Scottie Pippen and the heady rise of the athlete turned crypto bro

Scottie Pippen is selling out his NBA legacy again, to be world champion of crypto.

In his heyday, the hall of famer was happy to be the Robin to Michael Jordan’s Batman. But time, Netflix’s Last Dance documentary and the compounding embarrassment of his public divorce from the ex-girlfriend of Jordan’s eldest son, Marcus, appear to have made him so bitter about playing second fiddle that he has apparently moved to contemplating whether the NBA’s 90s dynasty needed another hero.

“How many championships would we have won with @ElonMusk?

Pippen wondered on X. Included with the post was an AI-generated photo of a ripped Musk off the dribble, packed crowd at his back, in a Bulls jersey. The responses had users questioning Scottie Pippen’s state of mind and posting Musk’s awkward stage jumping at a Donald Trump campaign rally as proof of the X owner’s lack of athletic ability. At last check the post had more than 27m views – attention Pippen hoped to draw to his latest project: a new cryptocurrency that attempts to tokenize the basketball the Bulls used to beat the Lakers for the first of their six championships. “I think the game 5 ball that I have is very recognizable to some degree,” he told TMZ Sports, “and what we’re trying to do is make it a real-world asset.”

You may have noticed: crypto has taken US sports by storm. Stadiums, jerseys and equipment are covered in logos for different coins or exchanges – few more prominent than the Lakers home, Crypto.com Arena. Many fans use cryptocurrency to place bets and buy special privileges with their favorite teams. Increasingly, athletes are getting in on the action too, promoting the industry as if it were just another shoe or sports drink. When Odell Beckham Jr signed with the Los Angeles Rams in the middle of the 2021 season and asked to receive his estimated $750,000 base pay in crypto, the wide receiver was panned for having dodgy business sense and then roasted when the market crashed.

Or maybe Beckham knew what he was doing. Since the presidential election went for Donald Trump, who has gone from calling crypto “a scam” to vowing to make the US “the crypto capital of the planet”, bitcoin’s valuation has shot to record highs. “Soooo who said taking my Rams salary in bitcoin was dumb again,” gloated Beckham, whose $750,000 would be worth north of $1.1m now. “I think it’s the greatest thing he could possibly do,” says Glauber Contessoto, a popular crypto speculator who goes by SlumDOGE Millionaire online. “He’s taking the money and investing it immediately instead of doing what a lot of these athletes do – blow it and be broke in a couple years.”

Dallas Mavericks point guard Spencer Dinwiddie went even further: he turned himself into a digital asset. He took the $34m contract he signed with the Brooklyn Nets in 2019 and turned into a digital treasury bond. The idea was to raise $13.5m from investors plonking down $150,000 for the promise of regular interest payments and special premiums if he made good on certain contract bonuses. But when the NBA kiboshed those plans, believing they came too close to gambling, Dinwiddie was restricted to working with “accredited“ investors (read: not Joe Fan) to sell just nine tokens – and with no exchanges offering the limited supply up for trade for the moment, the stock is fundamentally worthless.

Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen during their playing days with the Bulls. Photograph: Kent Smith/NBAE/Getty Images

Therein lies the big trouble with crypto: there are no obvious mechanisms for the average punter to distinguish serious opportunities from scams. And it doesn’t help that leagues and athletes are just as likely to get got. Two years ago, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX had its name on the Miami Heat’s home arena and Major League Baseball umpire uniforms. Tom Brady also touted the platform in a Super Bowl commercial as part of a crypto ad blitz. “I’m not an expert, and I don’t need to be,” Steph Curry says in his own FTX spot.

At least he was right about the first part. After being named FTX’s global ambassador, Curry released more than 2,900 non-fungible tokens on the platform featuring digital replicas of the shoes he wore while breaking the NBA’s three-point scoring record and dedicated the proceeds to his Oakland-based nonprofit. Not long thereafter FTX went bankrupt amid allegations that its owners embezzled and misused customer funds – not least paying a combined $90m for Brady and Curry for 40 hours of promotional work, according to FTX hagiographer Michael Lewis.

In March, FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud, conspiracy and money laundering in the most notorious case of white-collar crime since the Madoff Ponzi scheme. Brady and Curry, meanwhile, are named in a class-action lawsuit brought by FTX investors who accuse the pair – and other celebrities – of endorsing a multibillion-dollar failure.

The FTX collapse is among the many reasons Contessoto urges sports stars to think twice before attaching their name to the latest crypto trend. “Nine times out of ten, they’re not very familiar with crypto,” says Contessoto, whose story was told in the 2023 documentary This Is Not Financial Advice. In the film Contessoto, a Brazilian immigrant seeking an upgrade from hard graft and a 220sq ft apartment, gambles his meager life savings on a joke cryptocurrency called Dogecoin. And after winning big in Doge, losing it all and having to build back smarter, he is especially disinclined to risk his newly earned reputation on memecoins – which are exactly what they sound like: cultural currency somehow made real. Sam Baker, a memecoin trader who also spoke to the Guardian, likens the memecoin rush to “buying a lottery ticket.”

It’s a chance game with exceptionally opaque rules that could prove even more costly for genetic lottery winners with hard-earned reputations like Pippen, who famously undersold his NBA talent before it peaked and spent much of the Bulls’ dynastic run stewing over having to play at a cut-rate price. (He should’ve bet on himself!) More often than not, Contessoto reckons, “somebody approaches [these athletes] and says, ‘Hey, I’ll give you $100,000 if you do this or promote that. Then they launch the coin or whatever and it rugs and just leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.”

As a further example, he points to Hailey Welch, AKA Hawk Tuah girl, who lent her viral fame to a memecoin and got snookered in a classic pump-and-dump grift. And because it’s her face on the hundred-million dollar ripoff, the swindlers can keep a low profile while Welch takes all the arrows. It’s enough to make you fear for poor college athletes keen to trade on their fame.

But none of crypto’s inherent risks appear to be deterring Pippen. That’s despite receiving similar backlash for promoting failed NFTs and struggling to make a market for this new coin – which, again, is based on a ball no one has thought of in more than 30 years. “I think that ball was the start of a dynasty,” Pippen told TMZ. “This ball was something very meaningful for me. Even at the moment when I grabbed it, I sort of knew that was gonna be the start of something special.”

At a crypto conference in New York in October, Pippen expressed a desire to “build a community” around the ball and further spin it off into a documentary and digital game. Michael Saylor, a crypto evangelist who notably decried Covid safety measures for the employees of his Virginia-based tech firm as “soul stealing”, is one of Pippen’s biggest cheerleaders.

Pippen brushed off the reactions to his Musk post (“I’m following my favorite comments,” he wrote) before showing off another AI image of himself and Jordan tipping off against a pair of Tesla robots with a basketball bearing his coin stock symbol. “I feel like Scottie’s heart is in the right place,” Contessoto says. “I’m sure he has a lot of people around him who claim to be crypto savvy. But these guys don’t really care if the project does well or not.”

Which is to say: the Bulls great couldn’t be a more perfect champion for big crypto’s sporting campaign, a fresh and freewheeling new era that has sellouts like Pippen well poised to hit all the marks.

Source: The Guardian