began a second career as a financial adviser. But forget about yachts and fancy suits.
: Ballers Who is the REAL Spencer Strasmore? Random but, I just noticed it on this week’s end credits, but there’s an associate producer on the show named Spencer Strasmore. From what I gathered from IMDb, he’s worked as an assistant to Stephen Levinson (the creator of the show) for a few years.
Who is the REAL Spencer Strasmore? Random but, I just noticed it on this week’s end credits, but there’s an associate producer on the show named Spencer Strasmore. From what I gathered from IMDb, he’s worked as an assistant to Stephen Levinson (the creator of the show) for a few years.
The NFL’s Real Spencer Strasmore Is the Anti-‘Ballers’. After retiring from football in 2010, All-Pro defensive end Patrick Kerney began a second career as a financial adviser.
The closest correlations we have in the real world to Spencer Strassmore’s transition from pro-athlete to pro-athlete financial adviser are athletes who become agents, as well as the common switch from pro-athlete to pro-athlete commentator.
Who plays Spencer Strasmore in Ballers?
As a former player who now helps counsel NFL guys on the best ways to handle their cash, Kerney’s situation seems a lot, on the surface, like that of Spencer Strasmore, the lead character played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the series Ballers, which airs on Ringer initial investor HBO. (Johnson played at the University of Miami himself.) Strasmore is a retired NFL linebacker who is forging a second career in wealth management, but the qualities that make him a lively, charismatic television presence—his disarming smile; his constant clashes with a sardonic, greedy boss; his shiny vests; his ambition and opportunism—aren’t always what define a reliable, trustworthy financial adviser in real life.
Like Strasmore, he was an unstoppable force on the field and a fan favorite in his playing days, but that’s about where the similarities between him and the HBO character end. Strasmore is a perpetual bachelor who yacht-hops and gallivants around Miami and Las Vegas, rarely back at the office engaging in buzzkill drudgery like rebalancing portfolios or surveying spending reports. Kerney lives in Connecticut with Lisa and their four kids and recently earned a Connecticut property and casualty license, enabling him to liaise with his firm’s insurance clients in addition to the work he does as a registered investment adviser. Strasmore does indeed look good in a suit, and he knows it, peacocking around in loud custom threads; Kerney delivers presentations while wearing sensible half-zip sweaters. Strasmore’s own finances are in such shambles that he is reduced to borrowing money from his own clients; one of Kerney’s first rules of thumb is that you should never give money to anyone whose own books aren’t in transparent, impeccable order.
Stories of bankruptcy and fraud and implosion are what often dominate headlines—the stuff of Ballers drama, indeed. “You hear all these horror stories about athletes mismanaging their money,” says Jamize Olawale of the Oakland Raiders, who attended the Personal Finance Boot Camp in 2016 with his wife. “You just never know who has your best interests in mind.” What you don’t hear much about are the players like Mendenhall, who have early influencers in their lives who give them beneficial, lasting advice; or the various players who, Kerney says, enjoy positive outcomes from their conservative, plain-vanilla investment decisions. “They’ve been boringly slogging along in public securities, by doing a high percentage of their stuff in indexes,” he says. “It doesn’t make for a story.”
The way Kerney sees it, every dollar spent by a player today—on lavish vacations, on mutual fund fees, on cufflinks, on The Next Facebook—is a dollar that could have been stashed in the stock market. Assuming a growth rate of 7.5 percent, which he considers to be a conservative proxy for long-term stock market returns based on historical averages, a dollar today grows into $77 over a player’s remaining lifespan of, say, 60 years.
Kerney knows that not all expenditures are silly or selfish, that many are the result of well-meaning charitable impulses. The story of a player who makes it to the pros and buys his mother a house as a thank-you for all she’s done is a common one that is often celebrated, and understandably so. But Kerney likes to remind players that they also might have a future family to take into consideration, and that if they want to put their future great-grandkids through college one day, that begins now. (Kids are freakin’ expensive, as Kerney has pointed out on Twitter .)
HBO. In one scene in Ballers’ first season, Reggie, the friendvisor to star defensive tackle Vernon Littlefield, tries to wring money out of Strasmore in exchange for getting out of his way.
In April, Lisa Kerney, a SportsCenter anchor, sent a tweet to her husband Patrick, a former top NFL defensive end, about their 5-year-old son. “We may need to review the whole ‘investing’ idea again,” she wrote, attaching a photo of their kid’s homemade piggy bank: a Ziplock bag containing a tiny fistful of spare change and labeled “GUMBALL MONEY ONLY.” Patrick ’s response was part proud parent, part personal-finance wonk, and entirely him.
Who is Spencer Strasmore?
Spencer Strasmore is a retired athlete-turned-financial manager at Anderson Financial Management and the main protagonist of Ballers .
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He played college football at the University of Miami where he was a 2 time All American, set a school record for most sacks in a season and career on the way to winning a National Championship in football and as a member of the Track & Field program. Spencer declared early for the NFL Draft.
Spencer still performed well, making 3 trips to the Pro Bowl and recording double digit sack totals each season with the Saints, but battled through some severe knee injuries and he retired to little fanfare for someone of his stature after a 14 year illustrious career.
