Nash still trying for one key point
Former MVP is busy five years after retirement, but still working on a second life
Sometimes, maybe on a birthday or some other special occasion, Steve Nash will see highlights of his younger self on Instagram or Twitter or wherever. The greatest hits can be familiar, sure. But sometimes he sees a highlight from his two-MVP, Hall of Fame NBA career, his hair flopping around as he built one of the great point guard careers. What he sees is another country, another time. It barely feels like him.
“The old adage, every athlete dies twice, really helped me,” Nash says over an organic beer at a downtown Toronto hotel. “When I see a clip of myself on Instagram now, I don’t even really relate to that person. It’s kind of like, like I don’t feel me doing those things. It’s almost like it’s someone else.”
In a way, it is. Nash retired five years ago following two years of nerve pain, was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame last year, and is busy enough that it’s hard to keep track of his gigs. He does some soccer broadcasting for Turner Sports, and some basketball work too. He has been a special consultant for the Golden State Warriors for a few years, which meant working with guys like the now-departed Kevin Durant or Steph Curry, who in some ways is Nash’s evolutionary form. Nash didn’t want a championship ring when they won, though.
Nash is also a minority owner with the Spanish soccer team Mallorca, where he is on the board, and the Vancouver Whitecaps. His media company, which used to be called Meathawk, is now called CTRL_. He’s invested in the HomeCourt app, which tracks your basketball shooting and body movements and analyzes them.
He’s dabbling furiously, and he just had a fifth child 10 weeks ago, a boy. Nash has flown to Toronto on the redeye from Los Angeles after putting the kids to bed. He will doze for three hours in the hotel room because he has never slept well on planes, do some promotional work for the internet broadcaster DAZN, and talk before flying home.
He’s 45. He looks tanned, if not rested. He says it took him two years to fully mourn the end of his own career: late in his career he realized he had been suppressing his emotions for a long time to keep from getting distracted, so the mourning was a part of learning how to feel properly again.
And now he is still figuring out his second life.
“I get asked to do stuff every day,” Nash says. “But I have to keep my sanity and the sanctity of the family, so I try to say no, but the reality is that even with those parameters and goals, I still end up with a pretty full schedule. So I’m constantly trying to refine it: where am I making an impact, where could I be making a bigger impact? And I’m still kind of in a transition stage, to be fair. It’s been five years since I retired, but I’m still transitioning to … what is it that I really want to do?”
“I do know what I like, but it’s almost like I’m in my infancy now, and figuring out who I am.”
It’s jarring, in a way. Nash has always been someone who seemed to know where he was and where he wanted to go. He founded his production company while still a player; he started his organizational association with Canada Basketball while still with the Phoenix Suns, before he was general manager of the program for five years. Great career. He seemed ready.
He wasn’t. And now the Victoria product is trying the things he feels are irreplaceable chances. He still leaves open the possibility that he will chuck it all, or most of it, if that is what works. He thinks about the world a lot; he’s been leaning vegan lately for environmental reasons, with solar panels and an electric car. He helped shape modern basketball, and would like to make a bigger impact than just that, again.
So who is he, and how can that happen? Being on the board at Mallorca, which was a second-division club that recently reached La Liga, has been a goosebump-creating experience, and Nash is actually involved with how the club’s culture is shaped. (With the Whitecaps, he describes himself as more of a superfan.) Teaching players — whether in the NBA or at lower levels, which he tried in a short YouTube series called Give and Go — still gets him going.
And Canada Basketball was a passion for a time, but after five years of volunteer work he stepped aside for current GM and friend Rowan Barrett, who is under fire after Canada Basketball’s pro no-shows led to a tough ride at the World Cup. Nash won’t criticize the players — the national team made him better, but he says times have changed — and defends what he and Barrett did with the program.
He points to that crushing 2015 loss to Venezuela in Mexico, and how the program had been trending upward before this summer. Now, he says, Canada needs to go back and say to the players who didn’t come, how can we make this your program?
“We need to dig deeper and say, what can we do?” Nash says. “We want this, the country wants this.”
But one man can’t save it, and he has already moved on to places that worked better for him. He has an idea, which gets him going again. He’s starting down the road toward a more multi-sport athlete development model for younger kids, to counter the overspecialization and overprofessionalization of youth sports. Nash himself played just about everything: soccer, hockey, baseball, box lacrosse, volleyball. He ran track and cross-country. Basketball was the second-last sport he tried; he picked up rugby at St. Michael’s University School in Grades 11 and 12. Nash would like to build something to encourage that kind of lifelong physical literacy, whether or not it leads to the infinitesimal chance of a pro career.
“My motive isn’t necessarily that I’m going to end capitalism in youth sports,” Nash says. “But can we make this better?”
He’s all over the place, even as he sits still for a minute. But if you step back a little, you can see what Nash is looking for. So can he.
“There’s a lot of reward in trying to build a team, and I don’t just mean on the field,” he says of Mallorca. “It’s the same with a youth development model, or the same with being with the Warriors: collaborating, learning, being open.” It’s your career all over again, he’s told. He nods.
“That’s what I was drawn to: seeing my teammates succeed, seeing the vibe in the locker room, in the huddle, on the court be positive,” he says. “That gets me going. That makes me happy. I’m happy, this is exciting, this is fun. Scoring 35 and getting beat and everyone not really liking each other is not exciting to me, at all, at all.”
He still wants to distribute, collaborate, give and go. He’s still the same guy, in this second life. He’s just discovering how to be that guy again.