Kevin Nash's Basketball Career Ended After He Slapped His Coach
WWE legend Kevin Nash almost had a very different career path. In a Grantland profile from 2012 detailing Nash's foray into acting, the 6-foot-10 powerhouse talked about his years before becoming a wrestler, including a promising potential career as a basketball player.
The towering wrestler formerly known as Diesel was a successful basketball player throughout his time in college, including three years spent playing for the University of Tennessee. With his height and skill level, it seemed he had a solid chance at playing the sport professionally. That all changed with a quick series of mistakes that dramatically altered the trajectory of his life and career.
Following a loss to Kentucky in which Nash was ejected for getting into a fight, a confrontation between player and coach would wind up costing him. "We go back to the locker room and [head coach Don] DeVoe kept saying, 'Hey, hothead, you cost us the game,'" Nash told Grantland. "He grabbed my jersey and tried to spin me around. He kept running his mouth so I b****-smacked him. I bear-pawed him."
Nash Moves Into Pro Wrestling
After that encounter, Kevin Nash left the University of Tennessee altogether, though his basketball career wasn't at a complete end just yet. Following his three years in college, Nash spent some time playing basketball professionally overseas, as well as serving two years in the Army. A knee injury eventually forced Nash to move on from basketball entirely. He returned to his hometown of Detroit for a job on an assembly line before eventually making his way down to Atlanta, where he worked as a floor manager for a gentleman's club. It was during this period that Nash was recruited into wrestling.
The massive future star received training from Jody "The Assassin" Hamilton, and it didn't take long before he made his TV debut for WCW in 1990. Nash went on to have an incredibly successful wrestling career across several major companies, as well as garnering some notable acting gigs in the years since his retirement. Recently, Nash started his own cannabis business.