Still no stopping Tisdale By JOE POSNANSKI
Wayman Tisdale walked down the stairs in his Los Angeles home. It was February. What a life. Tisdale had been a basketball star. He was now a successful musician. How many other people get to hear that much applause? He could hear the rumbling of his wife and a couple of his four children as he came downstairs, and though he would not remember exactly what he was thinking, they had to be happy thoughts.
That’s when his leg snapped in half. It just snapped, no other way to say it; he could hear the crack, and the pain poured through him like an electric shock. All the way to the hospital, he wondered what happened. He had not fallen. He had not stepped on it wrong. The doctors took X-rays and for weeks could not figure out what happened.
Then they saw it. The tumor.
“I was not prepared for that,” Tisdale says. “You’re never prepared. You never think it will be you. I didn’t have any deep thoughts. I just told the doctor, ‘Please fix it.’ ”
•••
Nobody could stop Wayman Tisdale. Nobody. He would get the basketball, back to the basket. That red 23 on his Oklahoma jersey look- ed like the “S” Superman wears. He was so young, a college freshman, but he looked like he was born for this. He had that big smile on his face, too, because he knew he was going to score. Who was going to stop him? Tisdale could go left or right, shoot hook shots with either hand, make turnaround jumpers either way, he could jump over you, slip around you, plow through you.
One way or another, he would score. Nobody could stop him.
That was 25 years ago. Wayman Tisdale was the first freshman to be named a unanimous All-American. He averaged almost 25 points a game as a freshman at Oklahoma. His sophomore year, he averaged 27. He’s still the only player in college basketball history to be named All-America his freshman, sophomore and junior years — and with the way kids are jumping to the NBA, he might hold that record forever.
When you talk about the greatest scorers in college basketball history, you probably start with Pistol Pete Maravich. But Wayman Tisdale is in the photograph.
“Oklahoma basketball was really, really down,” says Kansas coach Bill Self, who played on the same AAU team as Tisdale and then played against him in the early 1980s while at Oklahoma State. “I’m talking about the whole state. It was just such a football state. That’s what people cared about. And I would say Wayman Tisdale, more than anyone else — I mean, more than Nolan Richardson, more than Billy Tubbs, more than anybody — made it a basketball state, too.”
Tisdale, you may know, moved on from that life. He won a gold medal playing for the legendary 1984 Olympic team (a team that was coached by Bob Knight and featured Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing). He went to the NBA and had a nice career (averaged 15.3 points a game over 12 seasons). All along, he knew that when basketball ended, he would play his own kind of jazz on his bass guitar.
And when basketball did end … well, nobody could stop Wayman Tisdale. Nobody. He played his bass at every gig, every town, wherever there were people to listen. He played with every musician who asked him. He watched them closely. Listened to them. Learned. Tisdale had loved playing the bass since he was a child, since his father, a preacher in Tulsa, had brought home a Mickey Mouse guitar. Wayman worked his fingers over that thing until his fingertips bled and something sounding like music emerged. He taught himself music. Then, he had taught himself basketball, too.
“They are the two parts of myself,” he says.
His first album made the Billboard Top 10 list in contemporary jazz. He was an instant success. It was strange. Some came out to hear him because they knew the name. Others did not treat him seriously because they knew the name. But none of that mattered much to Tisdale. He kept working. He would win them over.
“Basketball taught me a work ethic,” he says. “And even though music comes from a different part of me, I work just as hard at it.”
He released more albums, and they sold more copies, and he played with some of the biggest names in jazz, and he traveled the country. He even went to No. 1 with a remake of the song, “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now.” It was his song. Who else had lived a life like this? He was a sports star. A music star.
“I live to perform,” he would tell interviewers everywhere.
And then he was walking down the stairs, and his leg snapped in half, and the doctors told him that he had bone cancer, and everything changed.
•••
First came the chemo. Then came the eight-hour surgery when doctors replaced the tibia in Tisdale’s leg. He was on crutches for seven months. He was told many terrifying things. All along, there were the sleepless nights.
And Tisdale says this was the time when he learned exactly what is inside him. He had always lived with joy. He played the guitar with that joy. He played basketball with it, too. “He was like Magic Johnson, the way he smiled,” Self said. “You couldn’t help but just be happy when you were around the guy.”
“That was easy,” Tisdale says. “I love basketball. I love music. It’s easy to have joy when you’re around things you love. But how will you be when something like this happens? You don’t know. You can’t know until it happens.”
Tisdale started getting closer to his family. He started thinking more about God. He started listening to his old music. He heard a new sound. He realized something.
“All my life, I’ve tried to inspire people,” he said. “My father was a preacher, so I saw the way he got into people’s lives. That’s what I do. I did that as a basketball player — I wanted to give people something that would get them excited, something that could get inside them. That’s what I do with my music. It’s my chance to preach.
“And so when I went back and listened to my old music, for the first time, I heard that. Now the music was speaking to me. It was inspiring me. And it’s like, something changed. It’s just different now, you know?”
Tisdale is recovering. He’s walking now. He is getting stronger. He says, plainly, “I’m winning.” But winning isn’t enough. Tisdale needs to play music again. So at 7 tonight at the Gem Theater (tickets are available from the Gem Theater box office at 816-474-6262), Tisdale will have a conversation, and then he will play music. He is doing this for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, but more, he is doing it for himself. It will be only his second concert since that day when his leg snapped. He believes it will be his best. Nobody can stop Wayman Tisdale.
“I’ve enjoyed performing all my life,” he says. “But I feel like I have a message now. I feel like I have a purpose. Tell Kansas City that they’re going to get hit with a hurricane. I have something to say.”
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