Ep 03: NBA Star Kevin Love: The Breakdown That Became a Breakthrough

In the third episode of No Magic Pill, Blake Mycoskie sits down with five-time NBA All-Star Kevin Love for a conversation that goes far deeper than basketball. This is a talk between two men who both spent years using external achievement to outrun an internal wound – and who both eventually found that the wound always wins.

Kevin was one of the best power forwards of his generation. He won an Olympic gold medal. He won an NBA championship with LeBron James in Cleveland.

None of it touched the depression.

Then came the panic attack. On the court. In front of everyone.

And everything changed.

“Nothing haunts us like the shit we don’t say.”~Kevin Love

What You’ll Learn

• Why achievement is one of the most seductive and least effective cures for depression
• What a panic attack actually feels like from the inside – and why it is so frightening
• Why the invisibility of mental illness makes it so much harder to treat than a physical injury
• How Kevin found the courage to write publicly about his panic attack – and what happened after
• Why retiring athletes face a mental health crisis that almost nobody prepares them for
• How generational trauma lives in the body at a cellular level, and what that means for parenting
• Why happiness requires three things: someone to love, something to work on, and something to look forward to
• The simple daily practices – sleep, movement, connection, breath, writing – that hold it together even now

The Conversation

The Achievement Myth

Blake opens by asking Kevin what messages he absorbed growing up that might have planted the seeds of what came later.

Kevin’s answer is precise: 30 years of accumulated expectation. His father played in the NBA. The bar was set before Kevin ever touched a ball. Love and pressure arrived together, and he spent the better part of two decades trying to achieve his way out of the darkness that pressure created.

The achievement myth is Kevin’s name for it – the belief that the next win, the next accolade, the next height will finally cure the anxiety and depression. It never does. The brain simply resets to its baseline, and the goalposts move again.

Blake knows this terrain exactly. TOMS gave him everything the achievement myth promises – the magazine covers, the hundred million pairs of shoes, the identity. And then he sold the company and lost all of it in a single moment. The drug ran out.

Kevin says that when basketball was taken away by injury, he had literally nothing else. No outlet, no creative space, no sense of worth outside the game. That is when the mind starts playing tricks.

Depression Hiding in Plain Sight

Kevin turned pro at 19 and was playing in front of 20,000 people by 20. From the outside, he was an NBA All-Star with everything going for him.

Inside, it was some of his darkest years.

He describes what that period looked like: low energy, no eye contact, shame shivers, not wanting to talk to anyone. Perpetually tired. Emotionally exhausted. Playing a character so far from who he actually was that the performance itself became its own kind of suffering.

The only relief was the basketball court. He could step between those lines and feel grounded. When that was taken away by injury, there was nothing left.

Blake makes the point that the invisibility of mental illness is what makes it so hard to address. A friend with a broken leg gets immediate care, missed work, physical therapy, and no judgment. A friend in a severe depressive episode gets told to get over it. The wound is the same. The response is entirely different.

Trying to Talk About It

Kevin was not talking to anyone during those early years. He was compartmentalizing, channeling everything into basketball, sitting in dark rooms staring at the ceiling. Trying to preserve just enough to walk out onto the court.

He remembers the shame of it – not wanting to make eye contact, not knowing whether what was happening to him would end his career if it got out. In professional sports, vulnerability had always looked like weakness. He was terrified of what disclosure would cost him.

What a Panic Attack Feels Like

November 5, 2017. Playing the Atlanta Hawks.

Kevin starts the game and knows within minutes that something is wrong. He is in foul trouble, which adds to the weight. His breathing becomes irregular – not normal exertion, but something else. He cannot focus two feet in front of him.

He tells Coach Tyronn Lue he has to go. He runs to the locker room, hoping no one will be there. People are there. His heart rate climbs. He feels like something is blocking his airways. He sprints through the training room in front of players and staff, drops to the floor in his athletic trainer’s office, and cannot get enough air.

He is profusely sweating. He cannot breathe. He is convinced something is wrong with his heart.

They take him to the Cleveland Clinic. They run every test.

He is completely physically fine.

He sits in the hospital, covered in shame, not wanting to look anyone in the eye – not his wife Kate, not his longtime colleague Shannon who had driven from Detroit to be there. His safe place had just betrayed him in front of his entire professional world.

Blake adds what will resonate with anyone who has been through it: after the first panic attack, he went to bed for a month just hoping not to wake up in one. You stop playing offense. Your whole life becomes defense.

The Second Panic Attack and the Spiral

It happened again. Against Oklahoma City.

His teammates did not know what was going on. Some of them turned on him. He was afraid to say anything because he thought it would cost him his livelihood. So he said nothing, and the negative feedback loop tightened.

Professionally and personally, the pillars were falling. Success felt hollow when he was playing. The game was gone when he was injured. Everything that was supposed to anchor him was failing at once.

He broke.

Writing It Down and Pressing Send

The turning point came from DeMar DeRozan, who posted something raw and honest about his own depression at 3 AM – a quiet, almost passive tweet that opened a door.

Kevin’s agent told him: if you publish this, it’s out forever. You can’t take it back. Everyone will know.

Kevin pressed send anyway.

He describes what happened next as one of the most unexpectedly moving experiences of his life. The response was not the shaming he had feared. It was recognition. Security guards. Teachers from back home. Best friends he thought were on solid footing. Every demographic, every walk of life, all saying: me too.

He felt free. He felt like himself for the first time in years. He says it plainly: you can’t use me against me now.

That article, and the community it built, led directly to the Kevin Love Fund – a mental health organization focused on providing education, curriculum, and resources to young people who need them most.

Turning the Mess Into the Message

Blake and Kevin both sit with this: neither of their foundations would exist without their darkest chapters.

The depression that followed selling TOMS. The panic attack that cleared the locker room. The shame that drove them both inward for years.

Neither man romanticizes it. But both have made peace with the path that brought them here – and with the people they are because of it.

Preparing for Retirement Before It Arrives

Blake raises the subject of athletic retirement because he sees it happen to athletes constantly – a full career spent sweeping the mental health stuff under the rug, and then the game ends and all of it comes up at once with no support structure in place.

Kevin is honest: it scares him. He has had to come to grips with athletic mortality more in the last two years than in the previous twenty. He has been playing organized basketball since he was five years old. Letting that go will be a kind of death.

But he has built differently than most players do. The Kevin Love Fund gives him purpose and legacy outside the game. He has cultivated interests and relationships that have nothing to do with putting on a jersey. He has done the inner work.

He also gives himself one word he has had to fight for: grace. Looking back without destroying himself for what he could have done better. Understanding that the dots connect differently in hindsight.

The Three Keys to Happiness

Blake names a framework that lands clearly in this conversation: the three things you need to be happy are someone to love, something to work on, and something to look forward to.

Kevin has all three. And as he faces retirement, those three anchors are what he is counting on to carry him through.

Generational Trauma and Parenting

Kevin’s father struggled with depression. There is a history of mental health challenges running through the Love family – melancholy, negative cycles, addiction. Kevin is clear-eyed about this. He has read enough about epigenetics to understand that these patterns do not just repeat through modeling. They live in the body at a cellular level. Children inherit them before they can form memories.

He says he and his brother and sister are the generation that breaks the cycle. Not perfectly. Not easily. But intentionally.

Blake adds something he learned from researcher Kristin Neff: neuronal mirroring means that the most important thing a parent can do for a child’s mental health is work on their own. The neurons of people in close contact resonate with each other. A parent who is mentally healthy, present, and authentic does more for a child’s emotional foundation than almost anything said directly.

Kevin is filling his home with love and presence. It is the most important work he has.

The Daily Practices

Blake asks Kevin what he is actually doing day to day to maintain his mental wellness – because even with all the growth, Kevin acknowledges he still wakes up with anxiety every single morning.

Kevin’s honest answer: sleep first. Then eat well. Then movement – which he calls three birds with one stone, because working out helps his game, his body, and his brain all at once. Then connection. Then meditation, even just two minutes, even just breathing and grounding.

The one practice that ties everything together for him: writing it down. Not planned journaling, but messy, punctuation-off, all-over-the-place notes and voice memos that get the noise out of his head and give his feelings a name.

He learned this especially during grief – after his father died in April, he had to put it all on paper just to stop it from circling endlessly inside him.

Blake adds his own variation: he never works out alone. Movement combined with connection – in nature when possible – covers more ground than either one alone.

Kevin’s closing note on anxiety: breathe first. Most people are taking shallower breaths than they realize, especially when they are holding something. A few minutes of diaphragmatic breathing, a self-assessment of what you actually need that morning, and then – move forward.

Note to Self

Nothing haunts us like the shit we don’t say.

Take action. Make repair. Then let it go.

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About Kevin Love

Kevin Love is a five-time NBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and NBA champion who spent 18 years in professional basketball with the Minnesota Timberwolves, Cleveland Cavaliers, Miami Heat, and Philadelphia 76ers. He was known as one of the most skilled big men of his generation – a relentless rebounder and one of the most accurate long-range shooters at his position.

In 2018, he wrote a first-person essay for The Players’ Tribune titled “Everyone Is Going Through Something,” publicly disclosing his struggle with depression and the panic attack that changed his life. The response was immediate and overwhelming – and it led directly to the founding of the Kevin Love Fund, a mental health organization focused on education, curriculum development, and destigmatizing mental health for young people.

The Kevin Love Fund’s evidence-based social-emotional learning curriculum is free and available to schools nationwide. Its programs use music, creative writing, photography, film, and other mediums to help young people develop an emotional vocabulary – and the permission to use it.

Kevin is also a founding partner of Enough, Blake Mycoskie’s mental health initiative built around the message that we are all, always, enough.

He lives with his wife Kate and their daughter.

Links

• Kevin Love Fund
• Instagram: @kevinlove