There was a time when every hooper wanted to rap, and every rapper wanted to hoop.

Hip-hop and hoops is a marriage that can’t be divorced. In its truest essence, they’ve been partners since the musical genre was first created in the early 1970s. Hip-hop’s rhythm resonated from the Bronx and cascaded over hardwood surfaces and blacktops across the globe. It’s a dance that moves through crowds and invites participants to sing along to the melody of its hook.

This inseparable union is why Shaq featured Biggie, why AI sparked a dress code, why Kobe took Brandy to the prom. It’s Funk Flex DJing the Dunk Contest. It’s Drake’s commitment to the Raptors games. It’s LeBron throwing up the Roc. It’s The Knuckleheads. It’s Stephon Marbury. It’s Jigga bringing the Nets to Brooklyn. It’s an AND1 Mixtape. It’s the Knickstape. It’s why SLAM exists.

It’s why a young rapper named Dame D.O.L.L.A. would raise the bar by rocking a throwback Bill Walton Blazers jersey and a mic around his neck for SLAM 205. It was 2017, and at just one album deep (another would drop later that year), he had proven that music was more than a mere hobby. It had started from childhood when his cousin drove from New York to Dame’s boyhood home in Oakland in the early ’90s, bringing hip-hop with him. Dame just wanted to be in the car. Another family member and gifted MC, Brookfield Duece, would demonstrate that music was in his blood. It would never leave.

Although Drake had broken new ground by joining Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan on a SLAM cover the year before, SLAM 205 was the first time that we’d ever had a solo cover with a rapper front and center. It was “The Music Issue,” a momentous celebration of the basketball/music crossover that was executed with an intentionality that had only been alluded to previously.

Following this introduction to the basketball universe, Dame D.O.L.L.A. would go on to release four more albums and gain ongoing respect in his field. He would work with the likes of Jadakiss, 2 Chainz and Lil Wayne. He would contribute to the soundtrack of NBA 2K and enjoy recognition on the indie album charts. And he shows no signs of putting the mic down.

There was a time when every hooper wanted to rap, and every rapper wanted to hoop. Dame is pretty good at both.

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Every player has his own individual taste in music, which can range from hometown hip-hop to house music. But what about the communal space of an NBA locker room? How does a player earn the power of the AUX cord? And is it a democracy or a dictatorship when it comes to a team’s playlist?

At the outset of the 2016-17 NBA season, we made it our mission to find out who controls the music in each of the 30 NBA locker rooms. So, who is the locker room DJ for each team? Scroll through the gallery above to find out, according to the players themselves.

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The post Every NBA Team’s Locker Room DJ appeared first on SLAM.

Rony Seikaly knows all this, and he knows that your initial reaction to learning that a former NBA veteran and ’89-90’s Most Improved Player is now a “world-famous DJ” is likely laughter. Which is why he wants you to know how wrong this line of thinking is.

“I come from the underground school where the object of the game is to play music nobody else is playing,” he says one fall afternoon over the phone from Miami. “Commercial DJs—they’re pretty much like jukeboxes. They play the hits, what people want to hear.

“Me, I’m trying to give someone the experience they’ve never had before.”

This is where all that hard work comes in. It takes new music to create that new experience, and to find that new music—what he refers to as “gems”—in an age where everyone has access to the same seemingly infinite music sharing platforms, Seikaly must parse through thousands of songs. Literally. By his own estimation he listens to around 3,000 new tracks every month, each lasting somewhere between five and 10 minutes. He spends between two and three hours every day alone in his home studio scouring the catalog of the meticulously organized folders he has saved on various hard drives. Some songs are pulled in full. Others—say, for example, one with a drop he likes but a weak rhythm—are skinned.

Eventually, all that music gets trimmed down. For his weekly SiriusXM radio show, he’ll put together somewhere between 20 and 30 tightly woven tracks. For his live sets, around 15.

“Being a good DJ is about your ear more than anything else, and that’s where the work comes in,” he says. “You could teach a monkey to mix music or play hits. It’s not hard. To me the hardest part is creating your own sound, your own vibe, so that any time you’re playing, people know, Oh, this is Rony’s style. That’s why, to do this, you have to love it. This hobby is a labor of love.”

So now you know: Rony Seikaly is not a stereotype. He’s a man following his passion. Or at least that was the plan. Then he lost sight of what had drawn him to this second career in the first place. That’s the funny thing about passion projects.

The project part is easy. Preserving the passion is hard.

Rony Seikaly has always loved house music. Want proof? How about the disco he built in his parents’ garage as a 14-year-old? He removed all their junk, painted the room black and lined the walls with foil paper because he couldn’t afford mirrors. Then he strung up a disco ball and installed two record players.

That was back in Athens, where he was raised after his parents moved to Greece from his native country of Lebanon. He and his friends were too young for the local nightlife so they spent evenings in the Seikaly garage instead. Students from visiting basketball teams were invited, too—and they were charged a $20 cover, which would be reinvested into upgrading the homemade disco.

Seikaly brought his love for house music across the Atlantic with him, first to Syracuse University and then the NBA, where he played 11 seasons and averaged 14.7 points and 9.5 rebounds per game. The first six of those seasons came for the then-expansion Heat, in Miami, which is where he makes his home today. MIA is also where his ear and burgeoning skills were refined, though at the time his NBA brethren had no idea.

“That’s the funny thing, I don’t remember him ever playing that music,” says Glen Rice, who played five years with Seikaly in Miami. “I don’t even remember him wearing headphones on the plane.” (Another memory Rice has of Seikaly: “The ladies loved him.” Adds another former teammate, Keith Askins: “Rony kept beauty around him. I’ll leave it at that.”)

Seikaly, now 51, says he tried introducing his music to teammates a few times but was always rebuffed and told to “turn that Euro shit off.” So he played for friends instead. They’d file into the mini-club he built in his new Miami Beach home that housed Seikaly’s late-night after-parties. One night, or, rather, early morning, sitting there with Sean “P Diddy” Combs and Erick Morillo, one of the world’s more popular house music DJs, Seikaly began playing one of his new mixes. This was back in 2005, five years after his retirement and right around the time of his divorce from his first wife, Mexican model Elsa Benítez.

Morillo, enjoying the beat, turned to Seikaly. “Whose music is this?” he asked. Seikaly told him. “That’s impossible,” Morillo said. Seikaly responded that it wasn’t. “What does a basketball player know about house music?” Morillo replied.

“Believe me,” Seikaly answered, “I’ve been listening to this music as long as you have.”

Over the next few months, Morillo brought more and more friends by the house. “Come on, Rony, play for them,” he’d plead. The gatherings continued to swell. Still, Seikaly remained hesitant.

“I didn’t want people to think that I was into this so that I could become a DJ,” Seikaly says today. “It was never about that, that was never the goal. It was always just about the music.”

But, eventually, he relented. He owned a club in South Beach and figured that’d be the perfect place for a test run, which turned out to be a resounding success.

Soon after he was playing at all the top clubs in the world. There were trips to New York and Las Vegas and Dubai. Around a year later he was invited to play on the island of Ibiza at a club called Amnesia, one of the most famous house music spots in the world. More than 5,000 fans came out to hear him play.

“It was just a surreal moment,” Seikaly says. “After that it really took on a life of its own.”

Seikaly compares music to all sorts of different hobbies, from meditation and yoga to reading and art. He uses the word “melodic” a lot. It’s soothing, hearing him talk about what music does for him, how he’s able to lose himself in the beat. It’s like listening to the voice on one of those pre-sleep relaxation tapes.

But all that grueling touring was hacking away at the love. Retirement from the NBA was supposed to bring about less travel—suddenly he was back to spending weekends running through airports and cramming his 6-10 frame into tiny seats on 5 a.m. flights. Sometimes he’d wake in his hotel bed unsure of what city he was in. He also had a new wife and a 13-year-old daughter (from his first marriage) waiting for him at home.

“It got to the point where it was feeling like a job,” Seikaly says. “For me, that’s not what I set out to do.”

He didn’t need the money. He had made north of $27 million in the NBA (per basketball-reference.com) and dabbled in real estate, too. And yet the more famous he got the more he got paid, and the more he got paid the more difficult he found it to turn down offers. He just hated saying no.

Then, this past October, he boarded a Wednesday flight from Miami for a New York show that night. On Thursday he played in Chicago. Friday in Montreal. On Saturday morning he went through customs again to do a gig in Detroit. He finished the stretch with a Sunday night show back in Miami.

Mentally drained and physically exhausted, Seikaly returned home. He collapsed into the warmth of his house and took stock of the long weekend. It wasn’t just that he was no longer enjoying himself. He was struggling to match the room’s energy. At times he’d catch himself growing frustrated by the audience’s lack of appreciation for the rhythmic sounds and stories he was sharing with them. It was time, he realized, to make a change.

“I don’t want to be on three different continents in three days,” Seikaly says. “It was taking a toll—I don’t need that. It was time to go back to doing what I had originally set out to do, which is share my music with the people who love it.”

Seikaly decided he’d limit his public gigs to around five a year. He still has the radio show, and there are still the private concerts, reserved solely for those exceedingly familiar with him and his music, which he loves.

But there was also more to his decision to slow down. It just takes a few follow-up questions to pry it out.

“I was feeling guilty,” Seikaly adds, finally. “If I was single and didn’t have a family to take care of, I’d probably be on the road all the time. But I have a daughter and a wife and I was missing time with them.”

Then comes the kicker.

“I’m 1,000 percent happier than I was before.”

Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos: Courtesy of Rony Seikaly, Suzy Allman/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images, Tim de Frisco/Allsport

The post Spin Doctor appeared first on SLAM.

It’s a lesson not lost on superstar point guard John Wall. Which is why an aspiring rapper by the name of WallWay Pack deserves serious review.

Known to his friends as “Pacman” for as long as he can remember, he added the prefix and went by WallWay Pac for a time, but ultimately decided to add the extra letter to avoid any misunderstandings. “I had got a lot of people confusing it as being pronounced ‘Pac’ and I don’t ever want to disrespect 2Pac, so it’s Pack.”

Pack is John’s nephew, but he’s only one year younger than the Wizards PG, so their relationship is really more like two cousins. The pair lived under the same roof as toddlers in Raleigh, NC, until Pack’s mom—John’s older sister—got her own place. With time, they chose different paths as adolescents.

“He was into basketball. I took the wrong route,” Pack says. “I was into the streets and stuff. So while he was playing basketball, I took the whole opposite route.”

He kept in contact with his uncle, though, as J-Wall exploded onto the national landscape at Kentucky, went No. 1 in the 2010 NBA Draft, made his first All-Star Game and led Washington to the playoffs. Then, two years ago, John called Pack with an offer. He told his nephew to pack his bags and hop on the next flight to DC.

“He’s been living with me the last two years. I moved him up from North Carolina to keep him out of trouble, keep him out the streets as much as possible, just give him a pathway to show him he can be anything if he just puts his mind to it,” Wall explains. “Seeing me work every day and seeing how I compete and how much heart and competitiveness I put into what I do in the game of basketball, he does the same in his raps.”

The move is paying off. In late 2016, the 25-year-old released the single “Can’t Lose,” which began to earn some rumblings on rap blogs for its raw, guttural aesthetic laid over a bop beat produced by LeekeLeek, a name that will sound familiar to fans of Chief Keef, Lil Durk and Fat Trel. (And which you can listen to in the video at the top of this post.) Pack has since followed up with a visual for another song, “Lavish,” in the lead-up to his debut Real Rare album (available now on iTunes).

Wall, meanwhile, isn’t starting his own label, nor does he have designs on hopping in the booth himself. He’s just happy to see his nephew chase his dream, and hopes that lending him the WallWay moniker will serve as extra inspiration.

“I think it’s something that motivates him,” John says with pride, “gives him the motivation and determination to want to be great. In the rap game you have to take your time—it don’t come right away, and he’s willing to take the steps you have to take.”

Pack agrees: “It’s so much motivation. With him in the NBA, and still taking time out of his day to support me, it’s a great feeling. Just off the last name, people want to come and see what I’m talking about, and see what the story is.”

—

Photos courtesy of @wallwaypack

The post Can’t Lose appeared first on SLAM.

As Duece (yes, it’s spelled Duece, not Deuce) talks about the details of that morning’s flight itinerary from the baseline corner of one of the two practice courts, Danny disappears to take a phone call. Both are comfortably accustomed to being around the team, nodding to familiar faces. Soon, a wave of reporters engulfs their cousin (“Lil’ Damian,” is how Danny refers to him) for his mandated media availability, just a few yards away from where Duece is now showing off the new backpack he picked up during the trio’s last visit to New York City, which included an interview at SiriusXM’s “Sway in the Morning” (you know the YouTube clip, with Dame ripping another raw freestyle as none other than Gary Busey looks on, bewildered) sandwiched between road games against the Nets and Knicks.

Today, the first question in Dame’s media scrum is not about the next opponent or the mind-boggling three-point shooting display he just put on to end practice. Instead, a reporter wants to know if Dame is excited about J. Cole’s new album, which was announced the night before. Yes, Dame says, because “that’s my favorite rapper.” He then coasts through 10 or 12 minutes of the standard basketball stuff, before his allotted media time concludes with another music question, this time about his newly formed label, Front Page Music, Inc.

Such questions from otherwise bland basketball beat writers are a daily occurrence for Lillard now that he is—in addition to one of the best PGs in the NBA—a well-respected mainstream MC. Perhaps unbeknownst to the pool of local reporters in front of him, though, is the fact that the first two artists signed to Front Page are lingering just a few feet away. And, in a few moments, they’ll be posing with Dame for the photos you see in the pages of this magazine.

Damian Lillard is, by profession, a basketball player. One who is averaging career-highs in points (27.3) and rebounds (4.7) per game to go with 5.8 dimes a night and a career-best 45.6 field goal percentage. He’s on track to lead Portland back to the playoffs in the ever-competitive Western Conference and earn his third All-Star appearance in the process. (Though if we’re keeping it a buck, this year’s ought to be his fourth time getting the nod, as he rightfully notes on his song “Bill Walton”: “All-Stars, I should have three by the name.”) In the Blazers’ last game before our shoot, Lillard the basketball player put in light work against the Indiana Pacers at the Moda Center. Twenty-eight points, 10 assists, 5 rebounds, 4 steals and just 1 turnover, part of an easy blowout victory for the home team.

Damian Lillard the basketball player is not “approaching superstardom,” as he’s often feted in long, gaudy feature stories like this one. He’s already there. I trust

that as you read this, you don’t need a step-by-step explanation of just how good Damian Lillard is as a basketball player.

But Damian Lillard is not this month’s cover subject. Dame D.O.L.L.A. is.

D.O.L.L.A. (which stands for Different On Levels the Lord Allows) released his debut studio album, The Letter O, in late October, with a list of features that includes Lil Wayne, Juvenile and Jamie Foxx. The album, so titled as an homage to Oakland (where he grew up), Ogden, UT, (where he went to college) and Oregon (where he plays now), debuted at No. 119 on the Billboard 200. It earned praise on social media from peers in both of his worlds, from LeBron James to Casey Veggies.

That dozens of NBA players in the past have made forays into hip-hop with varying degrees of critical reception and mainstream success never gave Dame’s project pause. Instead, he studied how his predecessors moved, and figured the best thing to do was simply to be himself, unapologetically.

“I think some just try to fit in with being a rapper. Like, completely take on a rapper persona,” Dame says, without mentioning by name any current or former NBAers turned rappers. He’s now sitting in a folding chair at the free-throw line on the Blazers’ practice court, having swapped his practice gear for jeans, a pair of adidas Dame 3s and a fitted long-sleeve tee with his winged “D” logo on the sleeve. “For me, I haven’t tried to do that. I know that I was never in the streets, I was never a bad person, I was never any of that. I worked hard, I went to school—I had some scuffles, and I got in some trouble. I just try to share my reality. I don’t try to take on something that’s not who I am, and I think there’s been times where an athlete might—to be respected, they might try to take a different route with their music. That was the one thing I didn’t want to do.”

The list of NBA players who have put out singles and freestyles for fun is basically endless. Even for Dame, that’s where this all started: his #4BarFriday movement grew from a hashtag into a community. But releasing a full, studio-quality album has opened him to scrutiny from the music world, and, given the platform and scope of his voice—he has 3 million followers on Instagram alone—he’s going to great lengths to prove he’s no gimmick.

“We always hear about basketball players rapping, so it wasn’t anything that I took serious,” says Charlamagne Tha God, national radio and TV personality and co-host of “The Breakfast Club.” That is, until a few friends sent him the links to Dame’s original freestyle on Sway’s show in 2015.

“Yeah, he got bars,” Charlamagne admits. “The thing is, I always wonder—are we grading these guys on a curve, though? Like, does he have bars because he’s NBA All-Star Damian Lillard? Or does he have bars just because he’s simply nice? From a straight skill level, he’s skillful with his flow. He’s not just doing it because he don’t got nothing better to do with his time, one of these multi-millionaires who’s got a lot of idle time in the offseason when he’s not practicing.”

Everyone that worked closely on The Letter O raves about Dame’s professionalism. And the overwhelming consensus from the album’s various producers is that he was ultra-focused. On the basketball court, that’s what we’ve come to expect from Dame. Making music is a horse of a different color. But by all accounts, his comportment in the studio was consistent with his work ethic in the gym.

“They switched the microphone at one time, mid-song,” recalls LIKE, the producer on “Misguided” and one-third of the L.A. rap crew Pac Div. Dame didn’t even flinch, he says. “He did a few takes and it was a wrap. He didn’t need much. He was on point, the flow was on point, the punctuation, everything was on par. He was definitely open to constructive criticism, but you know what, honestly, he didn’t even really need it.”

“A typical artist, they like to come in, kick back for a second, chill, sometimes they’ll smoke or whatever, and then they’ll get to work,” notes Swiff D, who produced “Loyal to the Soil” featuring Lil Wayne. “But as soon as he got in there, we shook hands and went straight to the studio. I’m sitting there and the beat comes on, and I’m anxious to hear what he does, because just off the type of beat it is, it’s like, he has to flow all over this record. As soon as he started spitting, I could tell the passion—he’s serious. He had bars, bars, bars, bars. I was like, OK, this is gon’ go. For sure, this is gon’ go.”

Whereas normally an artist on the level of a Lil Wayne might respond to a feature request from a rookie rapper by mailing it in, Swiff—whose producer credits include work with Dr. Dre, Snoop, ScHoolboy Q and 50 Cent—says on the contrary, the quality of Dame’s verse inspired Weezy’s. “Wayne came and bodied that track, because he actually thought that what Dame did was tight,” he explains. “If he got on a song with somebody that had no bars at all, I’m sure he probably could have thought to himself, ‘I don’t have to go as hard.’ That alone tells you, he’s showing us that this is good enough for you to bring your best as well.”

Dame has dreams of collaborating with Common, Andre 3000 and Mary J. Blige in the future, too. “So when I’m done with it and people talk about my NBA career, I’m going to be able to go in my mancave or whatever and say,

‘On this album I did a song with Mary J. Blige, and my mom used to play Mary J. Blige in the car when I was growing up. And in my neighborhood everybody liked 400 Degreez and I did a song with Juvenile.’ And I can just say, I had this NBA career, but I also did these songs with people that I’m a huge fan of.”

I grew up ’round love but we had a slower start

Hooping on the tree and fighting at the park

Lucky we had guidance, we was more blessed than others

We was the deepest family, nobody had more cousins

—“Loyal to the Soil”

Depending on who you ask and when you pinpoint it, there were upwards of 10 members of the Lillard clan staying at their grandmother’s house in Brookfield, the neighborhood in East Oakland where Dame grew up. There, daily battles with his older cousins made Dame stronger, whether it was basketball on the makeshift hoop hung up to a tree outside, or on the football field, or the baseball diamond.

“I’ll still give him 20 right now, give me a basketball,” Duece insists, scrunching his face up and looking over at Dame. He quickly flashes a smile. “We always had that competitive nature in our family. But the same thing applies with rap.

“This was something our whole family did. I’d have a rap and he’d be like, ‘Alright that’s cool, let me let you hear this, though,’ and we’d all go back and forth. He was always rapping. He was rapping long before he was playing basketball.”

Brookfield Duece is the oldest cousin, eight years older than Dame. Since he was the first to get his driver’s license, it was often Duece’s duty to drive Dame and his brother Houston around when their mom was busy. “In the car, he’d just be playing his own music the whole time,” Dame remembers, laughing. “We’d be like, Man, turn the radio on! The whole time he’s rapping his own songs and saying every word.”

Citing 2Pac and his mother as his biggest musical influences, Duece describes his sound now as “street conscious, emotional, reflective music with trap sprinkles.” And he says studio sessions with his cousins are “same as the basketball court: you score, I score.”

Keeping the mood light in those sessions is Danny from Sobrante, resident comedian of the group. He has Duece and Dame cracking up throughout our photo shoot, and when we ask him to spit a few bars afterward, he delights his cousins by responding with, “Do Beyoncé sing for free?”

“I have always been a magnificent storyteller,” Danny says of his style, “a person who is daring and not afraid to say stuff that other people may have been scared to say.”

Here, in the Blazers’ sprawling practice facility, as Duece and Danny flank Damian and a camera flashes every few seconds, it’s hard not to think about the fact that Lillard’s five-year, $140 million contract with the Blazers means he could afford to do this music shit all by himself. Maybe ink with a major label as a solo artist and record during the summers. He is, after all, the star of all this.

Which begs the following question: Why bring your cousins along for the ride?

“It doesn’t make sense for me to try to start a label and sign artists just as a favor. I’m doing it because I really believe,” Lillard says, steadfastly. “Them two not just being family, but being artists who I believe in their music, I feel like it’s only right that I do something like this, and we start this together and build it up together.”

That doesn’t mean he’ll be easy on his artists, though. And they know it.

“What’s good about Dame being the boss, the CEO of Front Page Music? He’s a real fair person,” Danny says. “He’s gon’ give you as much rope as you need. You either gon’ rope the cattle or hang yourself.”

Where Dame’s music career goes from here remains to be seen. He promises to continue putting out music every summer (“It might be a mixtape, it might be an album. I don’t know for sure, but I’ll continue to put music out”) but also envisions taking that “CEO” title to heart.

“I see myself growing more on the business side than anything else,” says Dame. “I’ll always write music, but that might mean, if I like the look of an artist, but maybe his lyrics could be better or something like that, maybe I go after him, because he’s got the right kind of swagger about him and the confidence and all that, but I’m on the business side and maybe I could be writing for him, and lead his career that way. I definitely see myself more growing into that side of it than just trying to be a full-fledged rapper.

“We’re going to learn as we go,” he continues—the “we” being Dame, his business partner A&R Derrick “Lottery” Hardy and Front Page—“and just try to make it unique, different than the typical label, where it’s beneficial more to the artist than it is to me because I’m not in a position where I need to gain anything from the artist.”

Once the sitdown interview portion of our shoot is over, and I’ve asked all the questions I came prepared with, Dame has one for me.

“What’s your favorite song off the album?” he asks.

Coming from most other pro ballers, this might just be polite cross-talk as they wait to be de-mic’d. And rappers, well, after a long shoot, few would stick around for any longer than they absolutely had to, let alone for the musical opinions of a basketball writer.

But Dame is, remarkably, genuinely curious. I respond, rather immediately, with “Wasatch Front,” the second track on the album, and the one that stands out most notably for its storytelling as it relates to Dame’s basketball career, detailing the ups and downs of his time at Weber State. He says he wrote the song in the Notes app on his phone (as he did every song on the album, save for “Plans,” which he wrote out on old school pen-and-pad because his phone died) during his annual summer retreat back to campus in Ogden. He says the memories flooded back so vividly that he wrote the whole song in one sitting, and then he pats himself on the back for the “Girls call me MCM, I’m tryna be Jerome” line in the track’s hook. “How many people you think picked up on that?”

Dame laughs. “It’s a lot of lines throughout the album where I’m like, Man, that was cold.”

Still, he says when he listens back to the album now, every so often he’ll catch himself wishing he’d written a different punchline to a rhyme, or altered his cadence just a hair. The kinds of revisions afforded to artists who spend years mastering a project down to every ad lib. He recorded The Letter O over just a few months.

“At the end of the day, I know that I do this for fun. But I also put the right amount of time into it. Obviously, I’m not going to just put out no bad product. When I’m getting whatever the criticism might be, from people that critique the Drakes and the Kendrick Lamars and Chance The Rappers and everybody else—when they critique my stuff, that lets me know that they’re looking at my music as if I’m one of them. That’s a step above what athletes usually get,” Lillard says. “I also know in my heart that this is not my primary job. I’m doing this with half the amount of time and half the mindspace to put into it than the people that’s doing it for a living.”

“If he took some time to really focus on music, I feel like he could go a long way,” says Cardiak, a co-producer on “Thank You,” which features Marsha Ambrosius. “I understand that he’s doing ball and all that right now, so it’s probably more like a hobby type of thing. But if he were to take it more serious, I feel like he would go far in this rap shit. I think he would kill it.”

$K, who produced “Bill Walton” and three other tracks on Dame’s album, puts it more succinctly: “He’s hip-hop, bro.”

—

Abe Schwadron is the Managing Editor at numberFire and a former Senior Editor at SLAM.

Portraits Atiba Jefferson

The post Damian Lillard: In A Major Way appeared first on SLAM.

In 1984, Blow dropped “Basketball.” It’s a celebration of the game’s past and present, referencing everyone from Magic and Bird to Willis Reed, “Earl the Pearl” and “Number 33, my man Kareem is the center on my starting team.” He rapped, “Tell me if you were in the joint, the night Wilt scored 100 points.”

The year “Basketball” was released, the League was just beginning its meteoric rise from moribund status, with Magic and Bird having just faced off for the first time in the NBA finals. To give a sense about what a historic pivot point in hoops history this was, there is no mention of a promising rookie named Michael Jordan. But even without the Jordan marketing magic, “Basketball” by Mr. Kurtis Blow was a crossover rap hit single at a time when those were few and far between. The song not only traveled to a broad audience well beyond Blow’s native Harlem, it was embraced by someone who worked just a couple miles but several worlds away: new NBA Commissioner David Stern. “Basketball” marked the beginning of the extremely lucrative and at times very uneasy collaboration between the NBA and hip-hop. Stern had “Basketball” used in promotional videos and it has remained central to the League, later heard by a new generation on the soundtrack of NBA 2K12.

But the NBA’s acceptance and promotion of Kurtis Blow’s “Basketball” had greater ramifications than just some marketing tie-ins. It led many young kids—myself included—to discover hip-hop. I bought Blow’s album Ego Trip on my 10th birthday just to listen to “Basketball,” then rewind it and listen again. In the process, I became enamored with other tracks on the record, including the classic “AJ Scratch” and one of the first singles to communicate the reality of black urban life in the Reagan ’80s, “8 Million Stories,” with its refrain: “8 million stories in the naked city, some ice cold and told without pity.” That track featured an MC who started his career as “Son of Kurtis Blow,” DJ Run of Run-D.M.C. And once I learned about Run-D.M.C., I was all in and hardly alone.

The synthesis of Kurtis Blow, and the exploding popularity of the NBA, was unwittingly turning a generation of young people onto hip-hop. Kurtis Blow’s Harlem was going global and David Stern’s game was the vehicle. But “Basketball” didn’t just alter how we all saw the game. It changed the way the game saw itself. From David Stern’s marketing gurus to Nike’s high-top engineers designing the first Air Jordan later that very same year, they saw that this league—which as recently as 1979 was showing its finals on tape delay—could define “cool” in the 1980s and beyond.

This all seems so obvious today. But the idea that basketball and the sneaker industry could ride a black musical form devised just a few years earlier in the South Bronx to global domination must have seemed laughable then. This took daring vision. It also led to what has happened all too often when black music and corporate America meet: exploitation, with everyone except the people who created the art form becoming wealthy. In other words, none of the NBA/hip-hop empire building happens—or at the very least none of it happens the way we remember it happening—without the skills of Kurtis Blow. If everyone who has become wealthy at the intersection of basketball and hip-hop tithed one percent of their earnings to Kurtis Blow, he could live out his days in a platinum palace. But chances are even if they did, he would emerge to find a stage, kick a hole in the speaker, pull the plug and jet.

—

Photo: Janette Beckman/Getty Images

The post Court Vision appeared first on SLAM.

We caught up with Rosenberg to talk hoops for the first-ever SLAM Music Issue.

SLAM: What are your early memories of watching basketball?

Peter Rosenberg: The first basketball I remember is the ’87 season, Lakers winning the championship. I believe it was also the same year Larry stole the inbounds against Detroit and hit DJ [Dennis Johnson] for the layup. That year was the first year I remember watching. I wasn’t really a fan yet. I think I actually liked the Lakers because I didn’t have any connection. The next year, my dad’s friends from Boston started getting me into basketball. I immediately became a Celtics fan. Bad timing, of course, because the Celtics’ last ring was ’86. I fell in love with Larry Bird. That was it. Then of course the Jordan era started. I’ve been an NBA fan since.

SLAM: How would you describe your game on the court?

PR: No defense whatsoever. And lots and lots of jacking. I’m a decent shooter and can shoot from deep somewhat well. I don’t really do a lot else well. In college and into my early 20s and playing pickup with any regularity, I got to a place where I could be not horrible in other facets. Manageable if I had to bring the ball up. I’ve got range. I could pull up a couple feet in front of halfcourt.

SLAM: What’s your best on-court moment from back then?

PR: My personal best memory in a legitimate game of any sort was a rec game my freshman year of high school when I scored 18. I went 4-6 from three. I had an overall good day.

SLAM: Who’s the best musician that you’ve seen on the court?

PR: I haven’t played ball with that many people. I don’t know if I’ve ever played with a musician who I was like, “Holy smokes.” I know Bieber’s a pretty good player. He was great in one of the celebrity games and people thought it was a fluke. But Bieber, at least when he was young, played a lot and was a decent player. I’ve played with Jadakiss. Jada’s got a little game. Yo, I’ll tell you what, that video I saw of Lil Dicky was crazy. As a shooter, as a gunner, that video was crazy. With the camera on, and boom, knock down 16 threes in a row. That was wild.

SLAM: Who wins a one-on-one contest at Hot 97?

PR: [Hot 97 host] Ebro can’t move. Let’s be clear: his knees are a wrap. I don’t even know if he could step out fast enough on me if I was just shooting. That said, if he backed me down, I’d have a bit of a problem. I’ve heard DJ Bobby Konders is good at ball. DJ Enuff and DJ Camilo ain’t a problem. I don’t think they ball like that. I’m gonna go with me, because I don’t know any better. If my health is in good shape, right now I don’t have any problems, I think I’m a tough out for these guys. They don’t want it.

—

Max Resetar is an Assistant Editor at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @maxresetar.

The post Hot Mic appeared first on SLAM.

RZA laid out a plan for conquest that bore fruit in the mid-’90s. Read about it in this manual, broken down into 36 chambers. His career began as fake smiling cornball ladies’ man Prince Rakeem, forced to make terrible radio-friendly songs, which must be what it’s like to go from domination at Kentucky to lottery-bound chaos. Sure, times are tough now, as you go through your growing pains. You have big nights now and then, but you are not ready yet, a lesson learned somewhere in RZA’s philosophical and business musings.

The Wu-Tang Manual is all about having a greater plan for the future. Karl, you’ve already begun to cultivate a reputation as being “different” from other future stars. One day you’ll become a playoff staple, an MVP candidate, just like Prince Rakeem went on to become the RZArector Ruler Zig Zag Zig Allah, whose running mates GZA, Ol’ Dirty, Method Man, Rae and Ghost could’ve been first team all-rap from ’93 to ’96, maybe a precursor to the Towns-Wiggins-Rubio Wolves. KAT, as you adapt, it’s the perfect time to refine your strategy. Read this and soon you’ll be writing your own manifesto.

—

Sam Rubenstein is a SLAM contributing writer and a high school English teacher in Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter @SamRubenstein.

Previously:
Jeremy Lin x A Canticle for Leibowitz

The post Vaguely Literary: Karl-Anthony Towns x The Wu-Tang Manual appeared first on SLAM.

Years later, OutKast still regularly inspires Brown. That’s relatively normal—music and basketball often embolden one another—but the result of that inspiration is anything but typical. Because not only does Brown listen to and feel motivated by the iconic ATLiens, he regularly makes music of his own.

Brown bought a copy of Logic Pro when he was in high school, and ever since he’s been producing beats in his spare time. “It’s just to express myself and kinda do something to pass the time instead of getting into the other stuff a young 19-year-old can get into,” says Brown, who’s turned 20 since our interview with him. “There’s plenty of other enticements and things people can get caught up into and overwhelmed in: going out, girls, things like that. I try to just keep myself as level-headed and focused as possible, and [making beats] is one of the things that helps me do that.”

The 6-7 small forward grew up in the Atlanta area, spent a year of college at Cal-Berkeley and now lives in Boston as a member of the Celtics—who selected him third overall in last June’s draft—which is to say that he’s been influenced by multiple regions of the country. During an impromptu listening session in SLAM’s Manhattan office this past October, Brown played us some of his most recent beats, and we can say this: There’s undeniably zero singular inspiration.

“I make different types of sounds, so not every sound sounds the same,” he explains. “Like trap beats, I don’t just make a whole bunch of trap beats. I might make a few ’cause that’s what I’m feeling today, like I feel like making a banger or some Metro Boomin’-type stuff. Another day I may feel like slowing it down and making some Dilla-type beats or something smooth, something classic, New York-esque or something similar to that. It depends. It’s just based on how I feel when I wake up in the morning or when I dive into it. I don’t do it every day, but when I get into it I, can be into it for hours at a time, and time will just fly by.”

Brown says these days he mostly makes beats by himself when he’s looking to kill a few hours after practice—he purchased a small beat machine, a MiniNova synth and a keyboard that he can bring with him when his team is on the road—though in the past he’s been in the studio with friends and messed around there, occasionally producing songs with others as well. He’s connected to a nine-person, Atlanta-based hip-hop collective known as The Tribe Akashic, which features cousins of Brown’s—he even brought two of the group’s members to SiriusXM’s “Sway In The Morning” radio show last June.

His desire to improve musically comes a distant second to his desire to improve on the court—“I have full investment in my basketball,” he says. “It comes first”—but he hasn’t been scared to associate himself with the local music scene in every city the game has taken him to. First it was Atlanta, attending concerts and making tunes with The Tribe Akashic. Then it was the Bay Area, where he dove into the catalogs of Mac Dre and E-40. “To be honest I didn’t know who Mac Dre was before I went out there, and now I’m a big Mac Dre fan,” he says. He even attended and was photographed on stage at Hiero Day, a one-day outdoor music festival in Oakland hosted by a group known as The Hieroglyphics.

Now in Boston, Brown is interested in doing the same. He says he’s yet to link up with local artists there but would love to do so. In early November, a Cambridge mall was shut down prior to a meet-and greet he was set to host with New York rapper Desiigner—too many people showed up, and six people were arrested for disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace and trespassing. (The mall was evacuated before Brown even arrived.)

Upon being drafted by the Celtics, Brown elected to wear the No. 7—on the surface that may look like an homage to ’90s Celtic Dee Brown, and that may in part be true, but it’s largely a nod to the Five-Percent Nation, a cultural movement that heavily influenced ’80s and ’90s hip-hop acts like Rakim, Big Daddy Kane and the Wu-Tang Clan. (The number seven is an important figure to Five Percenters, as it represents God; both Jay Z and RZA have been spotted wearing pendants with the number seven on them.)

Though music is a large part of how Brown passes time away from basketball, it stays with him in that realm as well. In fact, he sees little difference between the two. “The beat of a ball and the beat of a drum is the same thing,” he says. “Having that rhythm, so when you’re in the zone and you have a really good rhythm about yourself on the basketball court, nobody can stop you. It’s the same way in the music world—like I feel the same type of way when I hear a dope beat. You feel the same type of excitement.

“Basketball and music is one to me,” he continues. “The pace, it goes up and down. The momentum, it’s all like a beat. You’ve got someone telling the story, controlling the energy—it’s very similar, very comparable.”

Brown listens to music before games, usually some type of hip-hop—nothing too aggressive, and nothing too calming. “I don’t like to be too over-hyped, but I don’t like to be too chill, either,” he says. “I like to be right in that kind of Zen mode, so I like music that puts me there instantly.” Before an October pre-season game in Brooklyn, he says he listened to The Notorious B.I.G., 2Pac, A$AP Rocky and a track from the ’70s by Italian composer Piero Piccioni, whom J. Cole sampled on “Jermaine’s Interlude,” a song on DJ Khaled’s 2016 album, Major Key.

The fact that this kid can string together Biggie and a now-deceased Italian pianist sums him up pretty well. He does things a little differently than most NBA players, and seems relatively comfortable doing so. He entered the 2016 NBA Draft without an official agent, leaning instead on his support system of basketball legends like Isiah Thomas and Shareef Abdur-Rahim and AAU Oakland Soldiers co-founder Hashim Ali. “I don’t know if I would recommend [not signing with an agent] for everybody ’cause everybody has their own process,” Jaylen admits. “All I needed was help navigating the process of going and flying to different teams and talking back and forth with GMs, and people to hear me and tell me what’s the truth. That’s all I really needed. It turned out well.”

He also has hobbies that most NBA players simply do not. He writes poetry. He plays guitar. He’s obsessed with chess. He reads a lot. He’s fascinated by business—while at Cal-Berkeley he interned at Base Ventures, a venture capital firm in the Bay, observing wanna-be start-up founders as they pitched their ideas to Erik Moore, the company’s Managing Director.

“A lot of 19-year-olds spend time differently—playing video games, girls, etc.,” he says. “Nothing’s wrong with that. I’m just thinking five, 10 years ahead, ’cause that’s just how I’m wired.”

Of course, all of this—the ability to devote a couple hours here and there to making beats or playing chess or studying business or learning guitar or doing any of the other things that make him The Most Interesting Man in the NBA—stems from his ability to maintain relevance on the court. And he knows this, referencing the fact that basketball comes first over and over. So far this season Brown is averaging only 4.7 points and 1.9 rebounds per game, but it’s early in his rookie year, and he’s stuck fighting for minutes behind older, more established players like Jae Crowder and Avery Bradley. And yet we’ve already seen flashes of what could be to come—he plays hard and with energy on both ends of the floor and has earned praise from star peers. “He’s a strong kid,” LeBron James said after an early season Cleveland-Boston tilt. “You can see he knows how to play the game.”

Brown has also had a handful of seemingly out-of-nowhere highlight reel dunks that hint at some serious star power.

“In chess, they have a piece called the rook,” he says. “The rook, in chess, most of the time it’s in the corner and sits there and nobody really notices it. It’s quiet—all game it might just sit in the corner and not do anything. But when it starts getting into action and starts getting into play, it can be very dangerous.

“I kinda look at myself as a rook right now.”

—

Adam Figman is the Editor-in-Chief of SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @afigman.

Portrait by Jihad Dennis; Action shot via Getty Images

The post Let ‘Em Know appeared first on SLAM.

As an MC, Shaq is without question the most successful professional athlete to try his hand at rapping. After appearing on The Arsenio Hall Show with the Fu-Schnickens in the winter of 1992, O’Neal was inked to Jive Records and his 1993 album, Shaq Diesel, went platinum. Diesel went on to release three more albums, 1994’s Shaq Fu: Da Return, 1996’s The Reign and 1998’s Respect. Shaq also went to work on Shaquille O’Neal Presents His Superfirends, Vol. 1, a project that was rumored to feature Dr. Dre, DJ Quik, Snoop Dogg and others, but the album was eventually scrapped in 2001.

The list of A-list artists Shaq worked with is extensive. The superstar hopped in the booth with The Notorious B.I.G., RZA, Method Man, Phife Dawg, Mobb Deep, Jay Z, Rakim, Lord Tariq, Peter Gunz and appeared on Michael Jackson’s HIStory album.

For the #SLAMMusicIssue, we talked with Shaq about his music career, rappers he has worked with, the politics of the music business and much, much more.

SLAM: Who were your early influences? How did you get into rap?

Shaq: One day in New Jersey I heard this dude playing Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” and the beat just sounded different. And after that, shit, I just kept following it and got into The Real Roxanne, The Fat Boys, Will Smith and Big Daddy Kane. I used to quote all of Big Daddy Kane’s lyrics so whatever he said, I used to write it down and recite them.

Once I left New Jersey for Germany as a teen, my cousin would send me a tape once a month, so I was up on all the hip-hop. Then I started DJing and rapping a little bit. For me, basketball and hip-hop come from the same place because on the way to games, I’m listening to my favorite artist. Then when I’m on the court, I’m trying to be like my favorite player, which is Dr. J. I think the reason I was able to go into it was because I’ve been doing it for my whole life. It’s not like I showed up in ’92 and was like, Oh, I wanna rap. I’ve been rapping since I was eight years old.

SLAM: Do you think rappers like Redman, RZA, Method Man and all the other guys you worked with respected that about you?

Shaq: Yeah, I think so. When the Fu-Schnickens and me did “What’s Up Doc?” on The Arsenio Hall Show, people saw that I had rhythm and flow. Then when rappers saw me in the studio and saw my work ethic and how I put songs together, they saw I was really serious. That was my whole concept, I wasn’t trying to be a rapper, I was fulfilling my dreams and rapping with my favorite rappers. I always wanted to have special effects in my videos and make everything memorable.

SLAM: You mentioned that Arsenio Hall performance, that set everything off for you. What do you remember about that night? Were you nervous at all?

Shaq: Nah, I wasn’t nervous because I had been doing it. I used to do talent shows; I used to rhyme in the mirror and all that stuff. I used to see Arsenio all the time and he was like, Yo! Come on my show. And I was like, I want to do something different, let me rap with my favorite rap group. I need you to contact Fu-Schnickens for me.

He contacted Fu-Schnickens, they came down and they let me hit a beat and shit, I laid that down in about five minutes. They were like, Oh my god! And I said, Hey, we’re gonna perform on the show. The next day I got record offers. Jive offered me a deal and gave me a chance to have my own label and I thought, you know what let me try it, if I can do something with my favorite artists that would be awesome for me.

SLAM: What was a bigger deal for you, being drafted No. 1 overall or getting a record deal?

Shaq: Getting signed to Jive.

SLAM: Who were your favorite artists to work with?

Shaq: I’ma have to go Biggie, Jay Z and Nas. It’s just like basketball. If I’m calling in Biggie, it’s like I’m calling in Mike, my game gotta be straight. I had my shit and I would do it and I was like, Nope, it ain’t good enough for Biggie. I would do it, do it and do it so when I got there my shit was already done because I wanted my rap to be perfect for Biggie.

Biggie came to my house, we had something to eat, had a conversation and then me, him and Lil’ Cease went to the studio in the back of my house. I played my verse for him and he was like, That’s tight big fella, that’s tight! And he just let it ride. He said, Play that again. And then he was like, Aight, I’m ready. And he went in there and laid a monster verse but was a little too X-rated. I was like, Biggie, no disrespect but… and he was like, Oh, that’s right, it’s for the kids! It’s for the kids! And that’s when he laid the verse he did.

Jay Z was the same way—no pen, no pad. And Nas was the same way, too. And I was like, Oh my god, this is why these guys are the best ever. Me, I gotta listen to the beat and put it in my walkman, go to sleep with it, think about concepts, think about lines, think about what I can and can’t say and them boys came in and just murdered the track. One take.

SLAM: Biggie only had Method Man on his first album, he had DMC and The Lox on his second album. All legends. So for you to even be on that list is really an incredible feat in itself.

Shaq: I wasn’t even gonna call him because I thought he was too big. But when he said, “I’m slamming brothers like Shaquille!” That’s when I had to do it.

So when I called him, he was like, Yo, man, I love your game, big fella. That’s how I want to rhyme aggressively like that. I was like, Would you mind doing something with me? He was like, Hell yeah, big fella just send me the ticket. I sent him and Cease first class tickets and they were down there the next day.

SLAM: What was it like working with Phife Dog?

Shaq: Aw, he was the best. It was really good because we’d come in there and spend two hours on music and 10 hours on sports. We would talk football and basketball. He loved the Knicks and would ask, ‘Yo, why you be doing my man Patrick like that?!’

SLAM: Were you ever starstruck being around any of these guys?

Shaq: Oh, all of ‘em. I know that I’m Shaq but mentally I’m still a guy who loves people, loves meeting people and recognizes real superstars. The first time I saw Halle Berry, I couldn’t even say hi to her. I know I’m Shaq, but my stuttering was like I-I-I-I-I-Hello!

It was the same thing [with rappers]. When you’re in L.A., you’re like, Oh my god, that’s Snoop! And you see him in the club and he’s like, What up, boy? I like that game, boy. Boy, you be thrown them mothafucka’s around!  The guys that I loved, they know and love me. It’s awesome.

SLAM: What motivated you to keep going after you went platinum in literally one try? 

Shaq: I just wanted to continue to do it. It was like a challenge. I went platinum the first time, can I go platinum the second time? Or triple, or quadruple? It was fun. The first time I only got to work with five or six guys, I got like a 100 favorite artists so I wanted to work with everyone. When I went out to the West Coast, I met DJ Quik, Def Jef, Snoop, B-Real, Ice Cube, I also did something with Dr. Dre that never got released.

SLAM: Were those part of the unreleased Super Friends album?

Shaq: Yes, they were.

SLAM: How come that album never materialized?

Shaq: It didn’t have enough promotion. At that time, A&M and Interscope was splitting up and my record label got caught up in the middle and I was like, Ugh, here we go.

SLAM: So you got to experience the bullshit in both the NBA and the music world…

Shaq: Politics. Politics all day every day.

SLAM: How did you navigate through the politics?

Shaq: When I went to radio stations I would always tell them, If you like it, play it. I ain’t gonna be giving you tickets to the games, a hundred signed balls and shit, we ain’t doing all that. I would go to radio stations and they would have like a hundred million balls to sign. I don’t do politics. You either put it in your rotation because you like it, or not, I’m cool.

Being a rapper, there wasn’t enough money in that to take it real seriously. When I went platinum, I made a million plus, but that’s too much work for a million when I can just run and up down the court and dunk and get 20 million.

SLAM: You worked with RZA and Meth when they were really hardcore artists. Did you worry about your image at all?

Shaq: My thing is, it’s not about being the best it’s about going and doing something on a super-high, respectable level. I ain’t the best rapper but I can be somewhere in the middle. I know I can sound better then some of these rappers now. I know that for a fact.

SLAM: Did any players say anything to you about your music on the court?

Shaq: No, they couldn’t.

SLAM: Did they ever try and collab with you?

Shaq: Players? No. I knew the criticism was going to be coming from both angles, so that’s why I got the best. I got Erick Sermon to produce something. I got RZA. I wasn’t getting no producers who hand out mixtapes on the street.

SLAM: If you were giving advice to any basketball players aspiring to be rappers now, what would you tell them?

Shaq: I’d just tell them to make sure your stuff is tight. The level of criticism right now is mayhem. When I was coming up, the local news could say something, maybe Billboard magazine would say something, maybe someone at MTV could say something. Now, you got the Facebook and Twitter, so you gotta come correct.

SLAM: Have your kids showed any interest in getting into music at all?

Shaq: I took them into the studio one time and we did a freestyle and they actually murdered it one take. They have ‘it,’ so if they want to do it, I could show them how to do it. I was impressed, I had all my babies kick a verse, it was awesome.

SLAM: That’s amazing. Will there ever be an O’Neal Family cut?

Shaq: You know what? Maybe.

—

Related:
Change of Plans — Dave East Feature From SLAM 205
Beat King — Chris Webber Feature From SLAM 205

Peter Walsh is an Associate Editor at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @Peter_M_Walsh.

Photo: AP/Raymond Chow

The post The Original appeared first on SLAM.

50. “Michael Jordan” — Lil Uzi Vert

49. “Ballad of Larry Bird” — Vermont

48. “Rondo” — RondoNumbaNine

47. “The Continuing Glory of JaVale McGee” — The Brothers Caldon

46. “Magic Johnson” — Red Hot Chili Peppers

45. “Detlef Schrempf” — Band of Horses

https://youtu.be/oGiMWMVqp_M

44. “Yeah Carmelo” — Maino

https://youtu.be/Bo36FfFRNzw

43. “Derrick Rose” — Meek Mill

42. “Dennis Rodman” — Gucci Mane & Migos

41. “K.O.B.E.” Kobe Bryant

40. “Rondo” — Sasha Go Hard

39. “Reggie Miller” — Lil B

38. “LeBron James” — Yo Gotti

37. “Like KD” — Lil Haji

36. “LeBron On” — Obie Trice

35. “Kyrie” — Rick Ross

https://youtu.be/3fw7ly5tzB4

34. “#PORZIŅĢIS” — Transleiteris

33. “Kobe and Ginobili Freestyle” — Mack Maine

32. “Chris Paul” — Riff Raff

31. “Kyrie Irving” — Bleezy

30. “Cryin’ For Me (Wayman’s Song)” — Toby Keith

29. “Dirk Nowitzki” — Migos ft. Young Dolph

28. “Keep Calm Like Kristaps Porzingis” — Olas

27. “Kyrie Irving” — Lil Cray

26. “That’s How I Beat Shaq” — Aaron Carter

25. “Pistol Pete” — The Ziggens

24. “Kevin Durant” — Rowdy Rebel

23. “Worthy and Erving” — Gucci Mane ft. Yo Gotti

22. “Love, Robert Horry” — Mick Jenkins

https://youtu.be/TNTkxPpIwLA

21. “Larry Bird” — Riff Raff

20. “Jordan Fade” — Cousin Stizz

19. “Russell Westbrook On a Farm” — Lil Dicky

18. “Bill Russell” — Waka Flocka Flame

17. “Melo” — Lil Snupe

16. “Tim Duncan” — Tory Lanez

15. “Do the John Wall” — Troop 41

14. “Larry Bird” — Ski Beatz feat. Stalley

13. “Black Mamba” — Fabolous

12. “Steph” — Lil Bibby

https://youtu.be/RN-T5Zz9cTI

11. “Steve Nash” — OB O’Brien

https://youtu.be/AEdeylKNZxY

10. “24 23 (Kobe, LeBron)” — Jeezy

https://youtu.be/XfvU6irQBPo

9. “John Wall” — Shy Glizzy ft. Lil Mouse

8. “Allen Iverson” — Don Trip

7. “Charles Barkley” — Migos

6. “Kobe” — Chief Keef

5. “White Iverson” — Post Malone

4. “Kobe Bryant” — Lil Wayne

3. “KD” — Dave East

2. “(I Wanna Be) Like Mike” — Teknoe

1. “Michael Jordan” — Kendrick Lamar

The post The 50 Best Songs Named After NBA Players appeared first on SLAM.

He steps up to the line and pulls up for a pair of free throws. Swish. Swish. He steps a few feet back, behind the arc, because it’s clear he walked in warm. Swish.

A few more fluid jumpers, a couple dunks, and you’re left marveling at how some people are simply very good. At things. Multiple things.

That’s surely the case for Dave East. These few minutes give a glimpse at the skills that led him to become AAU teammates with the likes of Kevin Durant and Michael Beasley, and later earned him a Division I scholarship. But throw on his most recent mixtape, September’s Kairi Chanel, and you’ll realize the same thing Nas and Def Jam have: That his second career is, somehow, even more promising than his first. And yet, there was a time—most of his life, in fact–where rap wasn’t even on the radar.

* * *

Born David Brewster in East Harlem—that’s where the moniker Dave “East” comes from—the now 28-year-old had the game in his soul through both nature and nurture.

“He was the introduction to basketball for me,” East says of his pops, who played an exhibition season with the ABA’s New York Nets. “He told me he brought a basketball to the hospital when I was born. And my love for it just came as his own.”

While his love for hoops was being incubated inside the house, Dave was honing his game outside of it. He balled on the NYC pavements, idolizing guards like Allen Iverson and Penny Hardaway.

“I’d be playing ball all summer, and by the time the season started, I’d get in some trouble or something would happen,” he recalls. That was the case freshman year, when he split time between Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics and Long Island City High School, where off-court antics undercut any potential on-court advancement.

So Dave, on the suggestion of his father, moved to Maryland for his sophomore year to live with his half-sister. The impact—from living in a new location as well as the fact that he was finally able to step on the court—was felt immediately.

During his sophomore year at Springbrook HS in Silver Spring, MD, East contributed to a team that lost the Class 4A state championship game on a last-second jumper to current NBAer Jeff Green’s Northwestern High.

“It was so much slower down there,” he says of the transition from the Big Apple to his new home. “There was nothing to do. So I was like, I’m gonna go to the gym. I really had the time to get my game right.”

That focus started to pay particular dividends during his junior year, after he shot up from 6-1 to 6-5 the summer before 11th grade. He scored 50 in one game. He started getting recruiting letters from big name programs like Georgetown and St. John’s. He was named to the first of two consecutive All-Met honorable mentions by the Washington Post. He started playing on a slew of AAU squads—the DC Assault, DC Blue Devils and NOVA United—where his teammates, at various points, included future NBAers Durant, Beasley, Ty Lawson, Greivis Vasquez, Nolan Smith and San Francisco 49ers linebacker NaVorro Bowman. By then, his eyes were set on the League.

“We had tons of talent on that team, and Dave was a great teammate,” says Smith, who played with East on a loaded DC Assault squad, and went on to star at Duke and play for the Portland Trail Blazers before returning to the Blue Devils as an assistant this season. “He fit right in with us. He went hard, he competed, did everything to fit our squad.”

Eddie Lee Jackson, who coached East with NOVA United, recalled a similar ease of fit, even in a different situation: The squad had talent, but not a roster of future NBAers.

“The first tournament he played with us, we had a team that was together for like three years, and this was their last summer together, and it’s hard when you bring new guys in,” Jackson says. “He was the kid that we brought in. We didn’t start him the first game, because we didn’t know how he was gonna mesh or play. And he came in and he was balling, he meshed great and the guys loved him. He was unselfish; obviously he was good. Then we started him the second half, and the rest of the way.”

“Excuse my French, but the motherfucker could score,” says Beasley, who also played with East on DC Assault. “Off the court, he’d talk. On the court, he’s one of them guys that’s gonna give you the same facial expression whether we up 20 or we down 20; whether he got 40 or he just missed 20 shots. You don’t know what’s going on in his face. He’s one of them silent killers.”

After a senior season in which he led Springbrook to an 18-6 record with averages of 19.5 points and 6 rebounds per game, East enrolled at the Atlantic 10’s University of Richmond in Virginia. But the situation quickly soured.

“It was constant clashing the whole season [with the coaching staff],” he remembers. “That was taking me off of focusing on my own game, which then led to me not wanting to go to class, which then led to me being ineligible.”

He was kicked out and headed back to New York, where he took classes online and played in leagues from Hunter College to Dyckman, intent on getting his grades and game up to speed. And though he didn’t realize it at the time, there was a silver lining to an otherwise forgettable experience at Richmond.

“Once I got to Richmond, I’d be in the locker room rapping, I’d be on the bus [rapping],” he says, emphasizing that he was strictly “playing around” and saw himself as a ballplayer first—and only. But the responses he got from teammates helped plant a seed that would later sprout.

Still, after a year back home, his dream—“I was like, I gotta get back into another school. I still wanna go to the NBA”—was the same. And, even if the League was just a dream, a pro future was well within reach.

“He very easily could have played overseas,” says Jackson, now an assistant at American University. “He was 6-5 and could shoot and could handle the ball. Those guys aren’t everywhere.”

Dave wound up at Towson University in Baltimore, where he was a contributor and spot starter as a sophomore and junior, putting up multiple games of 20+ points. But the off-court issues persisted.

“The focus of that team wasn’t there,” he says. “We was losing. So it kinda gave me a bad taste for it, to the point where I was like, Man, this might not work out. I had put so much into that. Every day. To have a coach tell me, ‘We don’t need you. I can go find somebody your height, [who can] shoot just as good as you, run just as fast as you,’ that I had to understand it’s a business—it kind of dampened the love I had for basketball.”

After his final stint with the team in ’09-10, he reached a low point.

“[For] three years I didn’t touch a ball,” he says. “I got into making money, some illegal activity. I didn’t care about ball no more. I was like, Aight, lemme get to this money.”

Not long after, he got a wakeup call as jolting as possible: East was arrested, locked up and confined to a cell, while many of his high school teammates and opponents—guys like KD, Lawson, Beasley, Smith and Green—were either making waves at the nation’s top programs or already in the League.

After serving six months, he got out and decided to pivot his focus to music. He delivered his first mixtape, the aptly titled Change of Plans, in 2010.

Though the tape went mostly under the radar, there was one old friend who was impressed: KD.

“He was like, ‘Yo, that’s you rapping? That’s crazy,’” Dave recalls. “He was like, ‘I got a studio in the crib. Whenever you free and you wanna come out here, I’ll make sure you get out here.’ I was like, I’m free right now.”

And like that, East was on a plane to OKC, where he stayed with Durant for a week and a half to record his 2011 mixtape American Greed. The experience had a profound impact on his outlook.

“It was pure motivation. Kevin don’t smoke. I was smoking. So I was like, Yo, bro, I need to go get some roll-ups at the 7-Eleven. He’d throw me the keys to the Maybach like, ‘Go ahead.’ I’m scared to drive it—I don’t wanna crash. I’m in a Maybach, but this is my friend that’s my same age that I started basketball with. So it was just amazing to me that, damn, his mother’s not working no more. My mother’s calling me—she driving a school bus.

“So that’s when I really locked in and was like, I’m gonna do it with the music. I know ball is over. Lemme be the best artist I can be. I put my head down, went hard. Next thing I knew, Nas was calling me.”

There were a few years and mixtapes in between recording with KD and linking with Nas, but by 2014, East had indeed signed to the rap legend’s Mass Appeal Records. With a new set of eyes and ears on his career, he released a string of well-received mixtapes—Black Rose and Straight Outta Harlem in 2014, Hate Me Now in 2015—and worked with Nas, Jadakiss, Styles P, Pusha T, Fabolous and more.

He further cemented himself throughout 2016 with a spot on the XXL Freshman Class cover, a scene-stealing verse during a BET Hip Hop Awards cypher, a standout appearance next to Nas and Lin-Manuel Miranda on The Hamilton Mixtape’s “Wrote My Way Out,” the release of his best project to date, Kairi Chanel, featuring 2 Chainz, Game and Cam’ron, and by signing with Def Jam.

It’s a reinvention that’s caught the eyes and ears of plenty, including old friends, like Beasley, who said he’s had East’s most recent release on repeat for months, but didn’t fully believe the connection until he was interviewed for this story.

“Every time I see him [in videos], I’m like, ‘Dave East, that motherfucker look just like DB,’” Beas says with a laugh, recalling his nickname for his old teammate. “My teammates think that I think that I know everybody—I meet a lot of people, I can’t help it—and I didn’t want to be one of them situations where it’s like, ‘Eh, Beas, shut up, you think you know everybody.’ And sure enough, we got the call [about this story], and everything just clicked. I was like, I knew I wasn’t crazy.

“He’s giving it to you how you want it, how you need it, the right sound, the right beats, he’s talking that shit. I must say, he’s real hip-hop. I’m glad to say that I know him.”

The revelation brought a similar light to Jackson.

“I smiled, I chuckled, but I was happy,” the coach says of when he first heard that his former player was establishing himself in the music industry. “I went and downloaded some music to see what he was talking about, and I was happy that he was being successful.”

Years after his hoop dreams deflated, Dave East is now shining for the whole world to see—just not in the lane he once thought he would. And he’s OK with that.

“I used to love for the whole gym to be [watching] and I hit that shot. Now, I love when the show is sold out and as soon as I come out, they go crazy. If you ask any NBA player, they wanna be rappers. If you ask rappers, they wanna ball. For me to have both, and to be able to almost get to one, but then get to the other one? I don’t got no complaints.”

Adam Fleischer is a writer living in New York. Follow him on Twitter @adamfleischer.

Portraits by Matthew Salacuse; Action photo courtesy of Towson University Athletic Media Relations

The post Change of Plans appeared first on SLAM.

“It was really just a joke,” says Boyette, who began to tweet using the hashtag #wnba20for50. “But people actually liked it, so I was like, I guess I have to keep doing it.”

For the next month or so I will outline my love and at least 50 reasons, @50cent should come to @wnbachicagosky vs. NY #WNBA20for50

— Imani McGee-Stafford, JD (@imanitrishawn_) May 10, 2016

Even as the campaign picked up steam, she never imagined that 50 would eventually sit courtside at a Sky game. But that’s exactly what happened last September when Chicago faced the defending champion Minnesota Lynx.

“Luckily, he came to a game where Maya Moore played, and she sold it,” Boyette laughs.

Boyette may not be giving herself enough credit, though. With 8.5 seconds remaining, Boyette iced that game with a thunderous block to ensure a 98–97 overtime win.

Afterward, 50 Cent had a message for Boyette. “He was like, ‘Whenever you guys play New York, call my people, let us know.’ So he’s a fan,” Boyette says.

It was a high point in a season that was filled with ups and downs.

Back in May, Boyette wasn’t getting crunch-time minutes—or any minutes at all. She picked up three DNPs in the team’s first five games.

“It was really hard for me to be putting in the work and not seeing immediately the results,” she says.

By July, however, Boyette had won the starting job and eventually finished the season first among rookies in field-goal percentage (55.4) to go with averages of 6.7 ppg, 5.6 rpg and 1.4 bpg.

With a non-stop motor, stretchy wingspan and elite athleticism, Boyette proved to be a defensive force in the paint and a steal at No. 10 in the 2016 Draft.

As far as Twitter campaigns are concerned, Boyette has now started a brand new one: #Bears4Boyette, an effort to get her husband, Texas defensive tackle Paul Boyette, drafted by the Chicago Bears in the 2017 NFL Draft.

“All I have left is finding my husband an NFL team, and that’s it,” she says.

—

Ryne Nelson is a Senior Editor at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @slaman10.

Photo via Getty Images

The post Hustler’s Ambition appeared first on SLAM.

“I don’t know if it’s fully registered,” says Dakota (who wears No. 12), the Lady Rebels’ leading scorer this season with 12.4 ppg, of the twins’ overnight stardom. “High school is when we really started and it became this snowball effect. It’s such a humbling thing to experience because we appreciate all of the love that we get. It’s an out-of-body experience to get that type of recognition from other people.”

The sisters initially opted to follow in their mother Angie’s footsteps by signing on to hoop at the University of Kansas. After a year there, they made the move to Sin City. While many speculated that transfer was made for reasons beyond the hardwood, they contend that it was simply about hoops. That’s not to say Vegas hasn’t had its benefits, though.

“Initially, it was solely for basketball purposes and we definitely weren’t thinking that far ahead. I wish that I could give myself that much credit,” Dylan (averaging 7.9 ppg this season) says with a laugh. “As we continued to pursue our music, we were like, ‘Wow, this is a serendipitous thing that we ended up here,’ because it’s an entertainment mecca out here.”

The opportunities have followed. Drake has been spotted at their games. Major labels have reached out. Major networks offered reality shows, but the NCAA shut all that down with the quickness. These two aren’t caught up in the fame. They’re steady grinding toward the future.

“Vegas is…Vegas. The city, the lights and all that stuff,” says Dylan, who cites Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill as musical inspirations. “We kind of tend to be homebodies. We’re not really about the nightlife or anything like that. We keep to ourselves and do the things that we really like to do: music and basketball.”

All photos courtesy of UNLV Photo Services

The post Run It Up appeared first on SLAM.

Chris Webber, who was playing for the Sixers when the album was released, produced and co-wrote the song “Blunt Ashes.” For the beat, C-Webb sampled Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology).” On the writing side, Nas and Webber namedropped music legends Prince and Bobby Womack, as well as famous writers Langston Hughes and Alex Haley.

“We was in the studio in Kelis’ session,” Nas said of the making of “Blunt Ashes” during a 2006 interview with MTV News. “One of my mans told Chris to put on one of his [beat] CDs. We was in there freestylin’. I started freestylin’ to one joint about shit we just be talking about, and I was like, ‘This is my shit right here. This is my joint.’ But Chris is my homie though. One of my closest homies.”

“After being drafted in the NBA No. 1, that’s the best feeling I had since that day,” Webber told Sway Calloway of working with Nas in a 2007 interview.

The beat placement wasn’t just a product of being homies with Nas; Webber was, in that era, a real part of the hip-hop culture and someone who had paid his dues as a writer, rapper, producer and record label owner for over a decade.

Shortly after he was traded to the Wizards (then the Bullets) in November of ’94, Webber appeared on BET’s Rap City and revealed that he was starting a record label with DJ Kay Gee from Naughty By Nature. Before long, the super-talented power forward began to pop up on major label releases.

In 1995, Webber appeared on Naughty by Nature’s Poverty’s Paradise on the “Webber Skit,” where he alludes to his beat-making by saying that he’s “been in the lab, tryin’ to come out with something different.”

In 1997, the same year he was named an All-Star for the first time, Webber launched Humility Records. Webber spent the next two years working on his debut album, 2 Much Drama.

Released under the name C. Webb in March of 1999, Webber’s 21-track project featured appearances from Kurupt and Redman. His single, “Gangsta, Gangsta (How U Do It),” with Kurupt, peaked at No. 75 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.

“I went to Chris’ house—this was when he was living in Maryland,” says Redman. “It was quiet. There were a couple homies there, but it was strictly work. He took it as serious as much as a player can. One thing I can say, his garbage was overwhelming. It was always full, spilling from so much shit.”

Webber shot a video for “Gangsta, Gangsta” that included cameos from Big Daddy Kane, Ghostface Killah, Redman and Erick Sermon. The video itself was a classic ’90s clip, full of dancers and oversized clothing, all set to a house party backdrop.

As Webber’s play on the court continued at an All-Star level, his career as a rapper was becoming more than a hobby.

Following the release of 2 Much Drama, Webber put his efforts behind Detroit-based rap group and Humility Records’ own Nocoast, a duo consisting of MCs Glock 9 and Low Life. Their 2000 release Coastales also featured guest spots from Redman and Kurupt and production from DJ Scratch of EPMD fame. It was the last known release under Humility.

In 2003, Webber popped up on Rebels of Rhythm’s Chunky album. Credited as “Chris Webber (Da Beatmaka),” the Sacramento King produced “Gettin’ Home.”

Webber’s public activity in music seemed to slow by 2004, but in an interview with DIME, he revealed that he was making beats under a pseudonym. . “I make beats under an alias,” he said. “It’s some well-known cats coming out using my stuff right now. But it’s under an alias and hopefully the music will speak for itself because it won’t have my name on it.”

In 2005, he popped up on local Sacramento rapper Big Slep Rock’s State Raised: The California Project Vol. 2 album, spitting a verse on “Earl Flynn,” a song that was named after a dance that originated in Webber’s hometown of Detroit.

In 2007, he once again teamed up with Nas for “Surviving the Times,” the first cut on the legendary rapper’s Greatest Hits album. The track didn’t come without some controversy. Following its release, underground rapper Wordsmith accused Webber of jacking the sample (“What Would I Do” from the 1978 musical adventure film The Wiz) from his 2006 song “As The Art Fades Away.” Wordsmith later retracted the statement.

Shortly after the release of Hip-Hop Is Dead, Webber sat with Sway for an extended interview on MTV. During the sit-down in his home studio, Webber talked about his love of music and explained how much he looked up to hip-hop stars as a teen.

“I grew up on hip-hop,” he said. “It’s so much different now. It’s cool to be a black man, it’s cool to impose your will. Back then, I had to have Public Enemy be who they were. It’s such a part of me and it fills me with pride to see Rakim ice grillin’ and not smilin’. I took that strength and took it to the basketball court. They gave me heart, like, OK, it’s cool to be you. I’m one of them because at the time they were the only ones I saw shinin’. Either them or guys in the neighborhood and at that time, I didn’t want to go that route—I wanted to be [one of the musicians].”

Based on his history, the rappers he collaborated with and his decision to make music under an alias, it’s clear that Webber—who declined to be interviewed for this story—wasn’t trying to be a part of the hip-hop culture as an artist strictly because he had the means to. C-Webb put in the work and showed utmost respect to the people he worked with.

“If I was a rapper who wanted to play ball, I would respect my legends,” says Redman. “I would learn to dot my I’s and cross my T’s, and that’s going to help my game better. He definitely had that kind of respect for us. One thing I can say about Chris Webb is he definitely didn’t use his money to get an album done, just to say, ‘I’m a rapper. I got money, I can get anyone on my album to prove that I’m a rapper.’ Nah, he really took this shit serious. He took the platform serious and he took the craft serious. When he came around legends and worked with myself or Nas, he wanted to know as much as possible and he wanted to be on his A game.”

—

Peter Walsh is an Associate Editor at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @Peter_M_Walsh.

Photo via Johnny Nunez/WireImage

The post Beat King appeared first on SLAM.

SLAM: What are your earliest musical memories?

Andrew Wiggins: I know my dad used to always play 2Pac, Kanye West. When I was younger, there was a lot of 2Pac playing. But he wouldn’t always let me listen to it. I’d get in the car and he’d turn it off. He would only let me listen to certain songs, like “Dear Mama” and more of the softer 2Pac songs. I definitely had to sneak around to find the other stuff.

SLAM: Your dad is American, and your mom’s background is Bajan. How did that shape the music you heard around the house?

AW: Yeah, she was born in Barbados. Growing up, I heard a lot of soca, a lot of reggae. I was always aware of it. I always have reggae and soca in my iPod—I have to have some of that.

SLAM: You’ve said in the past that you’re a fan of guys like SAFE and Smoke Dawg who, like you, are from Toronto. Tell me about your relationship with artists from that scene.

AW: They’re big names in Toronto. They’re making it big right now, and they’re producing good music. And I know them personally. Me and Smoke Dawg, I know him from back in the day, through his older brother. He started making music, and I started listening to it. He’d give me music to listen to, and then I saw the songs were getting better. Now he has some songs with some big names, too—for example, French Montana. And SAFE, he’s traveling to the States performing and stuff, getting to know different people out here.

SLAM: Because Toronto is brick eight months out of the year, it’s always seemed like artists there make music that sounds and feels like winter. What is it about the so-called “Toronto sound” that’s appealing to you?

AW: It’s always cold, yeah, but I never really cared about the weather. I just listen to whatever I feel like. Mostly, I know the slang, I know how people talk [in Toronto]. I understand what they’re talking about ’cause I’m from there, you know? It’s the same culture.

SLAM: Do you have any secret musical ambitions of your own?

AW: [Laughs] Nah, I can’t sing, and I can’t rap. I just love listening to music. And I love giving my opinion about it, but I have to say that I have no musical talent. You know, sometimes with my friends or something we’d rap for fun, but I wouldn’t say I’m good.

SLAM: You have no bars at all?

AW: I got, like, one or two bars. I could maybe go four or five bars max, and after that I’d be done.

SLAM: How does music fit into your pre-game ritual?

AW: It’s huge! If I listen to certain rappers before a game, it gets me hyped, it gets me in the mood. And I need to be in a competitive mood to play. I’ll play someone like Styles P—that [puts me] in a competitive mood. Or sometimes it’s Jadakiss, or DMX or Eminem.

SLAM: How about when you’re shooting around or practicing?

AW: It all depends on what I’m doing in practice. If I’m just shooting, I want to hear something smoother.

SLAM: Back in the day, Jadakiss and AI had those wildly popular Reebok commercials together. If you had to pick a rapper to work with on something similar for adidas, who would you pick?

AW: That’s a good and very hard question. I’d say Drake but Drake’s with Jordan, so I’d say…J. Cole. I like him a lot as a rapper. I like Kendrick a lot, too. It just kinda fits my style.

SLAM: You’ve namechecked legacy rappers, people who were at their peaks when you were still super, super young. Where does your musical discovery come from?

AW: It’s mostly from my dad, plus I have two older brothers. But I always found music myself, too. When you’re younger, you just get on the computer, you search and keep searching and searching and searching and finding new stuff. My best friend likes music a lot, too, so we always talked about it. A lot of my friends really, really like music, so they’ll figure out what’s new and they keep me updated. There’s people [whose taste] I trust. They keep me updated a lot.

SLAM: You were first coming up around the same time that Drake was really getting into his bag and sort of refashioning the way people from outside of Toronto were understanding the city. How did it feel to see that happen through music?

AW: In those days, Drake was considered up and coming—he was putting us on the map. Everyone from Toronto knew he was about to be the best rapper in the game and now he is, so there’s a lot of pride. Sometimes there’s a lot of things Americans don’t know. I catch myself saying things that the average American wouldn’t understand—I feel like maybe people from the East, from New York, understand a lot of it. When you’re in Minnesota, you don’t really hear that slang too much. Sometimes listening to guys like SAFE or Smoke Dawg or whoever can make you feel more close to home. Sometimes.

—

Rawiya Kameir is a Senior Editor at The FADER. Follow her @rawiya.

Portrait courtesy of adidas; Action photo via Getty Images.

The post 6 Side appeared first on SLAM.

Even if he never scores another point, CB solidified himself as a leader, a professional and a winner a long time ago. LeBron James and Dwyane Wade wanted him on their team. So did Jerry Colangelo and Mike Krzyzewski. A reputation can’t get much better.

Bosh has always shown that he’s not just a basketball player, though. He takes pride in being a well-rounded person. He used to have a YouTube channel with vlogs, interviews, even a behind-the-scenes series about getting his first tattoo. He’s become a talented chef and he’s appeared in movies and on television.

And these days, the Dallas native has picked up a new, more harmonious hobby: the guitar.

“I started playing because of my situation,” Bosh says. “I had a lot more free time on my hands. I always wanted to learn music. About eight years ago I tried picking up playing the piano. My cousin would give me lessons. Of course, I didn’t pursue it. It got too hard and I stopped. I always thought the guitar was cool. So I said, If I pick it up and don’t put it down, I can learn how to play the guitar.”

Even with all of his accomplishments on the court, Bosh has a relentless desire to keep learning new things. He begins by rattling off the legends who have inspired him: “Freddie King, BB King, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Freddie King’s from Dallas.”

He pauses there. “I was like, Damn, one of the Texas blues OGs is from Dallas. That’s super cool. Then of course, Jimi Hendrix, David Gilmour. I listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page.”

Bosh says his father used to play the old blues legends while he was growing up. “I have very fond memories of [guitarists] like that,” he says.

* * *

Young Chris Bosh averaged 20 and 9 through seven seasons in Toronto. He led the transition from the Vince Carter era and got the Raps to the playoffs twice. He was a dynamic first option. Seriously, go back and watch the tape. CB was dunking on everyone. In his final season up north, he averaged 24 points and 11 rebounds in 70 games. But the Raptors missed the postseason yet again.

As we all know, Bosh took his talents to South Beach in 2010. In joining the Heatles, Bosh entered the League’s brightest spotlight. When the Heat lost to the Mavericks in the 2011 Finals, it was Bosh who had to take the longest look in the mirror. Fans thought it was easy to laugh at him when he broke down and cried right after that series was over. The weight of it all hit him.

Bosh was 27 at the time, one of the 10 best basketball players on the planet, in the prime of his career. He could have quit, gone back to running his own team. Yet he understood that he was the one who was going to have to sacrifice the shots, the stats, the attention, the All-Star votes and the respect of every stupid troll on the Internet.

And he did it.

The Heat began to dominate. James got the awards. Wade got the love. Bosh flew under the radar. He was the team’s backbone. He was its most underappreciated piece, versatile enough to play center, locking down the paint, quick enough to switch off picks to contain the League’s fastest guards on the perimeter. After two seasons in Miami, he even developed a lethal outside jumpshot.

Trace it back for a second. Every big man in the League shoots jumpers now. But with the Heat struggling to beat Roy Hibbert, David West and the Pacers in the 2013 conference finals, Bosh had to step out to the three-point line and hit timely buckets from downtown. He made the third-most threes on the team in that series. He completely flipped his game, going from a rim-attacking power forward to a pace-and-space center. He was still playing down low, though. In the next series, he grabbed the critical rebound and made the pass that led to Ray Allen’s legendary Game 6 three-pointer.

From one of the best individual hoopers in the world to its most willing teammate to the small ball catalyst, Bosh didn’t hesitate to do whatever it took to win.

By 2014, fans finally understood that the Heat wouldn’t be the Heat if Bosh didn’t play his role. In the season after James went back to Cleveland, Bosh returned to superstar form. He was averaging 21 a game until the All-Star break.

People didn’t overreact too much when he was a late scratch in that year’s All-Star Game. A few days later, Bosh found out he had blood clots in his lungs. It was the start of a long road that’s left everyone uncertain about his future on the court. [That same blood clot condition took him off the court again in 2016.—Ed.]

Sidelined from his normal daily activities, Bosh started by taking a couple of guitar lessons from guys in Miami and Los Angeles.

“I had a teacher in L.A.,” he remembers. “We just did two lessons, though. He actually was just a guy that did our construction and we ended up talking about guitar one day. He said, ‘I can give you a few lessons.’”

Bosh lets out a full laugh. He laughs a lot. It’s the chuckle of a man who’s at peace, comfortable and happy.

He talks about the six-string with ease now. He likes to play the blues minor pentatonic scale and he likes the way the F chord transitions to the C chord. Every now and then, clips of him playing pop up on his Snapchat account. Sometimes he’s wearing Rolling Stones t-shirts; sometimes he’s rocking cowboy hats. Sometimes he picks up the acoustic; sometimes he rocks out with the electric.

He plays more notes and scales than chords, and plays along with records more than he jams with other musicians. He’s mostly figuring things out for himself, trying to find the sounds that interest him, he says.

“Things just started making sense a little bit,” Bosh says. “I started getting into music theory, the simple basics. You start to see how the pieces of the puzzle fit.” He laughs again. “When I tell you I’m all in, it’s no joke.”

Just as his father was into the blues, today, his wife Adrienne and her father are connecting with him through music.

“She grew up on grunge,” Bosh says. “Grunge and Stevie Nicks. And the Steve Miller Band.

“My father-in-law, we connect,” he continues. “We listen to old rock-and-roll records all the time. My wife, she’d go to rock festivals, Ozzfest [founded by heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne in the ’90s] all the time growing up. She just has a great ear for music. When we were dating, she turned me on to new music. I knew who Nirvana was, but she’d be like, ‘Listen to this Nirvana song.’ Or, ‘This is Nine Inch Nails.’ Or, ‘This is Sublime.’ Different kinds of bands. It’s interesting to talk to people about music.”

Bosh is probably one of very few NBA players who regularly listen to Nine Inch Nails. He’s definitely the only one to jam live with Miguel, the angel-voiced singer with hits like “Do You?” and “Adorn.”

“One time this summer, we were hanging out in Nashville,” Bosh says. “Miguel is a really good friend of ours. It was me, him and we were supposed to go see Gary Owen that night at a comedy club. We all ended up hanging out at my room.

“I was talking to Miguel and they brought out the guitar. He was like, ‘You play the guitar?’ I was like, Yeah! And my wife, she’s always like, ‘Yeah, he plays the guitar! Sing, play for ’em, babe!’ She put me on the spot right away. So I said, ‘OK, damn, Miguel, you’re here. I have to jam with you.’ That was probably the coolest moment so far.”

Bosh went from playing his acoustic Recording King guitar by himself to being afraid of playing with people (“At first, [jamming] was like jumping off a cliff”) to singing backup to Miguel in a city with one of the richest musical histories in America.

But Bosh’s ascension as a guitarist should come as no surprise. He’s a workhorse—and a quick study—in whatever he does. Basketball, comedy, cooking—Bosh has always figured out a way to succeed.

Unlike roundball, though, he doesn’t have anything to prove or win by learning guitar.

“Playing music is therapeutic and I wanted to be able to do that,” Bosh says. “I had never had a feeling like that about anything else outside of basketball. Of course, basketball, my wife, those are the times you get those feelings, but I got that feeling watching people play music. I’m like, man, you know what? I’ll do that. I’ll do that for free, by myself. If I could do that, I’ll be happy.”

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Max Resetar is an Assistant Editor at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @maxresetar. Photos via Getty Images.

The post Songs in the Key of Life appeared first on SLAM.

Then the late ’90s hit, and the worlds of hoops and music (specifically hip-hop) crashed into one another with more force than ever. Basketball stars started dressing like rappers, and SLAM covers looked increasingly like the front pages of The Source and XXL, with the aforementioned AI resolutely embodying this movement. Naturally, we (fine: they) were happy to ride this wave into pop culture relevance, in the process creating some of SLAM’s most iconic covers and issues to date.

There was a slow steer away from some of those vibes in the years that followed 2005’s NBA-instituted dress code, as players began showing up to games looking prepped for the glossy pages of GQ and Esquire. They still do, and they’ve seemingly enjoyed it, too—and lord knows we’re in no position to tell athletes what clothing they should or should not be wearing (even if today’s “dress code” is a total joke). Yet what might have gotten slightly lost in this aesthetic shift is that the original interlocking of hoops and music, so effortlessly represented in our mag and others during a previous generation…it never really went anywhere. In fact, the two are more intertwined than ever. It all just looks a little different than it used to.

Our new issue proves that. We’ve still got your usual dose of hoops—a strong high school ball section, a couple of action photo posters, some bball history reading—but for the most part, every story in SLAM 205 is devoted to the ever-evolving crossover between the worlds of basketball and music. There’s a rookie who produces beats in his spare time. Twin college guards who make R&B ballads. A vet who strums the guitar to forget about the frustrating fact that he’s not allowed to set foot on an NBA floor. A retired big man who rocks EDM shows across the globe. A rapper who dreamed of playing pro ball his entire life, only to fall short—and still wind up on the Billboard charts. An All-Star who lives with an aspiring rapper. Another All-Star (in the video above and the cover below) who was an aspiring rapper, then a successful rapper, and is now an aspiring music mogul. And trust—we could’ve gone on and on and on. Because the crossover between basketball and music is no longer much of a crossover. The term “crossover” implies two separate, distinct worlds. The industries are more meshed together than ever before. They’re one. And we’re very much here for it, perpetually exploring that space, practically living in it.

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Adam Figman is the Editor-in-Chief of SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @afigman.

Cover + portraits by Atiba Jefferson.

The post Damian Lillard Covers SLAM’s First-Ever Music Issue appeared first on SLAM.

When Dr. James Naismith climbed a ladder and nailed a peach basket to the wall of a school gymnasium in 1891, the basketball had yet to be invented.

In 1894, Naismith called upon sporting goods manufacturer AG Spalding to develop the very first basketball, which featured full-grain leather panels, as it does today.

Naismith was so pleased with the ball that he added to the original rules of the game: “The ball made by AG Spalding & Bros. shall be the official ball.”

It’s with this historical perspective that Spalding is honoring the game of basketball on its 125th anniversary.

“When you think about what basketball means to the athletes and fans who love it, it’s really about the excitement around the game, the teamwork, the camaraderie,” says Kenyatta Bynoe, VP of Global Brand Marketing and Partnerships, Spalding. “That’s what we’re celebrating: Everything that the game has given to us.”

As basketball has permeated into the fabric of our culture, the game continues to touch lives on a deeply personal level. The game could be someone’s classroom. A stage. A battlefield. A sanctuary.

“For us, [basketball] is everything,” Bynoe says. “It’s the reason why we innovate. The reason why we make a quality product and put so much time, attention and detail into the products that we make.”

Spalding has taken great care in building a team of ambassadors who represent the brand’s passion and dedication. Chris Paul, Damian Lillard and DeMar DeRozan have devoted themselves to the game in pursuit of maximizing their potential.

Basketball has brought them purpose and taught them the value of hard work. The three NBA All-Stars are sharing their stories using the hashtags #TrueBelievers and #125HoopYears. Spalding is asking others to do the same.

“They just have an overall incredible work ethic and that definitely aligns with who we are as a brand,” Bynoe says. “Our brand is definitely more about the work than the hype that’s associated with basketball.”

As part of the 125th anniversary celebration, Spalding is also gifting 125 limited-edition basketballs to athletes, coaches, fans, media, referees and other individuals who have made a notable impact on the game.

Featuring all-black composite leather with a metallic gold foil 125th anniversary logo, the ball represents a bold new era for Spalding basketball. An era of innovation at the highest level while paying homage to the past.

“Helping people play better and get better is what motivates us to continue to develop new products every day,” Bynoe says. “We’ve been doing that for over 100 years now. Basketball is who we are as a brand and who we are as a company.”

The post Since The Start appeared first on SLAM.