail time, no nothing,” Portis says. “Living happily ever after.
Fortune pilfered, Clinton Portis contemplated revenge under the veil of darkness. On a handful of late nights and early mornings in 2013 he lurked in his car near a Washington, D.C.–area office building, pistol at his side, and waited for one of several men who had managed a large chunk of the $43.1 million he earned with his 2,230 carries over nine NFL seasons.
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Once his helplessness gave way to rage, Portis lusted for a confrontation. He would meet this betrayer not with pleas or demands, or even blows delivered by thick fists attached to thick forearms. Bullets, he thought, were his sole means of balancing the scale.
“It wasn’t no beat up,” Portis says. “It was kill.”
Portis was eventually talked out of murder by a TV producer friend.
Portis says he was talked off the ledge by a producer he met while working on a reality show. She says she reminded Portis of his children and urged him to think about their future. He eventually forced himself to give up his gun to his mother, but was bluntly honest about how strongly he considered it:
Prepared as he was to commit murder, sacrificing his freedom and his name for revenge, he never found whom he was looking for. But what if he had caught a glimpse before coming to his senses? What if their paths had crossed, there in the darkness? Portis doesn’t hesitate: “We’d probably be doing this interview from prison.”
While Portis’s post-NFL career is tragic, thankfully he came to his senses and didn’t something that would have sent him to jail for the rest of his life.