What happens to elite athletes when their careers end

The NFL 52-man rosters have been pretty much solidified for the 2003 NFL season, but one can only wonder what happens to the guys that don't make the team or the practice squad?

I recently read about Cleveland Browns quarterback Kerry Holcombe working at Anheuser-Busch while he was frequently on and off the Tampa Bay Buccaneers roster earlier in his career.

Holcombe is now ones of the leaders of a very proficient Browns' offense, so his days at the beer foundry or stacking beer coolers at grocery stores are probably a distant memory.

However, legend has it that the guys cut from NFL rosters will be working at United Parcel Services, or UPS as it is more commonly known.

I never thought too much about this until I needed to get a summer job there a few summers ago and saw a UPS ad that said flexible schedule for students and decided to look into it.

I went to fill out the paper work in Jackson, Mich, which was inconveniently 45 miles away from the UPS station where I planned to work in Ypsilanti, Mich.

The man that greeted me and assigned me to a line of work, instantly looked like a football player to me. He was about 6'3" and 250 pounds, with forearms like Popeye.

The other major give away was that he had a big shiny gold ring that said University of Toledo MAC Champions.

Being a sports freak, or geek you might say, I was more interested in his football past than anything there was to come in my future summer's work.

He told me he was a former linebacker for the Rockets of U. of Toledo and that he played briefly for the Cleveland Browns.

He wouldn't elaborate more than that for some reason. Maybe, he was too focused on his job at UPS as an employment manager for all of the UPS stations in Southeast Michigan and Northwest Ohio, or maybe he was disappointed in not having a longer career in the NFL.

Probably, a little of both I'd say.

I've long forgotten the guy's name and never did get the job at UPS because we couldn't work out a schedule that would work with my class load that summer.

However, the guy was very nice and it was more the fault of the Ypsilanti regional manager that I didn't get work there, not his.

Still, I left UPS thinking, wow, that line that NFL broadcasters say towards the end of preseason, "We'll see who'll make the roster and who will be delivering packages for UPS," had a whole new relevance to me.

Also, all too recently, my brand new auto insurance agent, John Guess, told me about his minor league baseball career that he had in the Detroit Tigers system in the late '70s, early '80s.

He was a left fielder who used a short bat, which he showed me, to increase his bat speed. He played with many of the Tigers' greats in the '80s, such as Alan Trammel, Lou Whitaker, Jack Morris, Tommy Brookens, Dan Petry and Kirk Gibson.

The list goes on to include former Florida Marlins, Colorado Rockies, and Pittsburgh Pirate managing great Jim Leyland, who was a popular minor league manager in the Tigers system for many years.

Guess's career ended as he felt his chances of making the big leagues were becoming slight and he wanted to focus on his marriage.

He would eventually earn a bachelor's degree at Eastern Michigan University long before becoming my auto insurance agent.

This got me to thinking. What happens to all of the other athletes seeking a professional sports career that don't make it?

I spent two weeks at the Detroit Lions training camp covering them for a magazine that I freelance for and witnessed three players that the Lions drafted -- Zach Wilson, Travis Anglin and Brandon Drumm -- and veteran offensive lineman, Tony Semple, who were all got cut from the roster.

This displayed that even on a horrible team such as the Detroit Lions, there is stiff athletic competition.

At my years at the University of Michigan, I never saw an athlete in any of my engineering classes I can tell you that much.

Matter of fact, most of the Michigan athletes, and a lot of college athletes that I've noticed when their bio is flashed during games on TV, seem to major in Kinesiology or sports management.

Kinesiology is a study of muscles and their movement, so most likely they are learning to be athletic trainers, while those in sports management might be considering that sports' field someday.

Those classes were often taught in one of the campuses student fitness centers, meaning if they were taught there, they had to be to easy. You couldn't have had a brain straining class when there were co-eds in spandex doing aerobics or Tae Bo in the next room.

Whatever happens to these athletes after their college careers are done, they are grown people that make their own decisions and I am not judging them on what classes they took or if they went to college.

Also, I am not enamored by each college's athlete graduation rates either because if most of us had the slightest chance to have a professional sports' career, we'd all probably make sacrifices to focus more on our sports careers.

Your life is what you make of it and it's up to each athlete to make their own decisions. Hopefully, they make the right ones along the way.