A Brutal Injury Forced Kurt Russell To Start Acting Full-Time

Believe it or not, not every actor dreams of the bright lights and movie cameras from the beginning. There are many different roads actors have taken to their eventual careers, like Sean Connery’s time as a milkman, a military man, and nearly a Manchester United man before settling on the theater or working as a waiter with his father like Alfred Molina. Both fell in love with acting and that was that, but for ultimate cool guy Kurt Russell, acting was actually his fallback career.

Despite the fact that Russell was the son of actor Bing Russell and started out acting alongside big stars like Charles Bronson when he was still in grade school, he never actually planned on acting as a career. Instead he was focused on his first great love: baseball.

Unfortunately for Russell, he suffered a pretty painful (and slightly embarrassing!) injury that ended his baseball career right as it was beginning, forcing him to focus on acting instead. While it’s certainly a shame that he lost out on his baseball dreams, his expansive and impressive filmography is a win for the world.

Russell’s family were all pretty fond of baseball and his father had to abandon his baseball career due to a head injury, so young Kurt always just saw acting as a means to get closer to famous baseball players. He would eventually make it to Double A baseball, playing for a team in El Paso, but then he had an injury that changed the trajectory of his life. He once told the story to Men’s Health, explaining that he tore his rotator cuff while playing air hockey while out drinking and celebrating, which led to a brutal diagnosis:

“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. I sat there for like 10 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.”

Though Russell is considered one of the best Western movie actors of all time (and arguably one of the greatest movie stars of all time), he would long for baseball for many years, telling Men’s Health that he missed playing well into his 30s. He may not have gotten to live out his baseball dreams, but he did go on to star in a number of sports movies!

Even though Russell couldn’t play baseball anymore, he did star in a few roles in sports movies (and played basketball to save his life in “Escape from L.A.”) He starred with Robin Williams in the football comedy “The Best of Times” in 1986 and more memorably played real-life Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks in the 2004 Disney classic “Miracle,” but perhaps the most satisfying moment of his career tied both loves together.

The 2014 documentary “The Battered Bastards of Baseball” was directed by Russell’s nephews Chapman and Maclain Way, and it told the story of the minor league baseball team the Portland Mavericks, which had been owned by their grandfather Bing Russell. Kurt Russell features in the documentary and gets to tell the story of not only his father’s baseball legacy but his own time playing with the team and working as its vice president.

Sometimes our lives don’t turn out the way that we expected them to, but it’s pretty incredible that Kurt Russell’s backup plan for his life ended up being the kind of Hollywood career most of us could only ever dream of.