The Fear He Couldn’t Outrun: Kevin Love and the Panic That Broke the Mask
“He thought his heart was failing.”
November 5, 2017. Third quarter. On the court, it was a routine sequence a missed shot, a rebound battle, the flow of a normal NBA game. For Kevin Love, it was the moment the world began to narrow. A pressure, not from an opponent’s box-out, but from somewhere deep inside his own chest, began to build.
His breath shallowed, the roar of the crowd faded into a tinny hum, and a cold, electric fear shot through his limbs. He called for a sub, the professional instinct to exit the stage overriding the primal confusion. The walk to the locker room was a silent, trembling pilgrimage.
Once inside the sterile, tiled quiet, his body, the finely-tuned instrument that had built his fortune and identity, betrayed him completely. He collapsed. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic animal trying to escape its cage. His lungs refused to fill. The thought, clear and horrifying, cut through the panic: This is a heart attack. I am dying.
In that locker room, alone with a body screaming a warning in a language he didn’t understand, Kevin Love was not an NBA All-Star, an Olympic gold medalist, or a champion. He was a 29-year-old man confronting the terrifying possibility that the machine had broken, and that the tough, controlled persona he showed the world was a facade crumbling under an invisible weight. This was not an injury you could ice. This was a rupture from within.
Part I: The Architecture of a Silence
To comprehend the seismic nature of that panic attack, one must first understand the world it shattered. Kevin Love was forged in the image of traditional sports masculinity.
He was the son of an NBA player, a star at UCLA, a franchise player whose game was built on physicality on bruising rebounds, crafty post moves, and outlet passes thrown with quarterback force. His value was measured in double-doubles, in toughness, in his ability to absorb contact and finish through it.
The culture around him, and that he had internalized, was one of stoicism. In professional sports, especially in 2017, mental strength was synonymous with silence. You played through pain. You “got your mind right.” You didn’t show weakness.
Emotional struggles were a private failing, a lack of mental fortitude to be solved by “locking in.” Love had mastered this code. He was seen as intense, sometimes brooding, but always in control. His vulnerability was a statistical line on a box score, not a feeling to be shared.
This was the architecture he inhabited: a fortress of stats, contracts, and public perception, built to keep the messy, uncertain parts of being human firmly outside. The panic attack didn’t just attack his body; it was a direct, explosive strike on the foundation of that fortress. It proved the walls were paper-thin.
Part II: The Anatomy of an Invisible Break
A panic attack is not an emotion; it is a physiological coup. The body’s fight-or-flight system, designed for saber-toothed tigers, gets triggered by a modern ghost. The amygdala screams “DANGER” when there is no visible threat, flooding the system with adrenaline. The heart rate soars to outrun a predator that isn’t there. The lungs hyperventilate to fuel muscles for a fight that exists only in the mind. The mind, receiving these extreme physical signals, logically concludes: This is a heart attack. This is death.
For Love, the experience was one of total sensory and cognitive hijacking.
- The Physical Betrayal: This was a star athlete, a man whose career depended on listening to and controlling his body’s signals a tweaked ankle, a fatigued muscle. Now, that body was broadcasting a catastrophic, nonsensical alarm. The very tool of his trade had become his tormentor.
- The Cognitive Dissonance: Lying on that floor, the dissonance was absolute. I am Kevin Love. I am strong. I am in control. I am dying. None of the narratives of his life—the discipline, the success, the toughness—could explain or stop what was happening. It rendered his entire identity useless.
- The Profound Isolation: In a league where physical injuries are public, diagnosed, and treated with a team of specialists, this was a private hell. How do you tell your coach, “My heart is racing and I think I’m dying, but the doctors say my heart is fine”? It felt like admitting to a weakness that had no name, no MRI, no timeline for return.
The aftermath was a haunting quiet. He was checked by doctors, given a clean bill of physical health, and sent home. The crisis was over, but the terror remained, now mixed with a deep, unsettling shame. The question wasn’t just “What was that?” It was “What is wrong with me?”
Part III: The Decision: From Diagnosis to Exposure
The path from the locker room floor to a therapist’s office is a gauntlet of unlearning. Seeking help required Love to dismantle the very code he had lived by. It meant redefining strength not as the absence of need, but as the courage to address it. His decision to see a therapist was not a triumphant “first step”; it was a surrender. A surrender to the fact that the tools he had—willpower, toughness, silence were not just inadequate, they were part of the problem.
Therapy became the process of translating the body’s scream. He began to understand the panic attack not as a random malfunction, but as a symptom. A symptom of accumulated, unprocessed stress, of grief he hadn’t allowed himself to feel (including the death of his grandmother), of the pressure to perform, of a lifelong habit of compartmentalizing emotion. The “invisible breaking point” had, in fact, been building for years.
Then came the essay. “Everyone Is Going Through Something,” published in The Players’ Tribune in March 2018. This was not a polished press release from a mental health advocate. It was a raw, meticulous act of exposure. He detailed the terror of the panic attack with clinical precision: “It was like my body was trying to say to me, You’re about to die.” He wrote about lying on the floor, thinking about his family, and the profound confusion that followed.
The power of the essay was in its specificity and its lack of a tidy, motivational conclusion. He didn’t present himself as “cured” or as a hero. He presented himself as a work in progress, sharing the scariest moment of his life to prove that even someone who looked like they had it all could be utterly, terrifyingly lost inside their own mind. He was not branding himself; he was disarming himself publicly, inviting a judgment he feared was coming.
Table: The Dichotomy of Kevin Love’s Experience
| The External Reality (The Persona) | The Internal Reality (The Panic) |
|---|---|
| NBA All-Star, Champion, Physical Force | A body feeling physically out of control. |
| Culture of Stoic Toughness | Overwhelming, shame-inducing vulnerability. |
| Problems are solved by “working harder.” | Willpower was useless against a physiological response. |
| Identity built on control and performance. | An experience of total cognitive and physical hijacking. |
Part IV: The Unfinished Work of Honesty
Kevin Love’s essay is rightly hailed as a landmark that helped shift the conversation on mental health in sports. But to frame it solely as an act of “breaking stigma” is to neutralize its profound personal cost and unfinished nature.
The real weight of his decision was the relinquishing of control over his own narrative. He could no longer hide behind the mask of the unflappable star. He had permanently complicated his public image, intertwining it with a story of fear and fragility. For an athlete, this is a radical, risky act. Would he be seen as weak? Would it affect his contract, his standing with teammates, his legacy?
Furthermore, the essay did not provide closure; it initiated a new, public chapter of an ongoing private struggle. He became a symbol, whether he wanted to or not. Every interview, every public appearance, now carried the potential for questions about his mental health. Advocacy became part of his identity, a role that required a different kind of endurance.
The emotional clarity that emerges is not that he “beat” anxiety or became an advocate. It is that he made a choice, in the raw aftermath of terror, to confront the source of his pain with honesty instead of force. He traded the illusion of invulnerability for the harder, messier work of being real.
The story doesn’t end with a healed man or a conquered illness. It continues with a man who now knows that the fortress was a cage, and that true strength lies not in the thickness of the walls, but in the courage to step outside them, into the uncertain open, where the wind howls and the heart—still beating, still capable of fear—is finally free to be heard.