Wayman Tisdale

The NBA player who became a musician

1964–2009

Wayman Tisdale shot hoops with the Sacramento Kings, the Indiana Pacers, and the Phoenix Suns for 12 years. He spent another 14 playing bass guitar and recording eight best-selling albums. “I actually started playing music before I started playing basketball,” he explained. “Then I grew to 6-foot-9 and my values started changing.”

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The son of a pastor in Tulsa, Okla., Tisdale “idolized the bass players in the church band,” said The New York Times. “I thought they were the coolest cats,” he said. “They got to stand and do their thing in the back.” When his father gave him a toy guitar, he taught himself to play. Though he showed little interest in basketball growing up, “after sprouting 24 inches during junior high school and learning to dunk, he began to like the game.” Recruited by 150 colleges, Tisdale joined the University of Oklahoma as a power forward. With a quick-release short jump and soft southpaw shot, he averaged 25.6 points a game. In each of his first three years he was a first-team All-American and Big Eight Conference player of the year. He also “scored 2,661 points in his career, a Big Eight Conference record.”

After playing with the gold medal–winning 1984 U.S. Olympic basketball team, Tisdale turned pro and averaged 15.3 points per game, said The Washington Post. As his career was winding down, he picked up the bass guitar again. Emulating such artists as Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller, he used his five-string electric “as a melodic solo instrument rather than as thumping background accompaniment.” In 1995, two years before retiring from the NBA, Tisdale “released his first album, Power Forward, which rose to No. 4 on Billboard’s contemporary jazz chart.” He hit No. 1 with Can’t Hide Love and a remake of Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now, but he had trouble explaining his commercial success. “To become a chart guy is baffling to me. It was a gift. I can’t even read music. I couldn’t tell you what key I’m playing in.”

Diagnosed with bone cancer in 2007, Tisdale had a leg amputated last August. The prosthetic limb he wore until his death last week was crimson, one of Oklahoma’s colors.