The 37-year-old rapper didn’t make the cut as a college player. So why has he played for two professional teams?
The Scarborough Shooting Stars came within a single basket of winning the Canadian Elite Basketball League (CEBL) title on Sunday, losing to the Hamilton Honey Badgers by just two points after a run of 17 unanswered in the fourth quarter. Despite their heartbreaking loss, Scarborough’s season should still be considered a success – the team made it to the championship game in their first year in the league, and the high-scoring duo of Jalen Harris and Kassius Robertson are a dynamic backcourt around which to build. Harris even once scored 31 points against the Luka Doncic-led Dallas Mavericks. Yet, despite his NBA pedigree, Harris is not even the most well-known guard on his team. That distinction falls to Grammy-winning rap artist J Cole. Or, more accurately in this context, 6ft 3in Shooting Stars guard Jermaine Cole.
Hip-hop and basketball have maintained their ongoing relationship ever since the former first emerged in 1970s New York. Kurtis Blow, widely regarded as rap’s first commercially successful artist, famously announced in the 1980s that basketball was his favorite sport, 90s rap mogul Master P played on the preseason squads for both the Charlotte Hornets and Toronto Raptors, and platinum-selling artist 2 Chainz released a 2010s album called Rap or Go to the League. Comedian Dave Chappelle even once humorously observed that it seemed like rapping or playing basketball were the only two ways to make it out of America’s inner cities. And yet, even with hip hop’s well-established relationship with basketball, there’s probably never been anyone who better personifies the connection than J Cole.
