Divers try to find NFL star's $100K earring in murky lake waters
The good thing about being a rich professional football player is you can afford $100,000 diamond earrings. The bad news is that if you wear them out jet skiing you can lose them in the water. But, as Julio Jones realized recently, there's a bonus to that, too: You can always just pay some divers to go looking for the earring.
That is exactly what the Atlanta Falcons star wide receiver did recently after losing a massive, expensive earring in Lake Lanier, a lake in northern Georgia. Jones was out jet skiing when, according to WXII in Atlanta (via Deadspin) he hit a big wave and went flying off the jet ski.
When Jones got back up on jet ski, he was missing a very expensive piece of jewelry. So he did what anyone else would do. He hired a guy to dive for the earring.
So Bobby Griffin went diving into Lake Lanier, looking for the pricey item.
"I'm getting ready to dive for a diamond," Griffin says in the video as he goes into the water. "A diamond earring."
One problem for Griffin came in the form of total darkness. WXII describes Lake Lanier as deep, but the divers, Griffin and Robbie Pickering, were only 65 feet down, hardly an unreasonable depth. But it's not like diving in the Caribbean -- when you get below about 30 feet in a lake, things get dark in a hurry.
And because Lanier is a man-made lake that covered a bunch of communities that were submerged, as Deadspin pointed out, as well as a slew of trees that haven't been exposed to sunlight since the 1950's. An earring that costs $100K is a pretty big earring, but when it comes to slowly falling through murky water, it's a small metallic fish in a big pond.
Finding it is a near impossible mission, and, for the diving crew, they ultimately came up short.
Falcons training camp begins Thursday and goes through Aug. 4, The Associated Press reports. The first preseason game is Aug. 26 against the Arizona Cardinals, the grand opening of Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
The story was orginally published on CBSSports.com.
