Miami Heat superstar Jimmy Butler might just be the most interesting professional athlete in all of sports.
He certainly has a pretty big personality, and isn’t afraid to show it. Maybe that’s why he decided to start up his own coffee business called “Big Face Coffee” during the pandemic to match his charisma.
And when he isn’t knocking down big shots for the Heat, or making coffee, he’s probably busy being the biggest country music fan in the NBA.
As crazy as it might seem, Jimmy Butler (AKA Jimmy Buckets) is a massive fan of the country genre. During last year’s playoffs, Butler was blasting Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs any chance he got.
He actually discovered country music as a joke with his teammates. He used to walk around the locker room and hate that other players were blasting their music in their headphones for everyone else to hear. He asked them to stop, but his teammates told him to “mind his own headphones.”
So he figured out a way to get back at them, and decided to utilize country music in the process.
Butler said in an interview:
“I go home and I Google ‘what’s the most country song there is?’ Three popped up, but the one I saw first was Tim McGraw- ‘Don’t Take The Girl,’ so I downloaded it.
I go into the next game and I have my headphones like that and that’s what I’m blaring, and they were like ‘Yo, no you can’t listen to that, turn it down.’ And I said ‘no, you listen to what’s in your headphones, and I’m gonna listen to what’s in mine.’
Then I actually started to listen to the lyrics in the song, and I was like ‘wow!’”
He’s such a big fan of country music that he actually has decided to produce some of his own. Jimmy isn’t the first NBA player to record music (Star PG Damian Lillard has a whole other rap career on the side of his basketball playing), but he is the first to record country music.
Butler said in an interview with Boardroom that he’s been working on a rather expansive country music project over the past couple of years:
“I don’t want to tell anyone who I’ve been writing with because then it’ll ruin the surprise. Now, I’m in the lab writing and producing country music. We got some real artists and songwriters.
We probably got around 45 tracks right now, and I hope to go write some more. There’s definitely going to be an album.”
45 songs? That’s some Morgan Wallen double album level stuff…
You might be a little hesitant to listen to a country album with NBA player Jimmy Butler at the helm, but I’d at least be willing to give it a shot. It would at least bring an interesting perspective to the genre.
And if I’m being honest, based on his appearance today at the Miami Heat’s media day, he might be putting out a punk rock album as well:
Butler has been known to change up his look for media day as a joke, considering that many broadcasts have to use the images and videos they capture during the day for the rest of the year.
This look is a pretty bold one, though Jimmy seems to be embracing it:
And fun fact: Jimmy starred in Luke Bryan’s “Light It Up” music video in 2017.