Ruby Wax (b. 1953)
Filed under the name Ruby · April 13, 2026
In coaching, we talk a lot about the mental side of the game, way more than we used to when I was a player myself, and Ruby Wax's whole career now feels connected to that shift. She's an American-British comedian who's written best-selling books and campaigned hard to reduce the stigma around mental illness, which takes real nerve when your public identity was built on making people laugh — pivoting to talk seriously about something that heavy is its own kind of hard transition to pull off cleanly. I make my athletes talk about how they're actually doing, not just how their shot's falling, because I've seen kids fall apart mentally in ways nobody caught until it was already a crisis. Wax basically decided to be loud and public about a subject a lot of people, athletes included, still try to hide entirely. That takes a different kind of toughness than the comedy career alone required. Being funny gets you a stage. Using that stage to talk about something people are ashamed of takes a whole different kind of courage.