M-CAM Founder Dr. David Martin’s Financial Literacy Program Referenced in CNN Bleacher Report Article on Tracy McGrady

Date:  Tue, 2014-12-09

Here is how Tracy McGrady is going to change the world.

He is going to teach athletes to take control of their money. He is going to make them understand what he has come to learn in the last four years, when the injuries piled up and the games played went down: that it is easy to grasp investing once you know the language. And once they have this knowledge, he will help to launch a revolution among players who have been told they are too dumb to ask the right questions.

“He is going to teach athletes to take control of their money.”

He has a plan to make this happen. It was a plan designed by a friend, Rodney Woods, who first approached him about the idea a few years ago and has been pushing him to study and visit factories and meet executives ever since.

In this plan athletes and entertainers””suddenly wealthy people like himself””will learn about minority-owned manufacturers and then invest in those companies, bringing capital and jobs to the very neighborhoods where they grew up.

The plan is more complicated, of course. It will include education and support for the athletes. It will help link those small minority-owned manufacturers with big companies, connecting, say, a carpet company in Memphis to a car company in need of floor mats. It has already involved hundreds of people in its development and will bring in thousands more when it goes fully live in December.

“I don’t know of anyone putting something together like this on this scale.”- Robert Pagliarini “I don’t know of anyone putting something together like this on this scale,” says Robert Pagliarini, a California wealth management expert who has represented athletes but is not affiliated with McGrady and Woods.

If the plan works as it should and athletes invest and the minority companies thrive, Tracy should become bigger than T-Mac ever was. He will have an empire not unlike that of Magic Johnson, who bought into neighborhoods no one would touch, building hope with his own brand of Starbucks and movie theaters. Tracy is convinced his will be bigger.

He can become, as David Martin, a Virginia trade and patent expert who is a key adviser to Woods, says, “The first NBA player who is a half-a-billion-dollar industrialist.”

“How many athletes is [Magic] saving?” Woods asked in his first pitch to McGrady. “What has Magic ever done for you? Did he show the athletes how to be successful? You have to show the athlete how it’s done.”

Tracy wants to show them. He wants to tell them how naive they are when they blindly hand their future to advisers without knowing where their money goes. He wants them to see how he has managed to keep his wealth intact by not spending foolishly and how when he did””like the time he bought his own plane””he extracted himself from those mistakes.

He can become “the first nba player who is a half-a-billion-dollar industrialist.”- David Martin

He wants them to hear the words of CleRenda, who told him back when his career was falling apart, “Think about the end before the beginning.”

He does not need to be T-Mac even as T-Mac beckons him to the court, tempting him with a taste of what he has missed and a final chance at reclaiming those games lost to the aching back and throbbing knee.

“It’s like walking away from somebody you love,” CleRenda says.

Only now he has a new love.http://thelab.bleacherreport.com/tracymcgrady/