Before the Basketball, There Was the Bass: Wayman Tisdale’s First Love
Ask most people about Wayman Tisdale and basketball probably comes first.
The University of Oklahoma. The Olympics. The NBA. That unmistakable smile.
Ask Wayman, though, and the story started somewhere else.
Wayman Tisdale performing with Dave Koz on the Dave Koz & Friends Smooth Jazz Cruise, 2006. Photo by mjurn via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
“I can remember picking up a guitar when my father gave me a guitar, but it’s hard to remember a basketball,” Tisdale once recalled. A moment later, he made it even clearer: “Music was my love.”
That might be the most important thing to understand about Wayman Tisdale’s creative life.
Music was not the hobby he picked up after basketball. It was not a celebrity side project. Long before packed arenas and Olympic gold, there was a kid in Tulsa listening, experimenting, and figuring out how to make an instrument work in his own way.
Basketball made Wayman Tisdale famous.
Music was there first.
Learning It His Way
Tisdale grew up in a musical family deeply connected to the church. His father, the Rev. Louis Tisdale, was a Tulsa pastor, and Wayman learned by listening to the music around him.
According to his wife, Regina, the story of his bass playing began with a childhood guitar. Wayman’s father brought guitars home for his sons. His brothers found other uses for theirs. Wayman kept playing his until four strings were gone and only the two bass strings remained.
Something clicked.
Eventually, he moved to the bass. There was just one complication: Wayman was completely left-handed.
So he adapted.
Rather than learn according to convention, the self-taught musician turned the instrument around and developed his own approach. Regina remembered that because he had never taken formal music lessons, he simply created a system that made sense to him. He played the bass upside down, with the strings reversed from the conventional orientation, because that was what felt natural.
It became part of his sound.
There is something wonderfully Wayman about that. Faced with an instrument that was not built for him, he did not wait for somebody to explain the “right” way.
He found his way.
Basketball Never Replaced the Music
Of course, another talent was developing at the same time.
At Tulsa’s Booker T. Washington High School, Tisdale became one of the most heavily recruited basketball players in the country. At the University of Oklahoma, he became the first collegiate player to earn first-team All-American honors in each of his first three seasons. He won Olympic gold in 1984, entered the NBA as the second overall pick in 1985, and spent twelve seasons playing professionally.
But the bass kept traveling with him.
Tisdale continued playing through college and into his NBA career. Music remained connected to home, family, faith, and Tulsa. His friend and fellow Booker T. Washington alumnus Tony Mason remembers the two of them slipping into the school music room to jam together. Years later, they were still making music, recording at Tulsa’s Church Studio and in Tisdale’s home studios in Oklahoma and around the country.
Mason remembers Tisdale as “the funniest, most genuine, most real guy” and says that even as the settings around him changed, from Booker T. to the NBA to recording studios, Wayman remained essentially the same person.
That continuity matters.
Tisdale was not waiting for one life to end so another could begin. He was building both at once.
From the NBA to MoJazz
Eventually, the music moved from the background to center stage.
Before leaving professional basketball, Tisdale had already begun writing, producing, recording demos, and developing his own musical identity. A seven-song demo helped land him a deal with MoJazz, Motown’s jazz label. His debut album, Power Forward, arrived in 1995 and climbed to No. 4 on the contemporary jazz chart. In the Zone followed in 1996.
By the time his basketball career ended, Tisdale was not beginning again. He was accelerating.
His 1998 album Decisions marked his first release after basketball, and the Oklahoma Historical Society notes that he retired from the NBA specifically to concentrate on his music career.
Over the years, albums including Face to Face, Hang Time, Way Up! and Rebound followed. Tisdale ultimately released eight albums during his lifetime, collaborating with musicians including George Duke, Dave Koz, Jonathan Butler, Bob James, Kirk Whalum, and others.
His bass was often more than the foundation beneath the song. Tisdale brought it forward as a melodic voice, mixing contemporary jazz with the gospel, R&B, and funk he had absorbed throughout his life.
The basketball titles were still there in names like Power Forward, In the Zone, Hang Time, and Rebound.
But now the bass was carrying the melody.
Creativity at Home
Tisdale’s children remember that creativity was not something their father switched on when he walked into a studio.
It filled the house.
Danielle Tisdale remembers her father deciding, after retiring from basketball, that he wanted to learn acoustic guitar. For roughly six months, she said, there seemed to be a guitar everywhere he went, including the breakfast table.
“We got to actually see him set goals and watch things materialize,” Danielle remembered. To his children, “that was like magic.”
Gabrielle remembers sitting with him while he worked, hearing the same track dozens of times as he listened for details no one else seemed to notice. The family woke to made-up songs over the house intercom. Music rehearsals, church, studio sessions, touring, fashion, food, and performance were all part of the same creative ecosystem.
Tiffany Braxton describes her father simply as someone who “always kind of just created his own path.”
“A big part of my dad’s legacy,” she said, “is him just chasing his passions.”
That may explain why the story continues so naturally through the next generation, in food, fashion, design, events, and other creative work.
They watched someone make a life by following curiosity and then doing the work.
Passing the Instrument Along
Tisdale also found ways to make creativity possible for other people.
Danielle remembers that a childhood friendship unexpectedly connected her father with Fender and helped lead to an endorsement. What happened next says more about Tisdale than the endorsement itself.
He started giving instruments away.
If a young musician was serious about learning but needed a bass, Tisdale could help put one in their hands. Regina remembered similar moments, including Wayman providing an instrument for a young student whose musical potential caught their attention.
Creativity, for Tisdale, was something to share.
A kid needed an instrument? Find one.
A friend needed a singer? Make the connection.
A musician wanted to jam? Open the studio.
Tony Mason remembers Tisdale taking him along as his own career expanded, from recording sessions to performances in other cities. “He’s a part of my musical journey and my musical history too,” Mason said.
That may be one of the most powerful parts of Tisdale’s creative legacy. He did not just make music.
He made room.
The Rebound
In 2007, Tisdale was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer. Treatment eventually resulted in the amputation of part of his right leg.
Still, the music continued.
His final album, Rebound, arrived in 2008, its title carrying the basketball language that had followed him throughout his recording career, but now meaning something deeper.
His son Wayman II remembers one of his father’s favorite sayings: “Quitting is not an option.”
For Tisdale, that was more than motivational language. It was something his family had watched him practice for years.
Learn the instrument.
Work the plan.
Try something new.
Keep going.
Create anyway.
The First Love
Wayman Tisdale’s basketball accomplishments are extraordinary, and they belong in Oklahoma history.
But they are only part of the story.
Look a little closer and another Wayman appears: the kid wearing out the strings on a guitar. The teenager playing in church. The college basketball star still thinking about bass lines. The NBA player making demos. The musician building a studio at home. The dad carrying an acoustic guitar around until he figured it out. The friend bringing other musicians along. The artist handing an instrument to a young person and giving them a chance to discover what they could do with it.
Maybe the most surprising thing about Wayman Tisdale’s creative career is that there really was no dramatic transformation from athlete into musician.
The musician had been there all along.
And somewhere in Tulsa, before the arenas, the records, the tours, and everything that followed, a kid picked up a guitar and decided to figure it out.
He never really stopped.
Keep Exploring
Listen to Power Forward, Decisions, Way Up! and Rebound to hear different chapters of Tisdale’s musical journey. Explore his biography through the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, and watch for more of Wayman Tisdale’s story through OKPOP’s growing oral history archive and future museum experience.
Source Notes
Primary oral history sources: OKPOP interview with Regina Tisdale (October 16, 2023); OKPOP interview with Wayman Tisdale’s children Danielle Tisdale, Tiffany Braxton, Wayman Tisdale II, and Gabrielle Tisdale (October 16, 2023); OKPOP interview with Tony Mason (December 18, 2025).
Additional background: OKPOP Wayman Tisdale research packet and the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture entry on Wayman Tisdale.
