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Kevin Love, Rob Gronkowski talk mental health on LeBron James' 'The Shop'

Ryan Young
Staff writer
Kevin Love detailed the decision to come public about his battles with mental health on Tuesday's episode of "The Shop."

Cleveland Cavaliers star Kevin Love helped lead the conversation on mental health on HBO’s “The Shop” on Tuesday night, specifically detailing the decision to take his battles with mental health public last year.

Love told the group — which included former New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski, comedian Kevin Hart, rapper Lil Nas X and others — that the point before he went public was probably the lowest in his life.

Love first opened up about his anxiety and panic attacks last March in a piece for The Player’s Tribune, detailing his battle with panic attacks — one of which he actually had during the middle of a game. He did so just one week after then-Toronto Raptors guard DeMar DeRozan shared his similar battles with depression in an article by Doug Smith of the Toronto Star.

Multiple players have come out since then, sharing similar stories.

Though Love and DeRozan weren’t the first in the NBA to highlight the issue — that honor goes to Royce White, who was essentially blackballed from the league for doing so years before — the duo have since tackled the issue head-on.

On Tuesday’s episode, Love went into his decision to actually write the piece for The Players’ Tribune about his struggles. Love said that a journalist, ESPN’s Jackie MacMullan, actually started putting the pieces together around the All-Star break that season — something that really freaked him out.

So every time he was asked about it, he deflected.

Finally, though, he realized that he needed to be the one to tell his story.

“I was deflecting because I didn’t want anybody to know,” Love said on The Shop. “There’s such a stigma around it. But now, I have this saying: ‘Only by admitting who you are do you get what you want.’ So I played all my cards and just said, ‘This is what you get.’ But in that time, until you can admit what’s really going on, you’re in such a hole that you have blinders on. I thought, ‘I don’t want anybody else to tell my story.’”

Love wasn’t the only one to discuss mental health on the show Tuesday night.

Gronkowski detailed the stigma about being “mentally tough” in sports and inside the Patriots organization.

Warning: This video contains language that is NSFW

He also talked about when he learned that it was time to step away from the game.

Warning: This video contains language that is NSFW

“In order to do something bigger in life, in order to get to a higher stage … I felt like I had to get away from the game and focus on my health,” Gronkowski said. “I lived like the typical party life. I was eating f---ing sh-t every second. I was just trying to put on weight. I was living that life, and then at the same time I was going out and playing f---ing football and running people over, getting run over.”

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