Meyers Leonard's New Song is Good, Actually

I started mowing my parents' lawn when I was 8 years old. We had a very large riding lawn mower, and I would get on it and spend hours driving around the yard. At first, my main instruction was to not really get near anything. My dad would have me leave a few rows around each of the trees so I didn't accidentally run into them (though I sometimes still did). Most of the time, I think I did a pretty decent job, and I eventually established a highly lucrative business where I would mow our neighbors yard and eventually, my grandparents.

My main memory of driving the lawn mower around the yard is of these yellow soundproof headphones that had a radio in them. I would listen to WIXY 100.3 and just belt out the words to 90s country songs. One of my favorite meme styles is the people who think they're good at singing, who then play what they sound like on the lawn mower. Like this:

https://www.tiktok.com/@i_dad_so_hard/video/7248633681286335787?_r=1&_t=ZP-8uSg7wCHHH5

That was 8-year-old me bouncing around the yard doing renditions of Tim McGraw, Alan Jackson, Reba and George Jones.

I'm telling you all this because Meyers Leonard, the formerly-disgraced, former Illinois, and now former NBA basketball player, released a country song to officially announce his retirement from the NBA.

And it's actually kinda good???

I've had it playing on loop as I write this, and I still am shocked at how good the deep crooning from the 7-foot center with a sneaky good jumper sounds. I’m good for at least 30 of the 1,900 listens on Spotify. He sounds like a mix of Josh Turner and a foghorn, a real singer that I would not be surprised to hear on the radio. I could see a young version of myself on the lawn mower singing about “leaving Robinson” and dreaming of the NBA.

Don't get me wrong. The lines in the song are definitely cheesy (rhyming "little boy" and "Illinois" was kinda dope, but I'm not going to forgive "Led to fallin' in love with the love of my life," and you shouldn’t either), but when I saw the music video his high school basketball highlights and then heard him say "I left everything I'd ever known, headed up north, a hundred miles from home", it actually does feel country.

And in a ‘I grew up in Central Illinois’ way, not a 'I'm a proud racist’ way.

To be clear about that point, though, Meyers Leonard did use an anti-Semitic slur that effectively ended his NBA career years early (though injuries also played a role in that retirement).

But he also did something that seems foreign in Trump's America: He apologized. He went on a full-fledged learning and apology tour, including right here in Champaign-Urbana, delivering meals and listening to how he hurt people. He actually seems like he feels bad for his ignorance and racism and wants to be a better person, and he put in the actual hard work to make it seem that way.

This presents a sharp contrast to country artists (see Jason Aldean and Morgan Wallen) who use racism as a marketing tool, rather than something to learn from.

A long time ago, I decided I wasn’t really going to be a fan of individual players because, too often, they let you down.

Meyers was never really a hero of mine, though. He was talented at basketball, but more in a conceptual way (at least when he was at Illinois). He didn’t turn that talent into tangible on-court success. We missed the NCAA tournament his sophomore year before he went pro. I have talked to him a couple times as a media member and once at Joe's Brewery when he was on the Trailblazers and I was at a Daily Illini sports barcrawl. He was always very kind, but I never really related to him.

I’ll be curious to see where Meyers goes from here. Good in Goodbye explores the entire history of his life. I wonder if he has the songwriting chops to cover other country topics like being in love, facing heartbreak, drinkin’ beer, driving trucks and everything in between.

Many of us here in Central Illinois grow up wanting to be professional athletes or country singers. I gave up the singing dream after 7th grade choir. I gave up my NBA dream when I didn’t make the Monticello freshman basketball team. I gave up the lawn mowing business when I became too allergic to grass to function anytime I mowed the yard.

If Meyers can make it in the NBA and country music, he'll be a Central Illinois icon.

If he can keep learning from his mistakes, I’ll keep rooting for him.

You can follow Johnathan on Twitter, Bluesky and Instagram. He can be reached at jhett93@gmail.com

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