Kevin Love had always found refuge in basketball — a sport at which he excels.
But his team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, was not playing very well early in the 2017-18 season. And the expectations had never been higher: Love and his Cavaliers teammates won an N.B.A. championship the year before and were widely expected to return to the N.B.A. Finals.
Then, in the middle of a game on Nov. 5 against the Atlanta Hawks, Love — a five-time N.B.A. All-Star and an Olympic gold medalist — had his first panic attack.
“I thought I was fully having a heart attack and that I was going to die,” he recalled in an interview on Thursday night with Juliet Macur, a Sports of The Times columnist.
Get With The Times: Kevin Love and Juliet MacurCreditCreditVideo by The New York Times Conferences
Love recounted his harrowing experience as part of a broad discussion of mental health and sports culture at a New York Times live event at Tufts University. During an hourlong interview with Ms. Macur, Love spoke about the struggle to be open about his feelings and acknowledged that he was initially afraid that if he spoke openly about his battle with depression and anxiety, his teammates would think he was “weak” and “unreliable.”
The event, the latest edition of a conversation series called Get With The Times, was shown live and broadcast to watch parties held on college campuses across the country.
“I really truly believe that everybody is going through something,” he said, echoing what he wrote in a deeply personal essay in The Players’ Tribune in March 2018, several months after he suffered the panic attack.
Since the publication of his essay, Love has emerged as a high-profile voice on the topic of mental health. Though he said Thursday that he was initially uneasy about how his article would be received, thousands of positive emails came pouring in; he heard from close friends who were deeply affected; and employees of other teams have pulled him aside to say they are glad he got the conversation started.
“The biggest thing in my 11-year career so far that I’ve done has been this,” he said.
And as for how his teammates would react? Love said he was on a bus with his team in Denver soon after the essay was published when his former teammate Kyle Korver immediately told him he wanted to find a way to help. As the team walked off the bus, Love said, LeBron James — who has poured money and time into various charitable endeavors — pulled Love aside, shook his hand, and said, “Today you helped a lot of people.”
During the event on Thursday, Love took questions from college students — both in the audience at Tufts and from other campuses via video. One student asked him about the life lessons he had learned as a professional athlete.
“The biggest thing that I’ve learned is to not just stick to basketball,” he said. “Never be afraid to speak your truth.”
