Kurt Russell on his brief baseball career
It’s hard to imagine Kurt Russell doing anything other than acting. The star of The Hateful Eight was always angling toward acting, appearing as a child in Disney films throughout the 1960s. But as he evolved into his teenage and early adult years, Russell began pursuing a different career path: professional baseball.
When asked by Men’s Health if Russell feels any regret over the end of his athletic career, Russell claimed, “I used to. Up until I was 30 or 31, I had a hankering every spring. When you spend as many thousands of hours fielding ground balls and taking batting practice, it’s how you identify yourself. It informs not just your body, but your mind. I still wanted to play.”
Russell described baseball and acting as being “just completely different things. They’re not even like apples and oranges. They’re like… a race car and a TV remote control. There’s no connection.” Still, Russell was able to find some connective tissue when pushed.
“When you start cranking into a character, and you can feel the other actors go, ‘Yeeeah, that motherfucker is bringing it, here we go.’ That’s when it gets good,” Russell explained. “You get that same thing in baseball, when the intensity starts heating up, and you and your teammates are really connecting, and you think, ‘Yeah, bitch, let’s go. Let’s play ball.’ It’s a great feeling. It’s the crackle.”
Russell got as far as Double-A ball, where he played for the El Paso Diablos. It had previously been reported that Russell tore his rotator cuff, causing him to retire from baseball and take up professional guitar smashing. While Russell confirmed that part of the story, he also added that “It was a couple of things. I was using my arm more than I should. I took a hundred ground balls before every game. And then one night I was out celebrating, had a few too many, and blew out my arm playing air hockey.”
“I found out it was over from a doctor who had a terrible bedside manner. He examined me and said, ‘Aren’t you an actor too?’ I said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ And he said, ‘Well, you’re an actor all the time now.’ [Laughs] That was it. He just walked out of the room,” Russell remembered. “I sat there for like ten minutes, not knowing what to do. I was like, ‘Is that it?’ A nurse had to come in and get me. I was just devastated.”
One of Russell’s former teams, the Portland Mavericks, was owned by Russell’s father Bing. Russell himself briefly played for the team and later lent his perspective in the Netflix documentary on the team, The Battered Bastards of Baseball.
