If the Miami Heat superstar isn’t busy ripping the heart out of every team in the NBA playoffs, there’s a good chance he’s kicking back and enjoying some country music.
Jimmy Butler’s locker room music choices have always been a point of interest, but apparently his love for country music has taken over the 33-year-old pro basketball player’s playlist.
You don’t find country music playing in many NBA locker rooms (or even arenas) for the most part, so Jimmy Butler is an outlier. His love for the genre actually originated from a joke he was playing on his teammates.
In an interview, Butler sat down and described how he accidentally stumbled upon the greatness of country music way back when headphones still had cords:
“Before the game, everyone was listening to those Beats by Dre, and at that point in time they weren’t wireless and they had that thick cord and it was just like obnoxiously loud.
They (teammates) wouldn’t put them on their ears, they were like right here (around neck) and you could hear it. So it was like Lil Wayne coming from one of my teammates, Young Jeezy, Wiz Khalifa…”
Rap and hip-hop music was the way to go for many of the 6-time NBA All-Star’s teammates. “Jimmy Buckets” decided to give his guys a little bit of a taste of their own medicine
He came up with a plan, which eventually led him to find a Tim McGraw country classic:
“So I was like ‘why don’t y’all turn it down, what’s the point of having on headphones if you’re not gonna have them on your head?’ And they were like ‘don’t worry about it man, worry about what’s coming out of your headphones.
So I said ‘okay.’ After the game, 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.”
Jimmy thankfully found his way to “old country” with this McGraw tune. Things probably wouldn’t have gone the same way if “pop country” showed up on his Google search.
Butler continued:
“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!'”
The always wonderful Tim McGraw introduced and hooked Jimmy Butler onto country music.
Since then, Jimmy has played on a number of NBA teams before landing (and thriving) with the Miami Heat, and his distinct music choices have followed him from city to city.
I’d love to see what an NBA team would look like blasting “Don’t Take The Girl” through their team speakers. It might even be what Butler plans to do since the Heat couldn’t finish off the series sweep against the Celtics the other night.
Butler gave this beautiful answer on how he and his team plans to avoid getting down in the dumps following the loss:
“We are gonna listen to some music, gonna drink some beers… go have some wine… We’re gonna smile, we’re gonna be in this thing together… And we’re gonna go get one on the road.”
I’d imagine that Butler will be “working the aux” to keep the spirits of the Miami Heat high.
He’ll probably lean on Luke Combs like he did in this clip:
Or might even break out some Hootie and the Blowfish as he did in this Michelob Ultra commercial:
Jimmy Butler, A.K.A. Jimmy Buckets, is a national treasure and a certified country music fanatic.
I’m sure he would love to keep blasting country classics all the way to the NBA championship, of which they have a pretty decent chance of competing for.
And just in case you hadn’t ever heard “Don’t Take The Girl” by Tim McGraw (or at least needed a refresher), I’ve got it linked below:
