Stan Love, Athlete With a Beach Boys Connection, Dies at 76

New York Times

01-05-2025

Stan Love, a former professional basketball player who was the brother of the singer Mike Love of the Beach Boys and a onetime bodyguard and caretaker of the band's brilliant but troubled leader, Brian Wilson, has died at 76.
His death was announced on Sunday on Instagram by his son Kevin Love, the five-time N.B.A. All-Star who plays for the Miami Heat. He did not say when his father died or specify the cause or location, although he did say that Mr. Love died after a long illness and that his longtime wish was to die at home. He was known to live in Lake Oswego, Ore.
Stan Love, a 6-foot-9 forward who had been a star player for the University of Oregon, was selected ninth overall in the 1971 National Basketball Association draft by the Baltimore Bullets, the predecessors of the Washington Wizards. He averaged 6.6 points and 3.9 rebounds a game with modest playing time over four seasons with the Bullets and the Los Angeles Lakers of the N.B.A. and the San Antonio Spurs, then of the American Basketball Association.
As his basketball career ended, Mr. Love became Brian Wilson's caretaker in the 1970s and '80s, during a turbulent period for Mr. Wilson, his cousin, whose innovative songwriting and flair for sophisticated harmonies were complicated by drug use and mental illness.
Mr. Love said he toured with the Beach Boys for roughly five years. He described that period to The Portland Tribune in 2019 as chaotic.
'It was 24 hours a day of worrying, trying to keep the creeps away,' he said. 'Fame and money in rock-and-roll — it's all a very dangerous area to live in.'
In his 1986 book, 'Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys,' Steven Gaines described an incident from January 1982 in which Mr. Love said he was told that Brian needed protection from his brother Dennis, the Beach Boys' drummer, who was reportedly supplying Brian with cocaine.
Mr. Love and another bodyguard, Rushton Pamplin, known as Rocky, told Mr. Gaines that they had posed as police officers, broke into Dennis Wilson's home in Venice Beach, Calif., and beat him up. Mr. Love called it 'one of the most brutal beatings ever.'
Dennis Wilson pressed charges, according to the Gaines book, which led to a court hearing. Mr. Love was fined $750 and Mr. Pamplin $250. Both were placed on six months' probation. Restraining orders were placed against them and Dennis Wilson.
Dennis died by drowning after a day of drinking in 1983. Mr. Pamplin, a former model and college football player, died in 2022.
'Brian is a very fragile individual with a lot of mental challenges,' Mr. Love told The Portland Tribune. 'For someone to give him access to cocaine — that pissed me off.
'People get what they deserve,' he added. 'Dennis was one of the most problem persons I've come across.'
On May 7, 1990, Mr. Love filed a petition seeking to become Brian Wilson's conservator. At a tumultuous news conference that day, as reported by The Los Angeles Times, Mr. Love said that Mr. Wilson had become 'brainwashed' and made a 'puppet' by his psychotherapist, Eugene Landy, and that he was unable to care for his own personal and business affairs.
Mr. Love said that he had been unable to reach Mr. Wilson by telephone, and that Mr. Wilson's own mother and two daughters had not been able to spend more than five hours with him over the previous five years.
'I feel Brian is being held a virtual hostage,' he said.
Brian Wilson walked into the news conference and rebutted Mr. Love's contentions, calling them 'outrageous.'
'I feel great, and my life is back on track,' Mr. Wilson told reporters. 'I see who I want to see, and I am in charge of my own life.'
Mr. Landy, a clinical psychologist who was widely known as the 'shrink to the stars,' employed an immersive technique in which he and his team essentially oversaw Mr. Wilson's life 24 hours a day, including padlocking his refrigerator.
Mr. Landy was both credited with helping Mr. Wilson stage a comeback in the early 1980s and criticized for insinuating himself so thoroughly into Mr. Wilson's life that he began acting as his business partner and record producer and occasionally took songwriting credit. In 1992, in the settlement of a suit filed by Mr. Wilson's family, Mr. Landy was barred by court order from contacting Mr. Wilson. Mr. Landy died in 2006.
In a 2016 memoir, 'Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy,' written with James S. Hirsch, Mike Love said that his brother Stan moved in with Mr. Wilson in the late 1970s and used his sense of discipline as an athlete to apply 'tough love,' 'yelling at Brian about how fat and lazy he was and how he had to get his life in order.'
But Mr. Wilson's appetite for drugs remained unsatiable. When Stan Love would take a shower, Mike Love wrote, Mr. Wilson would sometimes sneak out in his robe and hitchhike in search of drugs. Once he was picked up and brought home by the talk show host Merv Griffin.
In his own memoir, 'Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story' (1991, with Todd Gold), Mr. Wilson accused Stan Love and Mr. Pamplin of making his life 'hell' by yelling at him and trying to intimidate him as they sought to get him to stop using drugs and to get into better physical shape.
But Mr. Wilson also recalled his two bodyguards rescuing him after he took an overdose of sleeping pills. In another incident, he said, Mr. Love once helped revive him when Mr. Wilson was left semiconscious and choking on his vomit after taking heroin.
'We're offering you our love and our help,' Mr. Wilson quoted Mr. Love as saying.
Mr. Love denied mistreating Mr. Wilson. And the veracity of Mr. Wilson's book was widely disputed. Mike Love filed a defamation suit against HarperCollins, which published the book, and settled for a reported $1.5 million. Efforts to reach him for comment were unsuccessful.
In 2024, Mr. Wilson was placed in a conservatorship after the death of his wife, Melinda. His business representatives had petitioned a California court, indicating that he had a 'major neurocognitive disorder' and had been diagnosed with dementia.
Jean Sievers, Mr. Wilson's manager and co-conservator, said in an interview on Tuesday that 'anything from that book I would say is questionable.'
Stanley S. Love was born on April 9, 1949, and grew up in the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Baldwin Hills. His father, Milton, was a union sheet metal worker. His mother, Emily Glee (Wilson) Love, who sang and played the piano, was the sister of Murry Wilson, the father of Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson.
In addition to his son Kevin and his brother, Mr. Love's survivors include his wife, Karen; another son, Collin; and a daughter, Emily.
Mr. Love was a three-year starter for the University of Oregon basketball team and became the school's career leader in points scored, a record that has since been surpassed. But music was also popular with the family since his childhood. He told The Los Angeles Times that a cello, a harp and a Steinway piano populated the living room. 'We'd get together and sing,' he said. 'My mother pushed the arts. I watched opera at the Hollywood Bowl at age 12.'