It’s not very easy to get through life without a job. Unless you’ve lucked into independent wealth because of family money or tripping over a giant gold nugget at some point, you need to work. The lucky amongst us can get jobs we enjoy that allow us to pay the bills and feel good about what we do. Most people just work to survive, though.
Once you get a job, keeping the job is a whole different ball game. According to one study, 40% of people will be fired from a job in their lifetime. There can be almost endless reasons for losing your job, but some are far more unpredictable than others.
10. BJ Tyler’s NBA Career was Killed By an Ice Pack
For the lucky few people in the world who are talented enough to be professional athletes, the sky seems to be the limit. If you’re a good enough basketball player, you can make millions of dollars on a contract, plus millions more in sponsorships. You can play for a decade in the NBA and be rich beyond your wildest dreams for the rest of your life if you’re responsible with the money. But the “ifs” in those sentences carry a lot of weight.
BJ Tyler had signed a $6 million contract with the Toronto Raptors. From the outside, it looked like he would have become a pretty big star in the game, and his future was laid out on a clear path before him. But then, as with too many athletes, an injury sidelined him and made him retire from the game completely. What’s weird about this is how it happened.
Tyler wasn’t hurt on the court, or even off the court. He had a minor problem with his ankle one day and put an ice pack on it to reduce swelling. And then he fell asleep. With the ice left untended on his ankle, it caused permanent nerve damage which ruined his ability to play basketball. He could no longer move with any speed, and his career was over.
9. Howard the Duck Ruined the Career of More Than One Person
Long before the MCU was a thing, Marvel was trying its hand at movies for lesser-known properties. Captain America, Nick Fury, Dr. Strange, The Punisher, and more all had movies before Robert Downey Jr. ever donned the mantle of Iron Man. And the most infamous film of all was 1986’s Howard the Duck.
The movie is most well-known today for being a giant cinematic failure. It was about an anthropomorphic duck from outer space who has a kind of sexy scene with Leah Thompson, the mom from Back to the Future. It was pretty weird all around. Most audiences hated it, but a few people still love it to this day.
It was such a big bomb that the studio never recovered. In fact, it’s one of the few movies that you can point to which has been blamed for ruining the careers of at least three different people.
Thompson once mentioned she felt the movie was such a big bomb that it mostly tanked her career. Director Willard Huyck never made another movie again after its failure. Frank Price, the president of Universal Pictures, resigned within a month with speculation being that the poor box office of Howard the Duck was the primary cause.
8. Director John McTiernan Wiretapped Coworkers
The 1990 movie Die Hard has stood the test of time as one of the great action movies. People still love it to this day, and if you go online around Christmas every single year people will debate whether it qualifies as a Christmas movie.
Director John McTiernan seemed like he would have been poised to continued the upward trajectory of his career which began taking off with Predator and continued on with other hits like The Hunt for Red October and Die Hard with a Vengeance.
Unfortunately, make Tiernan derailed his own career when he decided he should illegally wiretap some of his co-producers after the 2002 dud Rollerball. McTiernan ended up going to jail thanks to the scandal, which included him lying to the FBI about it. The act ruined his Hollywood career and you can imagine few in the business would trust him again after that.
7. A Model From a Plastic Surgery Meme Says It Ruined Her Life
Meme culture has been big on the internet for years, but did you ever stop to think about the people behind the memes? Sometimes a website will track down the “star” of a member and make a cute story out of it. Sometimes it’s not so cute. That’s what happened with Heidi Yeh, the model featured in a plastic surgery meme.
Yeh originally signed on to make an ad for a Taiwanese plastic surgery clinic. The ad features her, a man, and three kids. The idea behind the ad was that the mother and father looked a little different from the children because of plastic surgery. The text of the ad was “The only thing you’ll ever have to worry about is how to explain it to the kids.”
The ad was not supposed to extend beyond the local area being served by the clinic. However, once it got online, someone turned it into a meme and it spread around the world. It started traveling with a story that it was real, and Yeh was getting a divorce because her husband saw their ugly kids and decided she had defrauded him by not disclosing that she’d had surgery.
Because everyone believed the story was real, she lost modeling jobs. Companies thought not only had she had plastic surgery, but that she was this horrible person who had lied to her husband.
6. Colonel Sanders Ended His Law Career By Fighting in Court
Despite dying in 1980, most people around the world still know the face of Colonel Sanders thanks to his restaurant Kentucky Fried Chicken. During his lifetime, the colonel was what polite people would describe as a colorful character. For instance, he once shot a man for painting over one of his advertisements.
For a time, Colonel Sanders worked as a lawyer. It’s hard to say if he was any good, but word is he once got into a fight in a courtroom with his own client. There were no serious legal repercussions for the colonel, but it put an end to his law career and allowed him to focus on chicken, so maybe it was all for the best.
5. Larry Bird Ended His Career by Building a Driveway for His Mom
In the 1980s, Larry Bird was one of the biggest names in basketball and is still often considered among the top 10 to ever play the game. He was a 12-time all-star; he won a gold for the US Olympic team, and he was making millions of dollars. It’s been said he had earned as much as $80 million and when he left the game in 1992, he left $24 million on the table.
It’s not that his career had come to a natural end; instead, Bird injured himself and had to retire from the game. His back injury is one of the worst in basketball history because he was in his prime at the time it happened.
Arguably the biggest tragedy is how the injury happened. He had opted to help build his mother a driveway at her house back in 1985. He was shoveling gravel outside and threw his back out. It bothered him for years and was constantly locking up. Even surgery couldn’t fix it. It got so bad he had to bow out of the game when he arguably should have had many years to go.
4. Jean-Claude Van Damme Turned Down a 3-Movie, $12 million Deal
The 1980s and the 1990s were a golden age for action movies. Stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Jean-Claude Van Damme were huge. But nothing lasts forever, and action stars often age out of their roles as time goes on. That’s not to say that Schwarzenegger and Stallone aren’t still making action movies today, they’re just not as intense as they used to be.
Jean-Claude Van Damme, on the other hand, could have probably had a much bigger career than he did. However, Van Damme was a man who bought into his own hype more than other people did. There had been rumors for years that he was very good at sabotaging his own career, and thought he was bigger than he was. The man confirmed as much himself.
After the commercial success of his movie Timecop in 1994, he was offered a three picture, $12 million deal. Instead of taking it, he demanded more money. He wanted $20 million “like Jim Carrey.” The studio hung up on him and he was blacklisted, tanking his career and relegating him to “direct to video” releases.
3. Allan Carr Produced the 1989 Oscars Then Never Worked in Hollywood Again
Every year the Academy Awards puts on the annual Oscar broadcast and, more often than not, the next day people complain about what they didn’t like about it. But the Oscars are going to be hard pressed to ever outdo the 1989 opening that was so bad it ended the career producer Allan Carr.
The opening segment featured an unknown actress portraying Snow White doing a musical number with Rob Lowe, who is not a singer. The show had no host, just these random performances that made little sense, were bloated with random stars, and were awkward and cringe-inducing to watch.
No one bothered to ask Disney for permission to use Snow White, so they sued for copyright infringement. The broadcast is still considered the worst in the show’s history and ensured subsequent shows never went without a host for another 30 years.
2. Justine Sacco Was Fired Over a Tweet
Remember Justine Sacco? She was one of the first people to fall victim to what was later labelled “cancel culture.” Which is to say that Sacco said something online that exploded and ruined her life offline as well.
In 2013, Sacco was flying to South Africa and before she boarded the plane she tweets “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white.” She did not know the storm that created during her time in the air. It went viral, was seen by thousands, and soon after she was fired from her job as a communications director.
For a time she was the villain of the internet, and the tweet effectively ruined her life. If you’re hoping for a silver lining for this sort of thing it’s worth noting that Sacco eventually got another job and, within a few years, was hired back by the same company for an even more high profile job. So getting cancelled is more of a temporary thing for some folks.
1. Composer Robert Schumann Ruined His Potential as a Pianist with a Homemade Invention
If you want to make a living as a pianist you have to keep your hands safe. Robert Schumann really wanted to be all he could be when he tickled those ivories. He invented a device that would help strengthen his hands and allow him to play piano even better. Except the exact opposite thing happened.
Schumann is widely known these days as a composer rather than a pianist. Also, for the fact he spent his final years in an asylum. But the reason he failed as a pianist was his invention. Using a cigar box and wire, the device was meant to allow him to rest his hands while he played, allowing them to get stronger. He caused permanent damage to two fingers, however, and couldn’t play at all.