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Big Baller Brand CEO LaVar Ball revealed some surprising personal news in the aftermath of his major health crisis last year, which forced him to have his right foot amputated.
In a livestream with YouTube content creator N3on on Wednesday, June 24, LaVar, 58, revealed that his wife of nearly 30 years, Tina, had left him.
“Tina decided to go her own way, that’s why you don’t see her here,” LaVar said. “But she wanted to go do something else. That’s fine with me. We had our run.”
LaVar and Tina got married in 1997 and share three sons: Lonzo, 28, LiAngelo, 27, and LaMelo, 24.
Tina had a health crisis of her own in 2017, when she suffered a stroke that left her with aphasia, which impairs a person’s ability to speak.
“She was always beautiful in my eyes until you say, ‘I wanna go do something else,’” LaVar said. “Now you not as beautiful to me.”
He added, “It is what it is, man. Any time you can find somebody you can stay in love with for a long time or for one day or whatever — if you can witness that love, that’s good. I had that with her.”
Not one to throw a pity party, LaVar revealed he had also “found somebody else.”
“No need to worry,” he said. “It’s somebody who’s working for me.”
LaVar and Tina’s split comes after LaVar had his right foot amputated in February 2025 due to a foot infection that spread through LaVar’s blood, leaving him in hospital “for over a month.”
“Due to not paying attention to my diabetes … I ended up having to get my foot amputated,” LaVar wrote in an essay for SLAM magazine in March 2025. “First, they cut off a couple of toes. Then they cut off my foot. Then they said, ‘We gotta go almost knee high for another surgery.’ Three surgeries. And then there was the blood transfusions. Not one, not two, not three, four different times.”
LaVar continued, “I look at my situation like this: I’ve talked to some of my people that’s my age that’s been calling me that have cancer. And they say, ‘We thought we got it all, but we didn’t,’ and so the organs are getting tore up in the inside. Now these folks are dying. And these are my friends that are around my age, in the 50s and dying of cancer. Just for me to have my foot cut off, I got another one. I’m good to have my foot cut off as opposed to being dead.”
News of LaVar and Tina’s split comes as the Minnesota Timberwolves stunned the NBA by trading for their son LaMelo on Thursday, June 25.
In a video posted via social media on Thursday, LaVar urged Minnesota to “get the other two Ball boys.”
Lonzo last saw NBA action for the Cleveland Cavaliers in February, the same month he was traded to the Utah Jazz and waived on the same day. Following his own semi-pro basketball career, LiAngelo is now a successful rapper going by the stage name GELO.
