When LaVar Ball first addressed having his right foot amputated, he seemed to be taking the matter in stride.
“Did y’all forget I’m LaVar?” the father of NBA players Lonzo and LaMelo Ball and rising rap star/former professional basketball player LiAngelo Ball said last month on TikTok. “If I wanted to, I’d grow it back!”
In a first-person article published Tuesday by Slam magazine, however, the famously vociferous Papa Ball revealed that he wasn’t always so upbeat about his medical situation — and that he ended up losing more than just his foot over the course of three operations since December.
“I had an infection on my foot that started spreading through my blood due to not paying attention to my diabetes,” Ball wrote. “I ended up having to get my leg amputated. First, they cut off a couple of toes. Then they cut off my foot. Then they said, ‘We gotta go almost knee high for another surgery.’ Three surgeries. And then there were also the blood transfusions. Not one, not two, not three, four different times.
“All those surgeries and blood transfusions, it made me question whether it was worth going through it sometimes. It made me think, ‘Man, just kill me and let me go about my business.’ It made me think that maybe it’s time for me to shut it down.
“But then seeing what my boys are doing out there, they’re like, ‘Dad you’re the toughest dude I know.’ That made me keep going. … It was good to have that backing from my boys. One of the things that makes me go is when they are all together. When they are all together, I feel strong.”
With an over-the-top personality he used to promote his own business ventures, Ball became a well-known figure in the sports world while his sons were basketball stars at Chino Hills High School. Now he says he intends to use his platform to encourage others to look after their own well-being better than he did.
“From my experience the last couple months, I want to get in people’s heads the importance of taking care of your health — especially Black people, because sometimes we’re not trying to go to the hospital, we will try to sleep it off or say, ‘Yeah, we’ll get to it later,’” Ball wrote. “And sometimes it’s a little more serious than what you think.
“I look at my situation like this: I’ve talked to some of my people that’s my age that’s been calling me that have cancer. And they say, ‘We thought we got it all, but we didn’t,’ and so the organs are getting tore up in the inside. Now these folks are dying. And these are my friends that are around my age, in the 50s and dying of cancer.
“Just for me to have my foot cut off, I got another one. I’m good to have my foot cut off as opposed to being dead. But if I don’t go at the end of last year during Christmas to get that infection looked at, [an infection] that’s been around for maybe a month or two on the bottom of my foot, this would be a different type of story.”
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