In recent years, standout athletes like tennis star Naomi Osaka, decorated gymnast Simone Biles, and Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott have become the faces of sports heroes who deal with mental health issues.
But before them, there were athletes like NBA star Ron Artest, former Rockets guard Vernon Maxwell and basketball Hall of Famer Dennis Rodman who were battling mental health problems before it was fully understood or embraced. But now the retired Artest is freely discussing his struggles with mental health.
“It’s very important that we bring it to life and let people know we are here,” said Artest, who legally changed his name to Metta World Peace in 2011. “We are going to get back to this game, but we are not going to focus on this game right now.
“Years later, I’m getting an overwhelming amount of requests to talk about mental health, which is cool. It’s a little much, but it’s cool.”
Maxwell, an emotional guy when he played with the Rockets from 1990-95, knew something wasn’t right in his head. But it was a secret that he felt he couldn’t share, not even with his teammates.
Maxwell took a deep dive into athletes dealing with mental health and last year hosted a Mental Health Symposium here in Houston. He wants to help players get the mental health support he was too afraid to ask for when he was a player.
“With me, I had a lot of the things that I did when I played and I was so scared to let my teammates know because of the peer pressure and that I was going to talk to someone to talk about what I was going through in my day and my life on and off the basketball court,” Maxwell recalls.
“I had a problem going to talk to somebody about that. I just want to change that narrative with professional athletes and the young athletes and young Black men or white men or whoever it is where you can be at the point where it’s okay to reach out and speak with somebody because I was thinking my teammates are going to think, `Damn, this boy is crazy for real.’”
Artest, who also played with the Rockets from 2008-09, has been so visible and vocal in this mental health journey that he was appointed to the board of the UCLA Psychiatric Ward.
Artest, of course, was the initiator of one of the most troubling scenes in sports history when he went into the stands as a member of the visiting Indiana Pacers and sparked a players-fans melee in Detroit after a fan threw beer on him.
The NBA suspended Artest for the remainder of the 2004-05 season as a result.
Artest says he took his mental health seriously once he realized his career could be in jeopardy.
“Basketball was kind of everything to me,” Artest said. “I put so much into it and when I was getting certain things out of it because of some things that were self-inflicted. So I said I wanted to at least finish my career off.
“It turned into sports therapy because most of my issues happened on the court because the emotions involved.
“There was a reason I was trying to figure things out. So I just started asking myself all sorts of questions. I had three therapists at one time. Parenting class, marriage counseling and anger management and maybe something else at some point and time.”
Artest says players before him, like Maxwell and even Rodman, helped pave the way for him to get help. Rodman’s revealing interview with Oprah Winfrey has always stood out for Artest.
“Dennis Rodman was someone I looked up and I saw that he was being vulnerable. I was like, I want to be like that … but without the dress,’” he said. “I changed my number to 91 at one point and time for Dennis, just to show that support.
“Sometimes people act like they didn’t hear that interview on Oprah when he said, his parents weren’t there, he grew up in a household and then he goes and acts out but nobody is talking about Dennis Rodman having issues. That’s one of the things that gave me the courage to thank my psychiatrist on national television.”
Maxwell and Artest are both glad the negative stigma behind mental health has now shifted to tolerance and compassion.
“If you were to come out back in the day, especially in 1999 when I got here, and you say you are going through something, there would be backlash,” Artest said. “We’ve made it where if somebody in the media talks about a player to this day about their mental health, they might get fired. That’s nice. Sometimes they play chess with us and we play back.”
