Bill Stephney, a longtime executive at Def Jam Recordings, one of hip-hop\u2019s most suc – cessful record labels, remembered Darryl Dawkins, a notable National Basketball Association player in the mid-1970s, carrying himself like a monstrous b-boy \u2014 the short hair with a part, the gold chains, the rhyming and fast talking. A decade later, as rap music got big, Dawkins\u2019 look was no longer an anomaly in and outside of the NBA. A wave of New York\u2013born ballplayers, like Kenny Smith, Rod Strickland, and Mark Jackson, entered the league and carried themselves and dressed like the guys from the neighborhood, the same ones who were rapping. \u201cWe didn\u2019t look at them as hip-hop representation in the NBA, but guys from the same \u2019hood where the culture was,\u201d Stephney said. The look that defined Run-DMC, the crisp Adidas shell-toes and popping sweat suits, was what the ballers at New York City\u2019s Rucker Park would wear, Kenny Smith said. The rappers popularized it.<\/p>\n
USA Today<\/em>\u2019s basketball editor Ron Thomas noticed, and loved, the league\u2019s unabashed acceptance of Black culture. There were plenty of African-Americans in the NFL, but the operation felt squashed of an identity. It was so regimented. In the NBA, Thomas heard Black music in the locker room. The players would hit the clubs.<\/p>\n \u201cThe NBA decided that it was going to make being a Black league its brand,\u201d said Thomas, an AfricanAmerican. \u201cAnd the NBA was fine with that. I felt, without thinking about it, you were covering a Black cultural entity called the NBA.\u201d<\/p>\n Christopher \u201cPlay\u201d Martin, one half of the hip-hop group Kid \u2019n Play, believed athletes, rappers, and drug dealers had much in common. They came from the streets, where they were trying to find their purpose, where they celebrated together. \u201cWe all knew our plights, our struggles, our journeys to get there,\u201d Martin said. Some members of this group, he added, wanted to trade places.<\/p>\n The connection between rap and basketball ran deep. For Stephney, a native New Yorker, young Black men played ball as a DJ worked turntables on the side. \u201cI don\u2019t know if that distinction in this area ever expressed itself,\u201d he said. It was all part of the same experience.<\/p>\n As rap videos accumulated, so did employees at NBA Entertainment. The staffers grew up on MTV, said Patrick Kelleher, who joined NBA Entertainment full-time in 1990, after serving as an intern in 1989. Rap and the NBA were soul mates in commerce. The rhythm and flow of the music matched the athleticism, NBA Entertainment producer Stephen Koontz said.<\/p>\n The athletes were so dynamic, and the music was so new. It made sense to marry the two \u2014 especially on highlights. \u201cYou could dunk on the beat,\u201d NBA Entertainment\u2019s Heidi Palarz said.<\/p>\n Dave Zirin, the sports columnist and sports editor for The Nation<\/em>, said the rap-NBA link goes back to at least the NBA Entertainment\u2019s 1984 year-in-review video, \u201cPride and Passion,\u201d where a rapper performed an original pastel-colored jam called \u201c13 Johnsons\u201d for a segment about the NBA players surnamed Johnson.<\/p>\n Thirteen men with the same last name 13 Johnsons playing the game.<\/em><\/p>\n It made the \u201cSuper Bowl Shuffle\u201d sound like \u201cRapper\u2019s Delight,\u201d Zirin said.<\/p>\n Perhaps, but the NBA was fostering a connection with rap. Zirin also recalls Kurtis Blow\u2019s rap classic \u201cBasketball\u201d being used in NBA promotions. It was appropriate. Blow considered it a theme song for basketball. He performed after games \u201cthat weren\u2019t drawing people \u2014 Sacramento playing Washington or something. So, the game is half full. They call me in. The song was so hot, we were selling out. The games would be packed. I did that for about 20 different games. It was incredible.\u201d Blow got to meet the players he rapped about: Isaiah Thomas, Julius Erving, George Gervin. They all hugged him like he was part of the family.<\/p>\n Former NBA Commissioner David Stern was fine with the NBA-rap relationship, Koontz said, \u201cas long as we kept it in the bounds of sanity.\u201d That meant no \u201cCop Killer,\u201d no songs with outright misogyny or drug use. Into the early 1990s, most popular rap music remained benign. \u201cThere was no objection, because back then it was tamer,\u201d said Kelleher. \u201cWe were using \u2018Hip Hop Hooray.\u2019 It wasn\u2019t as profane as it is now.\u201d The NBA worked with Kid \u2019n Play but not Dr. Dre, said longtime NBA Entertainment employee David Gavant. Controversy was a good way to alienate customers.<\/p>\n \u201cThey wanted to appeal to the youth, just plain and simple,\u201d Martin said, referring to the NBA. \u201cThat was the sound of the youth. That\u2019s what they loved. That\u2019s what appealed to them. That was the language, the style, the culture.\u201d Martin credited the NBA with recognizing rap\u2019s stamina, and to choose trustworthy brands \u2014 that is, artists \u2014 that fit with the image the league wanted to promote.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things that David Stern always believed was sports as entertainment,\u201d said Jon Miller, the cogeneral manager and vice president of NBA Entertainment. \u201cThat\u2019s probably a clich\u00e9 today; it was not a clich\u00e9 then, it was a creation of that as a natural reality and a strategy. He was sort of the orchestra conductor for all that, and music was the easiest place for that to occur.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Reprinted from<\/em> FROM HANG TIME TO PRIME TIME: Business, Entertainment, and the Birth of the Modern-Day NBA by Pete Croatto with permission from Atria Books. <\/em><\/p>\n How the NBA\u2019s embrace of rap music helped lead to the sport\u2019s rapid rise..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":11688,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-on-campus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11600"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11683,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11600\/revisions\/11683"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nCover courtesy of Atria Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"