While still in the NBA, Junior Bridgeman invested $150,000 in a small Milwaukee cable company; about five years later, its sale returned roughly $700,000

Most accounts of athlete wealth follow a familiar script: the signing bonus, the shoe deal, the oversized house. Bridgeman’s path looked different. Milwaukee Bucks owner Jim Fitzgerald asked his players whether they wanted to buy into a local cable television operation he had recently purchased, and Bucks forward Ulysses “Junior” Bridgeman said yes. According to ESPN’s reporting on Bridgeman’s rise, in 1978, three years into his NBA career, he committed to a $150,000 stake, paid over a few years rather than in a lump sum.

About five years later, around 1983, when Fitzgerald sold the company, Bridgeman received a $700,000 check, which ESPN describes as the first financial win of his life. Separate reporting from Financial Planning puts the profit on that deal at roughly $550,000. That deal serves as the starting point, but it’s not the most interesting part of the story. This is a story about slow money, small failures, and one uncomfortable question: what does it actually take to hold on to what you have?

A paycheck that shrank on arrival


Bridgeman wasn't handed a fortune. According to ESPN, his first-season salary was roughly $140,000, paid in two installments. After taxes and agent fees, his first paycheck came to about $55,000. That figure describes his rookie-year pay, not the cable deal: the $150,000 cable commitment came three years later and was paid in installments over several years, not funded out of a single paycheck. In an age when finance content tends to reward whoever called the overnight winner, a stake bought in installments with a five-year wait is almost quaint. There was no ticker to refresh and no viral thread, just patience built into the deal. It’s worth saying plainly that the $150,000 figure was close to, though not identical to, his first-year salary of $140,000: a reminder that this wasn’t a coffee-budget bet. The takeaway isn’t “be like Junior.”

Rich isn't the same as safe

High pay doesn't guarantee anything. According to Kyle Carlson, Joshua Kim, Annamaria Lusardi, and Colin Camerer, authors of the 2015 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper titled "Bankruptcy Rates among NFL Players with Short-Lived Income Spikes," bankruptcy filings among the retired players they looked into began climbing shortly after players left the league, and continued at a substantial rate for at least 12 years. The same paper found that neither a player's total earnings nor the length of his career changed those rates.

Bridgeman's next move wasn't a clean win. Per the ESPN report, he opened a Wendy's in Brooklyn with former NBA forward Paul Silas, and the two put in about $100,000 at first. It failed, and Bridgeman said they lost about $150,000 altogether. The next year, in 1988, ESPN reports, he put about $750,000 of his remaining NBA savings into five Wendy’s locations in Milwaukee. Some reports put his eventual net worth as high as $600 million; more recent reporting from early 2025 puts it closer to $1.4 billion. The order matters here: the expensive lesson came before the big bet.

Why it hits differently in 2026

According to the Federal Reserve Board's survey of U.S. households, 73 percent of adults were doing okay financially or living comfortably in 2025. Young adults were among the groups that saw meaningful declines. The same fact sheet reports that 35 percent of non-retirees felt that their retirement savings plan was on track, and that 49 percent of adults under 30 were living with a parent.

Set against those numbers, Bridgeman’s $150,000 stake, committed in 1978 and paid back in 1983, looks like it came from a different financial planet, and in an important sense it did: it was funded by an NBA salary, something almost none of today’s young adults have access to. That gap is real, and it’s worth naming rather than waving away. What does carry over isn’t the dollar figures but the sequence: learn the business, expect to pay tuition in mistakes, and let time do the work. None of that requires a franchise or a jump shot, but it also doesn’t erase the fact that Bridgeman had a financial runway most people in 2026 simply don’t.