Some of us may be lucky enough to have enough money to own a jet ski. But few of us will be in the same income bracket as Falcons wide receiver Julio Jones, who just lost a $100,000 earring when he fell off a jet ski in a Georgia lake.
Jones was tooling around Lake Lanier near Gainesville, Georgia, last weekend when he took a tumble off the craft. It’s a pretty normal thing to do, granted. Many jet ski users experience the occasional tumble from the perch of a jet ski, but few lose an earring worth $100K while doing it.
The NFL player said he was dumped from the jet ski due to the violent wake of a passing boat. He found himself unharmed upon swimming back to the surface, but after taking stock he realized that one of his diamond stud earrings was gone, knocked off during the tumble and sunk to the bottom of the 65-foot-deep lake.
“Yeah, it was worth a little bit,” Jones nonchalantly told WXIA-TV in Atlanta.
Jones then actually hired a scuba diving team to try and recover the expensive bauble.
Despite the player’s crossed fingers, the dive team had no luck finding the earring because the bottom of the lake is filled with rocks and tree limbs. Worse, the lake bed is completely dark as the murky water above screens out all light at the lake’s bottom.
“It’s down in crevasses and nooks and crannies,” salvage diver Richard Pickering told the media “It’s impossible—absolutely impossible.”
Jones didn’t seem to let the loss get him too upset, though.
“As long as I’m good, it’s materialistic stuff,” the All-Pro said afterward. “You can always get that kind of stuff back.”
Losing $100K might seem a hefty price to pay for a jet ski run, but Jones will not likely miss it much. The Falcons star will pull in about $11.5 million in base salary this season, according to Spotrac.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.