So what happens when the thing that you've loved since you were a kid, the thing that eventually would lead you to become an eleven time NBA All Star and two time champion, playing alongside the best in the world, what happens when that comes to a cataclysmic end at the age of 31, leaving you to figure out not only what to do with the rest of your life, but who you are?
That is exactly what happened to my guest this week, Chris Bosh.
He fell in love with basketball at an early age and even earned the prestigious mister basketball title while still in high school in Dallas, Texas.
And a year into college, Chris entered the draft and ended up on the Toronto Raptors, where he played for seven years before joining the Miami Heat and winning two championships.
But a handful of years into his time in Miami, he was having trouble breathing and found himself in the hospital with blood clots in his lungs.
A year later, the clots returned to his leg, officially ending his career and leading to a season of reckoning and reimagining, launching him into an exploration of who he was beyond the sport that had defined so much of his life and career.
Chris shares many of the awakenings and insights and stories in his great new memoir, letters to a young athlete.
And we go deep into some of the early moments of awakening and then exploring in his career.
What do you do when the thing that has defined so much of who you are and how you move through the world and earns your living and supports your family when it just magically goes away?
How do you change and re identify who you are in the world and what you're here to do?
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields and this is good life project.
So you came up in south Dallas.
Yeah.
Which it's kind of funny because when I think when a lot of people, especially when you're not from Texas and you think of Texas and you think of athletics, like when you're younger, the first thing that comes to mind is football.
It's like the religion is football, of course.
So it was interesting for me to learn that actually, there's a huge basketball culture in Texas, too, which I didn't really know all that much about.
But you were sort of like, dropped into that from the earliest age.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's one of the funny things that my dad always says.