Why A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife Dawg Was Sports Fans’ Favorite Rapper

From his ever-changing wardrobe of sports gear to his constant references to lesser-known players, Phife channeled his love of the game into everything he did.
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“My five favorite little men in NBA history are: Kenny Anderson, Mark Jackson, Kenny “The Jet” Smith, Allen Iverson, Chris Paul.” These were Malik Taylor’s words in the 2011 documentary, Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels Of A Tribe Called Quest. It went on from there. Phife Dawg, as he was more commonly known, pontificated on the sad state of the New York Knicks, his love for Big East basketball, the pinstripes on the New York Yankees’ and Mets’ uniforms (he didn’t think the Mets should wear pinstripes), his five favorite running backs, and who Jay Z would want coaching his then-New Jersey Nets (a young Rod Strickland).

Think about that for a minute. In a music documentary about one of the most important hip-hop groups of all time, director Michael Rapaport felt it necessary to dedicate a small chunk of screen time to Phife waxing poetic about sports. Such was Phife’s obsession. This leads to a scene where Phife talks about recruiting basketball players for an all-boys school in Connecticut. He was so excited about the gig that he was considering leaving hip-hop completely. “I love hip-hop, but at the rate it’s going right now, I could do with or without it,” he said.

His passion for sports was plain when you looked at him. It started on Tribe’s first album, 1990’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. When you looked at the album’s liner notes, you saw Phife in a blue New York Knicks Starter jacket. Then the first time you saw him rap — in the “Can I Kick It?” video — he was wearing a Braves jersey and Georgia Tech hat. The last time you saw him rap live on TV, this past November on “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon,” he was decked out in Mets gear.

In between, Phife wore gear for just about every team under the sun. In the documentary alone, you saw him rocking gear from the Chicago White Sox, Florida Gators, Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Lakers, New Jersey Devils, Oakland Raiders, San Francisco Giants, Seattle Supersonics, and of course, the New York Yankees. In the liner notes for The Low End Theory, he was front and center in North Carolina Tar Heels apparel. On the cover of his solo album, 2000’s Ventilation: Da LP, he wore a custom New York Jets jersey. He was always dipped in the fresh new gear, often reflective of the city in which Tribe was performing.

He also peppered his lyrics with sports references. Of course, he wasn’t the first rapper to do this — Kurtis Blow released his iconic “Basketball” nearly six years prior to Tribe dropping People’s Instinctive Travels  — but Phife may have been the best at it, packing his greatest lyrics about sports into Tribe’s biggest songs. The Queens rappers had four hits land on the Billboard Hot 100, and in two of them, Phife rattled off memorable sports lines. On “Award Tour,” he boasted that Tribe were “coming with more hits than the Braves and the Yankees.” He led off “Scenario" by insulting football and baseball All-Star Bo Jackson’s (presumed) poor lyrical ability. Bo might have known sports — he had, after all, captivated the nation with his Nike "Bo Knows" campaign, where he played every sport imaginable — but Bo didn’t know jack, because Bo couldn’t rap.

Of course, Phife’s genius wasn’t just that he could rap about dominant sports teams or players like “Joey” Montana or Pelé, but lesser-known players. When he spit rhymes about NBA players like Scott Skiles, Muggsy Bogues, Derrick Coleman, Vernon Maxwell, and Charles Oakley, it let the listener know that he really knew his game. These weren't exactly household names, and in the days before the internet, you more or less had to be studiously watching "SportsCenter" and checking box scores to know them. To know that Phife was doing this gave him a special place in a sports fan's heart.

Knowing his sports wasn’t enough, though. Phife took it up a notch with his humor. “Your styles are incomplete, same as Vinny Testaverde,” he rapped about the former No. 1 pick who completed fewer than 50 percent of his passes in his first year as a starting quarterback, on "The Chase Pt. II."  He quipped about Michael Jordan’s gambling. He invited you to watch him “stab up the track as if my name was O.J. Simpson.” He claimed he had the “complexion of a hockey puck.”

He also weaved sports references into his narrative verses in a way that let you know that he lived, perhaps above all, like a sports fan. In “8 Million Stories,” he casually mentions that his night out with his lady friend Nicki is going to the Knicks game, and just when you’re forgetting about Nicki standing him up for the game, he punctuates his story with the revelation that “Starks got ejected,” referring to famed New York Knicks guard John Starks. In “Butter,” which Talib Kweli described yesterday as a “master class in story rap,” he described himself as “b-ball playing.”

Phife just couldn’t help himself. As he explains on the autobiographical track, “Beats, Rhymes and Phife,” from Ventilation, sports are a part of him: “Grew up being a sports fanatic, wanting to box for gold medals / Influenced by the likes of Ali, and Sugar Ray / Magic Johnson, Tony Dorsett, and Dr. J.” The album closed with a shout-out to basketball player Malik Sealy, a native New Yorker who starred at St. John’s University and in the NBA, who died in a car accident just prior to the album’s release.

Eventually, Phife’s fandom found its way into the sports world proper. He was a playable character in the basketball video games NBA 2K7 and NBA 2K9. Last year, he stopped by ESPN twice, on “SportsCenter” with Scott Van Pelt and “His & Hers” with Michael Smith and Jemele Hill. In both, but especially the latter, he was a well-spoken NBA analyst.

Though Phife battled complications from diabetes his entire adult life — he readily admitted to being addicted to sugar — he wasn’t always doing poorly. In an August 2010 show featured in the documentary, he and Q-Tip flipped one of his more poignant lyrics to: “Phife you ain’t fat” / “B I know I look energetic / Ali Shaheed Muhammad had me doing calisthenics.” As such, the news of his death was more than a little jarring. Hearing him talk on “SportsCenter” and seeing the group perform on “Fallon” in November and at a Hot 97 concert in December left Tribe fans feeling hopeful about the future. Now, suddenly, it’s all gone.

One wonders if we’ll ever see his album, Muttymorphosis, which he had supposedly finished. It’s only fitting that in the one clip he shared from it, he drops sports jargon like “undefeated,” “underrated,” and “underdog,” and can be seen wearing the gear of his cherished Ohio State Buckeyes and UNC Tar Heels, as well as the Kansas City Chiefs. We have to add another un-word now: unfortunate. Forty-five is too young to die. If only Q-Tip really could, as he boasts in "Check the Rhime," play the resurrector and give the dead some life. Phife was competitive enough to want one more win with his team.