The Evolution Of Kevin Love

Photo Credit: Nick Garcia

BY LAURA SCHREFFLER
PHOTOGRAPHY NICK GARCIA
STYLING COURTNEY MAYS
GROOMING CESAR FERRETTE
SHOT ON LOCATION AT THE MAYFAIR HOUSE HOTEL & GARDEN

There are many things Kevin Love is good at, but for the nephew of Beach Boys co-founder Mike Love, music is — surprisingly and self-admittedly — not one of them.

“I am not musically inclined,” the five-time NBA All-Star, FIBA World Champion, and Olympian, admits on a late Monday afternoon in May after having casually tickled the ivories earlier in the day during our cover shoot at Coconut Grove’s Mayfair House Hotel & Garden. “I tried to pick it up when I was playing in Minnesota; I had a teacher for a couple of years, but then, when I left for Cleveland, I didn’t have the time. But that’s the way sports go. You move from a city, and you have to start anew.”

Love isn’t bemoaning his lot in life or his lack of musical talent. It’s the path he chose to follow after all, a path modeled not after his uncle but his father, former NBA star Stan Love — and in more ways than the obvious one.

To demonstrate this, Love picks up two of the four Leica cameras he takes with him everywhere he goes. “I think the best quality that I picked up from my father at a very early age — and something that I still thank him for to this day — was that he always had a camera on him,” he confides. “I have my Leicas — plural — with me because different cameras capture moments differently. I really make it a point to be off my phone in the off-season, but these allow me to live in the moment and capture that moment right away. There’s a lot of intention behind it.”

The 35-year-old athlete has been snapping up a storm lately, documenting his now-one-year-old daughter’s first year. One of his cameras prints instant pictures, which he uses as bookmarks. He shows me his work; they’re gorgeous, and all of his little girl (whose name he and Canadian supermodel wife Kate Love née Bock have not yet shared publicly). He also recently created a beautiful black and white family portrait for agent Jeff Schwartz and his wife as a Mother’s Day gift.

He does this because it’s an artistic outlet and also, in part, because it helps him with his pursuit of living in the moment. While he’s still connected, he isn’t on his phone, and that’s one big “W” for a man who’s used to winning.

“You see it so many times. LeBron (James) is getting his 40,000th point or you’re at a concert but not taking it in. Everyone wants to capture that moment for their friends, or to put it on social media, like ‘Look at the cool life that I live’ instead of just absorbing it. With so many of those videos that you take, it feels so meaningful to capture that moment. But the reality is, you’re probably never going to watch it again, and at the same time, you’re forgetting to really be present, not truly living in the moment, and denying yourself an actual memory,” he says.

This —living in the moment — is something that Love has been actively working on for years, and the results of his efforts are obvious. He presents as sensitive, thoughtful, and supremely intelligent — emotionally and otherwise. The word that comes to mind when I look at the 6’8,” blue-eyed, two-time member of the All-NBA Second Team is “evolved.” Which is how he prefers to see himself, too. Love is on a continuous quest to be his best self — the best husband, father, and person that he can possibly be.
This path of progression is one that Love was on long before moving to Miami and playing for the Heat, becoming a father in 2023, and before marrying his longtime love in 2022. His pursuit of greatness started well after his professional career began with the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2008, when he emerged as one of the league’s premier power forwards, earning multiple All-Star selections; before he established himself as a double-double machine; and before he won gold medals at the 2010 FIBA World Championship and the 2012 Summer Olympics. It actually began during the early years of his tenure with the Cleveland Cavaliers, where he played from 2014 to 2023, and, during that time, helped to secure the franchise’s first-ever NBA title alongside then-teammates LeBron James and Kyrie Irving.

Photo Credit: Nick Garcia

He remembers the day his journey began well. It was on November 5, 2018, that he could no longer hide the storm inside him: he had a full-blown (and well-documented) panic attack on the court during a game against the Orlando Magic.

“In a lot of ways [I found emotional intelligence] because a very public mental health moment happened to me within what I thought was a safe space — on the basketball court. I had a panic attack that I’ve spoken very openly about. I wouldn’t say that I was pushed into talking about the moment, but I had a feeling, or maybe it was intuition, that I needed to share my story before somebody else did. I wanted to take ownership of it. At the same time, [fellow NBA player] DeMar DeRozan had tweeted something about his depression, so I thought, OK. That was accepted, obviously, and it was something scary that he did. There’s a lot of rumblings about my situation, so you need to do something about it. I wanted to be able to tell my story and peel back a layer of something I deal with on a daily basis.”

Love then courageously penned a powerful essay for The Players’ Tribune, detailing his struggles with anxiety and depression, which sparked a national conversation about mental health in professional sports. He has never regretted it, though it was terrifying at the time.

“I felt it was necessary for me not to live scared, not to live in the shadows. But at the time, I didn’t want anyone seeing me like that. It’s vulnerable, it’s scary, it’s not what athletes at my level are expected to be. We’re expected to be superhuman, puffing out our chests and wearing armor, because sports, on the men’s side, are so hyper-masculine. I was worried that the game was going to be taken away from me, that my livelihood would be in jeopardy, that my teammates wouldn’t trust me anymore. But I had to take the mentality that if I live my life out in the open, you can’t use me against me. This is what you get.”

His bravery was rewarded with overwhelming support, inclusive of the teammates he was so sure would discredit him. “They didn’t think less of me,” he recalls now. “Many of them approached me, in fact, in a good way. I remember, we were on a five-game road trip, a West Coast swing — a big trip for us. [The morning I released the story], a lot of my teammates approached me about it [and I found that] it was widely accepted. It opened up a conversation, not just from the sports community, but the community at large, which I’ve got to say, wasn’t something I expected. People started sharing their stories, people that I would never have guessed were dealing with similar issues. It was very eye-opening. At the same time, for me, it was very therapeutic, because I think people wanted to be part of something larger than themselves.”

The realization that he was not alone propelled him to launch the Kevin Love Fund (KLF) that same year, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting mental health education and providing resources for those in need. In the years since its inception, the nonprofit has introduced several impactful programs, including a free evidence-based SEL curriculum tailored to middle school, high school, and college students, which is now being taught to over 55,000 students in more than 500 schools in all 50 states, as well as internationally in West Africa, Ukraine, India, and more. The fund recently partnered with SONY and the Spider-verse to inspire young adults to find their hero within — as Love himself did — and have open conversations about their struggles. The new lesson plan, developed by the KLF education team, encouraged students to share a challenging experience by writing and illustrating their own series of storyboard panels, similar to the way the team behind the short film used storyboards to develop The Spider Within.

As a result of his work with the fund, Love has been awarded the ESPY Arthur Ashe Courage Award, Change Maker Award by the Child Mind Institute, and the NBA Cares Assist Award. He was also an ESPY Muhammad Ali Sports Humanitarian Award finalist due to his work in the mental health space.

Love is understandably pleased by the progress he’s made, sharing, “[Since we started] we’ve been able to teach emotional learning and model vulnerability within the classroom and now, these kids are able to learn emotional language at an early age. I certainly didn’t have that, especially as a young boy. I was taught to suppress it. I was taught to compartmentalize.” But through the foundation, and his own strength of will, he’s found grace. “I think the fact that we’re able to speak about mental health issues and eliminate the stigma is a beautiful thing, and a much needed one, too, because everyone is going through something in some capacity, and I love being able to make a difference and impact in people’s lives. It’s an exciting moment in time, and I’m proud to be part of it.”

On the flip side, in sharing his story, in creating his foundation, Love’s own life has also changed for the better. “I’m so much more comfortable in my own skin now,” he confesses. “I’m still doing the work, because this type of acute, high-level anxiety doesn’t just go away. I still take medication and I probably always will. It’s not something that’s like, ‘It’s gone, it’s out of me, I’ve absolved myself of any mental health type of challenges’ — no. It’s more that I’ve changed my relationship with it, attacked it head on, and have been proactive rather than reactive. Now, I own it so I can disown it.”

He adds, “I tried to push it away and suppress it in some very unhealthy ways for too long. Just being able to understand that I’m not perfect and that I’m always going to be a work in progress is a very comforting feeling.”

Photo Credit: Nick Garcia

KEVIN LOVE has admitted that he’s leaning into his emotional side, and that’s true for a multitude of reasons, all of which bring him back to the same, exact spot: contentment.

After six years in Minnesota and nine in Ohio, he’s loving life in the Sunshine State, in part because he’s able to soak up all of that happiness-inducing vitamin D. “I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and the weather definitely takes its toll on you and affects your mood, especially if you’re already dealing with something. For me, it was an unbelievable place to grow up, just pure beauty everywhere you look, but it does rain for two months straight.”

Although Love declares that he, well, loves his home state’s weather, Miami is definitely the better fit for his current situation. “Just being able to open the door in the winter months is pretty amazing,” he admits. “[My wife and I] are homebodies anyway; we don’t stray too far from the house. So being here in that respect has been a great change of pace. And playing basketball here, with such a storied franchise, an organization that I’ve admired for a really long time, has been a special part of my career as well. I’m definitely very happy here. Life is good.”

A pessimist might say that things could always be better — the Heat could have taken home the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy during his debut year with the team, say — but truly, he has no complaints… other than, well, that. “For me, honestly, always winning a championship is the goal,” he says. “This is such a storied franchise that traditionally gets the best out of the team that they put on the floor — the best out of every player — whether it’s a superstar, a two-way player, a rookie, or a guy that’s in year 16, so anything less than a championship isn’t [ideal].”

Clearly, Love isn’t the only one who feels this way [everyone knows how Jimmy Buckets feels about losing] — and that goes doubly or even triply so for Heat president and NBA legend Pat Riley. “I was talking to Pat this year, and he says that there’s been nine times in history that he’s been happy, and every other season he’s been miserable,” Love continues. “He’s been a player, a coach, a general manager for maybe over 50 years now, and he said, ‘Only nine times did we go all the way and hoist the trophy; the other times were misery.’ He always says there’s winning and there’s misery.”

Photo Credit: Nick Garcia

Love doesn’t see life that way, though, as much as he admires and respects “The Godfather.” “I certainly think that there’s a lot to gain from seeing where we fell short, and understanding that injuries play a role and take their toll within the team — which you saw this year with the playoffs. But being better throughout the regular season, trending in the right direction, and being healthy around the playoffs is a great goal and very conducive to winning. I’m hopeful that we have a little bit more luck on our side in the future in terms of guys being hurt and missing games, because we had the injury bug this year, unfortunately.”

There’s no way of preventing hurt from happening in professional sports, but Love is still giving it his best shot by keeping healthy and consistently working out — which isn’t a hardship because he’s always had a love affair with the gym, bless him. “I attack my off-seasons; I actually do more work, but I do it efficiently,” he declares, noting, “Going to the gym ticks so many boxes for me. I always say that a good body and brain helps my sport, but it’s a dopamine/serotonin release for me as well. I try to swallow the frog — do the hardest thing — first thing in the morning. I’ll hang with my daughter and have our little routine while I have my coffee, get to watch her and play with her, and then I go right into working out while she’s sleeping.”

But even with his love of the game (and the gym), what keeps him going is taking a mental break from it all. In the past, that was predominantly through travel, wandering the world in pursuit of the best bottle of wine and the most luxurious of adventures, but now that he’s both a husband and a father, that looks more like spending time with his family at their summer home in the Hamptons or hanging out with friends on the west coast, like former team member and best friend Channing Frye, whom he co-founded the Willamette Valley, Oregon-based Chosen Family Wines with in 2016.

“It’s really important to take that mental break, and really take time off. That can be from the sport, but also, just being away from your phone, focusing on being human. And honestly, I think that’s what has allowed me to play for so many years — being able to find balance. I think time flies because it feels like every second, every moment is accounted for.”

He’s feeling the passage of time more keenly now than ever thanks to his daughter. “Being a father has been life changing. People always told me that my firstborn would change my idea of love, and that’s true. And living your life completely for somebody else is definitely scary — but it’s also very exciting, and looking at my baby grow has completely changed my understanding and conception of time. I’d come back from a road trip after 10 days, and she’d be different. It’s so hard to fathom how fast she changes.”

Because of his daughter’s growth, the passage of time is an ever-present thought, a thought of which he shares now. “Time isn’t elastic; it’s finite, and I think that you do everything that you can to stretch it when you understand what’s at stake. And I know that seems dramatic,” he admits, “but you don’t want to look back at life. It’s inaction that is the starting point and the baseline of regret.”

Social media doesn’t help. Rather direly, Instagram recently warned him that he only has 18 total summers with his child left before she flies the nest. But instead of stressing him out, he says it gave him food for thought. “I think it’s really sad, but it also gave me perspective to try to find balance, and just stay present, which, I think, are the two hardest things to do in life. Our daughter has certainly made me comprehend and understand that better.”

Oftentimes, he admits, the realization of how quickly she’s changing even brings him to tears. “I’ve become such a wet person,” he confesses. “I’ll be giving her a bottle at night before I put her down to sleep, and I’ll just be in tears. Where did they come from?”

It’s a good thing, then, that Love has truly learned to embrace his emotional side and refuses to shy away from his feelings. “I think a good cry is really healthy,” he insists. “All these emotions are super healthy. They come from a great place and are very

authentic. I’m feeling what I’m feeling, and I’m leaning into it.”
Even when that means dredging up things he’d rather forget. “Sometimes, you start thinking about the past, and then you start thinking about regret, and start feeling all these emotions. For me, regret is very much tied up in inaction rather than action. And I’m like, that’s not going to be me now.”

The Love of right now is practicing authenticity, grace, and humility. He wants to be a worthy husband and father (to both his human daughter and his four-legged one, Hungarian Vizsla Vestry, whom he refers to as his “first daughter” and who even has her own Instagram account), do right by his team, his foundation, and by the people who rely on him. “My purpose in life right now is my daughter, my wife, and my dog, and my career of course. I want to do right by the people who matter most, because everything I’m doing, I’m doing for them,” he says.

This is his personal evolution. The self-proclaimed work in progress is going to keep on going, and growing. “Even in the last year, I just feel like I’ve changed a lot,” he shares, noting, “In some ways, I’m very proud of that — but the job’s not finished yet.” He pauses. “Within your life, every couple of years, you look back and you’re like, wow, I didn’t know anything. And I think that’s a beautiful thing.”

Photo Credit: Nick Garcia