It’s hard to describe what it felt like when I saw the headline.
“Ozzy Osbourne Dead at 76.”
I stopped. My hands froze. The air left my chest like I had just been hit with the hardest screen of my life. I was in the middle of a workout — headphones on, shots going up — when someone called my name and showed me the screen. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t. Just two nights earlier, he’d texted me.
“I watched your game. You were on fire. Keep going, kid. You’re only getting started.”
I hadn’t even replied yet.
People will ask how someone like me — a 23-year-old basketball player — could feel this deeply about someone like Ozzy Osbourne. But what they don’t know is that Ozzy wasn’t just a rock star in my world. He was a lifeline.
He was a friend.
I met Ozzy through my dad. It started out as a joke — my dad being this diehard Black Sabbath fan who used to blast “Iron Man” before every one of my high school games like it was my theme song. He always said, “Ozzy doesn’t sing — he survives out loud.” And somehow, that stuck with me.
Then, in 2021, after a brutal injury sidelined me for weeks, I fell into a pretty dark place. I was frustrated, scared, tired of the pressure. My dad, worried and trying to help, reached out to an old friend who somehow knew someone connected to Ozzy’s team. A few days later, I got an unexpected FaceTime request.
It was Ozzy.
Hair wild, voice gravelly, smile crooked — he said, “You’re the Clark girl, yeah? Heard you’re tougher than half the NBA.”
I laughed through my shock, and we talked for over an hour.
That was the beginning.
What followed were years of late-night texts, odd little voice notes, and sometimes, full-on rants about life, pain, pressure, and survival. Ozzy didn’t give advice the way most mentors do. He didn’t tell me to be perfect. He told me to feel everything — even the ugly stuff — and turn it into power.
“Fear is just proof you still care,” he once said. “I used to scream backstage just to remind myself I was alive.”
His words hit me in ways few ever have.
He would watch my games when he could. Sometimes he’d call afterward and say ridiculous things like, “You crossed that girl so bad she’s still spinning.” Other times, he’d just say, “I saw the fire in your eyes. Don’t let them dim it.”
We had planned to meet again this summer. A simple dinner, just the two of us. No cameras, no press. Just laughs, stories, music, maybe even a freestyle jam on a borrowed guitar.
Now, that will never happen.
When someone like Ozzy dies, the world talks about his music, his legacy, the madness of his youth. And yes — all of that matters.
But I want the world to know about his heart.
The man who listened when I couldn’t speak. Who cracked jokes when I needed to cry. Who told me, at my lowest, that the world doesn’t break you unless you let it.
“You’re not just an athlete,” he told me once. “You’re a storm. And storms don’t apologize.”
I carry those words into every game.
And now… I carry them into grief.
Today, I lit a candle in my apartment.
I played “Mama, I’m Coming Home” — the acoustic version he once told me he wrote with tears on his fingers — and I let myself cry.
Because I didn’t just lose a mentor.
I lost someone who reminded me that it’s okay to be loud, to be messy, to be real.
And most of all — to be human.
To Sharon, his children, his bandmates, and everyone who loved him: I send you all my love. He wasn’t just your family. In some strange, quiet way, he was mine too.
I know the world will mourn the man on stage.
I will mourn the man who reached out to a scared athlete and said, “I see you.”
Rest in power, Ozzy.
You were the noise that comforted me.
The silence now is unbearable.
But I’ll keep roaring — for both of us.
— Caitlin Clark
