Jose Canseco's Daughter Saying Her Dad is Broke and She Made All Her Money Modeling is the Least Surprising Revelation of All Time

If ESPN keeps making new episodes of 30 for 30 from now until the supervolcano under Yellowstone unleashes an extinction level event on us all, I'll always believe that the best, most important episode they ever did was "Broke." As the name implies, it focuses on athletes who managed to piss through all their career earnings, some of whom made tens of millions of dollars but lost it all. Two anecdotes that jump out for me: Andre Rison talking about being so competitive, he wanted to have a bigger entourage than anyone else he saw. So there'd be nights when he'd go out with a few dozen people, most of them total strangers, and be stuck with the whole tab for the entire night. Another is Sean Salisbury, who had 12 career starts from 1987-96, saying he once got an American Express bill for $100,000, and had nothing to show for it. Not one purchase. He'd just squandered it all. That episode should be required viewing for every professional athlete, at least once every season of their careers. 

I bring it up because Josie Canseco's dad is one athlete who most definitely could've used the cautionary tales told in that show:

Source - Josie Canseco, a Victoria’s Secret model and daughter of one half of the Bash Brothers, spoke out on social media on Monday about being self-made and her family’s money.

Canseco wrote in a series of since-deleted Instagram posts her family is "broke" and did not get the advance in life because she came from money.

"Everyone claiming I came from all this rich money because I'm a 'canseco' do ur research," the 26-year-old wrote Monday morning. "My 'family money' was blown by the time I was 6/7 w bankruptcy n I had to work my ass off to not only sustain my 'family name' but also pay my bills cause no one paid that s--- except me.

"My family is broke and I dont get the advance of a family that was rich."

She added that she was in debt for "years" and was making about $100-per-week when she first started her modeling career. ...

Jose Canseco starred for the Oakland Athletics, winning an MVP award in 1988 and also blowing the doors off the steroid scandal that plagued the league in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He reportedly made about $40 million from his playing career and filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

First of all, Canseco not only made $40 million in salary, back when $40 million was still considered a nice chunk of change (and not just half of what the Red Sox paid Rusney Castillo to stimulate the economy of Pawtucket, RI), he was printing money. Endorsement deals all over the place. Selling his name, image and likeness to anyone willing to pay. In the Dark Ages before social media, he was doing a 1-900 number grift on people naive enough to pay $4.99/minute to listen to him dispense daily wisdom. And "Juiced," which was the book that blew "the doors off the steroid scandal" was a best seller. Not to the fortune he was paid to get his ass kicked at Rough 'N Rowdy:

So he had to work a million times harder to squander all that generational wealth than he did to head a flyball over the right field fence:

Second, there has never been a more predictable outcome to a great athlete's life than this. Seriously. If you go back in a time machine to 1990, walk into any bar in America and announce you've come from 33 years in the future and ask random people to guess which athlete of their time will end up bankrupt, a few might name a boxer or two, because that's always happened, but 95% of them will say "Jose Canseco" without a moment's hesitation. 

There's a school of thought that says if you took all the money in the world and distributed it evenly among every human being, eventually everyone would end up with the same amount of wealth they had before you redistributed it. I don't know if I can go along with that because there's a lot of Social Darwinism in there that has been used to justify some pretty damned evil shit. But it is true that some people have an innate talent for accumulating wealth, and others can't keep a buck in their wallet if their life depended on it. And it usually does. Canseco always struck me as the latter. Like if he made another $40 mil this year, he'd be back at the bankruptcy attorney's office by 2024. "A fool and his money …" and all that. 

But first and foremost, this is about Josie Canseco. I get why she deleted the posts that outed her father's mishandling of the kind of wealth that should have set her up for life. It's embarrassing to admit your dad set fire to a mountain range of cash and it made an easy life unnecessarily difficult. 

But the larger point is what this says about Josie. Her's is a heroic tale. A journey of inspiration and courage. Of overcoming obstacles. Of meeting challenges head on and not being deterred. Of using her talents to the best of her ability, and being a bigger success than she probably would have if she grew up with all the advantages. 

So say what you will about Jose Canseco - and goodness knows I have and will continue to - there's no denying the man raised a very impressive young woman. His mistakes have become her triumphs. And I have no doubt that many years from now, she'll have a lot more money than she ever made modeling.