Grab the Brass Ring: The Bankruptcy of Charlie Batch

Pittsburgh Steelers backup QB Charlie Batch filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2010, after his real estate venture defaulted on a $1.15M mortgage with Dollar Bank, according to a story in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.  Twenty-five properties held by Batch Development Company, Inc. associated with the mortgage default were placed into receivership.  Court papers show that Batch reported a $6M delta between his assets and liabilities at the time of his bankruptcy filing.

That’s news you may not have known, but it’s still old news.

Last Friday, however, a federal bankruptcy judge lifted an automatic stay that will allow Primerock Real Estate Fund LP, one of Batch’s creditors, to pursue its $820K claim against the two-time Super Bowl winner.  Among the remedies available to Primerock is the option to seize collateral that backed the debt.  And among that collateral are Batch’s two Super Bowl rings, which over time have been valued in a range somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000.

It was not second-string Batch himself, nor the easy lure of celebrity bankruptcy, that gave rise to a slew of soft news articles and blogs on the subject in the last week.  It was the inviolable nature of the rings themselves, not unlike Dorothy’s claret-colored pumps in the Wizard of Oz, which seemed to capture the attention of media-types.  The SB rings and the ruby slippers sparkle.   They both—at least according to a 2010 NFL on FOX commercial—possess miraculous transportive faculties.

At the end of the day, bling-ability may be boundless.  As Salman Rushdie once wrote:

“See: behind bullet-proof glass, the ruby slippers sparkle.  We do not know the limits of their powers.  We suspect that these limits may not exist.”

And so for a brief moment this week the talk of the town (in Football Bankruptcy Land) was Charlie’s rings.  And early reports that he might lose them (to the soundtrack of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”):

Exchanging all precious gifts/
But you’d better take your diamond ring/
You’d better pawn it babe.

It now appears that Batch is working on a payment agreement with Primerock that may allow him to retain the rings.

To me, the moral of the story is that poor or unlucky financial decisions affect many Americans, irrespective of fame.  Or that “news” is not so much a collection of facts (lots of workaday people file for bankruptcy without making headlines), but instead a concoction of myth (the inscrutability of the rings).

Or that even though I find Batch’s situation unfortunate, my Green Bay Packers still won the Super Bowl.