Even before he retires from the NBA, Kyrie Irving has his post-NBA life planned out for him. His father, Drederick Irving, and stepmother and agent, Shetellia Riley Irving, have already carved out the next step for the NBA player.
Speaking in an interview with the “Earn Your Leisure” podcast, Shetellia Riley Irving, the CEO of A11Even Sports, said she and Kyrie Irving’s father have designed a plan to pass the family business to Kyrie Irving whenever he decides to retire from basketball.
“Once [Kyrie’s] done, the goal would be to pass it on to him. I can retire, his dad can retire and we can run around and act like we’re 20-something years old,” she said. “That’s the goal…I think at some point [Kyrie] would have enough experience to really, really be an agent of change for players coming into the industry.”
She also reiterated her advice to Kyrie Irving not to launch an independent shoe brand after losing his Nike deal.
“We took the time to figure out what we really wanted in a shoe deal…It was creativity, price point, quality products and a host of other things,” she noted.
“When we started to have the conversations with ANTA and a few other companies, it was really about us creating our own contract because we didn’t want something that was really a traditional contract where it was like you just get royalties, base commission and then you walk away.”
“We wanted something that had a lot more ownership for us because we knew that once we put [Kyrie] in the lab, we knew what he was gonna create at the end of the day,” she noted, adding, “We wanted something that gave us real equity.”
In March last year, former Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving made changes to his management team by hiring his stepmother Shetellia Riley Irving to act as his agent, writer for The Athletic Shams Charania reported. It made Shetellia Riley Irving the only Black woman representing an active NBA player, the report added.
Prior to putting his mother in charge as his agent, Kyrie Irving was managed by Roc Nation and Jeff Wechsler. He first hired Roc Nation in 2019 after moving on from agent Jeff Wechsler. Kyrie Irving, who is among some players who are unvaccinated, set aside $1.5 million in July 2020 to support WNBA players who opted not to play the rest of the 2020 season be it as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic or to pursue social justice endeavors. On December 10 that year, he also paid off the tuition of nine graduating students at Lincoln University, an HBCU in Pennsylvania.
Kyrie Irving also donated $323,000 to Feeding America to help provide meals to people impacted by COVID-19 and partnered with City Harvest to donate 250,000 meals across the New York area to help marginalized communities get food.
