NFL Player Spends More Than $900 on 8-Hour Uber Trip to Avoid Missing Voluntary Practice

Bills cornerback Shareece Wright took an eight-hour Uber that cost him more than $900 so that he wouldn't miss a voluntary practice.

June 7, 2017

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There are plenty of NFL players who are choosing not to attend voluntary team workouts this spring because they are, well, voluntary. Those players have the right to skip the practices and wait until mandatory training camp comes around. But Bills cornerback Shareece Wright didn’t want to be one of those players this week—and he went to great lengths to attend a voluntary workout in Orchard Park, New York on Monday afternoon.

It’s still a little unclear why Wright had to do this, but early Monday, he was stuck at O’Hare Airport in Chicago with no way to catch a flight to attend practice. So rather than just calling the Bills and telling them that he was stuck in Chicago, he hopped into an Uber and made a 550-mile trip that took more than eight hours so that he could arrive at the Bills facility on time for practice. It cost him more than $600, and he tweeted about the trip late Tuesday:

And there’s more to the story, too. Because Wright made some poor Uber driver take a 1,000-mile round trip from Chicago to upstate New York and then back again, he left a large tip at the end of his portion of the trip. According to Wright’s representative Tamerat Berhe, Wright tipped his Uber driver $300, which means he paid more than $900 overall to attend a voluntary practice:

Can you imagine how it must feel to be one of the Bills players who decided not to attend practice this week for whatever reason? This guy just showed all of them up with his commitment to make it to a practice that he very easily could have skipped. That’s a veteran move from a veteran player and a great way to get into the good graces of the new coaching staff in Buffalo.