Matt Forte got his first signing bonus check and called his agent in a panic.
The stub said $890,000-something. He'd signed for $1.5 million. He thought the Bears had made a clerical error. His agent's response was one word, more or less: taxes. Welcome to a different bracket. And Forte — who had majored in finance at Tulane, who had sat in accounting classes, who had a father that taught him about depreciating assets at age ten — didn't see it coming.
He put it exactly right: "You can know about something but not really pay attention to it, and then you find out and it's like wow."
That's the episode. Not the tax bracket. Not the financial advisor who was selling him commission-based products, or the annuity he eventually put money into, or the Hall of Fame snub that's been quietly eating at him for eight years. The episode is about what holds when everything else moves — and what Forte figured out, slowly and sometimes the hard way, is that the foundation was always there. He just had to keep choosing it.
The scarcity mindset that actually saved him
Most rookies hit the league with one of two failure modes. The first is obvious: they spend like the money won't stop because nothing in their experience has prepared them for the idea that it will. The second is subtler — they freeze. They see the tax hit, they hear the horror stories, they understand intellectually that 78% of NFL players are broke within two years of retirement, and they bury the talent. Don't spend, don't invest, don't do anything that might go wrong. The parable of the talents, Forte called it. The one who buried his — living a scarcity mentality — created nothing and lost everything anyway.
Forte arrived at something harder to hold: scared enough of being a statistic to stay disciplined, but honest enough with himself to know that discipline without direction is just paralysis with a good story. "I was like, I don't wanna be a statistic, so I know going and spending like crazy, you're gonna be one. So if I don't, let me take one of these biblical principles — the ones who actually used what they had and went and got more, they were given more."
His dad gave him that frame, years before the NFL, through a penny stock that tanked. He bought 100 shares with his allowance. He checked on it every day. It went nowhere. His father told him it was a long game — like a seed. Forte blamed him for the tip for years. He also never forgot the lesson.
That's the inheritance that mattered. Not the 529 plan that didn't have much in it — which his dad showed him specifically so he'd understand he needed a scholarship. Not the stocks. The framework. How to think about money as a tool with a logic to it, not a reward to be consumed or a danger to be avoided.
The one scholarship offer, and why it set everything else
Forte wanted to play at Texas. At USC. At Ohio State. He was willing to leave home, willing to compete at the highest level. He got one scholarship offer. From Tulane — literally up the street from Slidell.
He said the Lord used that to keep him humble. I believe him. But I'd add something he was too gracious to say directly: it also gave him a different relationship to proving himself than the five-star recruit who arrives already validated. Forte played his whole career — ten years, more total yards than most of the guys currently on the Hall of Fame nominee list from his draft class — with something to prove, and no one handed him the proof. He had to build it himself, one game at a time, in a market that never fully gave him his flowers.
That's not a chip-on-the-shoulder story. It's a formation story. The guy who always has to prove himself develops a tolerance for being underestimated that the guy who was always celebrated usually doesn't have. Forte came out of it knowing the scoreboard mattered less than the body of work, and the body of work mattered less than the foundation underneath it.
He said something about the Hall of Fame that stuck with me. He wasn't bitter. He was genuinely baffled — he had more yards than guys who made the list, almost double what some of them did. But his framing for it was the same framing he had for everything else: "I've never been the most popular or sought after guy, but I've just been consistent. Which I think is a message in itself."
Consistent is the word nobody wants to celebrate. Consistent doesn't get the pregame feature. But consistent is also, over a long enough timeline, what separates the players who leave the game with something from the ones who don't.
The divorce rate nobody talks about enough
Forte said the professional athlete divorce rate is 80 to 85%. The national average is already 50%. He and his wife Danielle run the marriage ministry for Pro Athletes Outreach — they are literally in the room with these couples, doing the work.
His diagnosis: lack of knowledge and pride. A perfect storm. You've got 20-, 21-year-old men coming out of college with money and platform they've never had, surrounded by people who want things from them, trying to learn simultaneously how to say no, how to invest, how to manage the people around them, and how to be a partner — while also being a professional athlete, which already consumes everything you have.
The marriage breaks because the priority order gets inverted. Football first. Then kids. Then everyone else. The wife — the highest human relationship, as he put it — ends up somewhere in the middle of the stack, after the training and the recovery and the film and the obligations. By the time you retire and the football is gone, you're living with someone you've been slowly deprioritizing for ten years, and neither of you quite knows how to be a couple without the schedule that used to organize everything.
I think about that. My wife and I had a moment recently — not unlike what Forte described about the night before we recorded, where he'd been on the phone and driving and moving, said something in the wrong tone, and his wife slowed them both down. Speaking the truth in love, he called it. There's a craft to that. Most of us who played football were trained to be direct, to cut through, to say what's real and move on. That works on the field. It does damage in a marriage if you can't dial it. I'm still learning when to dial it.
PULL QUOTE: "Fame is like cologne. Smells good on you, but don't drink it." — Matt Forte
What the book is actually about
Stay in the Game has a subtitle — How to Make the Most of Every Season — and Forte was careful to say it isn't a blueprint. It's not cookie-cutter. The principles are portable; the situations aren't.
What he's really writing is a permission structure. For the college kid who got one scholarship offer and feels like he's already behind. For the rookie who got the tax bill and doesn't know what's happening to him. For the ten-year vet who's watching teammates retire and fall apart and can't quite name why he isn't. The answer, in Forte's framing, is always some version of the same thing: the foundation either holds or it doesn't, and whether it holds depends on what you built it on before the storm hit.
Hurricane Katrina was that storm for him, literally. He was a sophomore at Tulane, coming off a freshman year where he'd proven he could play — 200 yards against Army, another hundred at TCU, the whole future visible. Then a storm strengthened in the Gulf and everything stopped. He ended up on a gym floor with ninety-something teammates, on cots, in Jackson, watching the city he grew up next to disappear under water. He watched people lose homes that had been in their families for generations, lose the paperwork that proved ownership, lose any ability to reclaim what was theirs.
"Football will numb you to things emotionally," he said. "When someone gets injured, 'Hey, move it up five yards.' You're just so numb." Katrina broke through that. He had to mature emotionally in a way the sport wasn't asking him to. That maturity — the ability to actually feel the weight of what was happening around him, to not just be transactional — is what I think made him capable of building the things he built after football. The ministry work. The book. The commitment to pouring into young men in a way that actually costs him something.
What I took from this conversation — and what I'd do with it
Three things, sharper than I had them before we sat down:
- The foundation conversation has to happen at ten, not twenty-two. Forte's father started talking to him about depreciating assets and stock market mechanics when Forte was in middle school, sitting in front of a dial-up computer looking at a 529 plan that barely had anything in it. The conversation was honest and early. By the time the signing bonus arrived, Forte had a framework — imperfect, incomplete, but there. Most players don't get that conversation. The ones who do show up to the league with at least one filter between the money and the mistake. If you have kids, start talking about how money works now. Not the motivational version. The mechanical version — what assets do, what taxes take, what the difference is between consuming and building. Let them buy the bad penny stock and blame you for it. The lesson is worth more than the $100.
- Know exactly what your financial advisor is being paid to do — and who's paying them. Forte said it plainly: some financial advisors are selling products, not managing wealth. They put you in what's beneficial to them. I hit this too — I sat in cash from 2010 to 2012 partly because I didn't yet have the right team and didn't trust the ones I was talking to, which cost me real returns in a window I'll never get back. The fix isn't distrust. The fix is understanding the structure before you sign anything. Is this person fee-based or commission-based? What does their book of clients look like? What happens to them if this investment goes bad for you? Those are not rude questions. Those are the questions a grown man asks before handing someone the bag.
- What you're building toward matters more than what you're building. This is the one that's hardest to operationalize, but Forte's answer to "what's your biggest investment?" wasn't the apparel brand or the media work or the real estate. It was the marriage ministry — the couples he and Danielle sit across from every year, the young men who aren't going to end up divorced at 85% rates if Forte has anything to say about it. That's not charity separate from the financial conversation. It's the same conversation. The platform and the money are the pitcher. The question is always what you're pouring it into and whether the glass you're filling is going to hold it or drain right back out. Forte's answer to that question has been consistent since long before he had anything to pour.
The biggest price he ever paid, he said at the end of the conversation, was giving up the world. All of it — the validation, the materialism, the finest cars, the allure of fame. In exchange for what, I asked. He said: an eternal perspective.
I'm not going to paraphrase that. He said it better than I can.