Nate Robinson Says Washington Booster Offered Him $100k To Keep Playing Football

During his SI podcast on Wednesday, former NBA veteran and Slam Dunk Champion, Nate Robinson, told a story about a booster offering him $100,000 to continue to play football when he attended Washington. Robinson played in 13 games for Washington as a freshman in 2002, recording a pair of interceptions and starting six games, before quitting to focus on basketball.

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When they fired [football head coach] Rick Neuheisel my freshman year that made it easy for me to make my decision to quit and go play basketball, which I wanted to do anyway. For my three years at UW, I had a booster offer me $100,000 per year to come back and play football because they needed Nate Robinson back on the football field because we weren’t winning any games, it wasn’t exciting.

But a booster came to me, my mom sat down and my mom was like, ‘That’s a lot of money.’ And she was looking at me like, ‘What you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I want to hoop, I don’t want to take money from a booster and not knowing if this handshake is for us to keep this money, because people don’t do nothing for free.’ And that’s what my mom taught me. What do I owe you after this? My mom was just like, ‘What do you want to do? It’s up you. This is your life, not mine.’ I told my mom I going to have to kindly say ‘no thank you, but my dream is to play basketball and earn everything that I got.’

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Here's was Washginton's statement on the matter...

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The events described by Nate Robinson had not been reported to our department in any way, and were new information to us this morning. Based on his statements it does not appear that any NCAA violations occurred, but we look forward to following up with Nate and any other relevant parties to learn more about this matter in hopes of continuing to foster a full environment of compliance within all of our athletic programs.

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(SB Nation)