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Before Nate Robinson’s decade-long career in the NBA, the bouncy point guard was a football player. Robinson originally enrolled at Washington on a football scholarship. His freshman year, he played all 13 games for the Husky football team as a cornerback, intercepting two passes and making 34 tackles on the season. Most notably, Robinson made a crucial fourth-quarter interception in Washington’s triple-overtime upset of No. 3 Washington State in the Apple Cup.
After his freshman season in 2002, Robinson would never put on another helmet, despite intense pressures and monetary incentives from the Washington elite. In his new Sports Illustrated podcast, “Holdat,” which he co-hosts with former NBA player Carlos Boozer, Robinson claims a UW booster offered him $100,000 a year to continue his football career.
“When they fired Rick Neuheisel my freshman year, that made it easy for me to make my decision to quit and go play basketball, which I wanted to do anyway,” Robinson recalled. “For my three years at UW, I had a booster offer me $100,000 per year to come back and play football because they needed Nate Robinson back on the football field because we weren’t winning any games, it wasn’t exciting.”
“But a booster came to me, my mom sat down and my mom was like, ‘That’s a lot of money,'” Robinson said. “And she was looking at me like, ‘What you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I want to hoop, I don’t want to take money from a booster and not knowing if this handshake is for us to keep this money, because people don’t do nothing for free.’ And that’s what my mom taught me. What do I owe you after this? My mom was just like, ‘What do you want to do? It’s up to you. This is your life, not mine.’ I told my mom I was going to have to kindly say no thank you, but my dream is to play basketball and earn everything that I got.”
Robinson’s personal anecdote comes in the wake of Arizona men’s basketball head coach Sean Miller reportedly offering projected top-5 NBA Draft pick DeAndre Ayton $100,000 to come to Arizona.
[h/t Complex]