None of this was authorized by the school, of course. It wasn’t anything associated with the athletic program, the NCAA, the alumni, or the boosters. It was just me taking it upon myself to talk to these kids. From what I could see, they didn’t have anybody at the school to talk to, because nobody at that school came from where they came from. I felt like they needed help, and I helped them. I helped a lot of those kids get their heads right, but unfortunately all the mentoring in the world wasn’t going to make a dent in the biggest problem they faced: money.
The NCAA regulations on student athletes are inhumane. It might be going too far to compare it to slavery, but it’s an immoral system no matter how you try and justify it. The NCAA makes billions off of these kids, and they get paid nothing. My first thought was, Shit, I’ll give you a job, hire you on at the warehouse. But then I learned more about all the regulations and found out I couldn’t. They are not allowed to get jobs while they play. People don’t want alumni or boosters using fake jobs to funnel money to these kids. They can’t work, can’t accept a free burger or a sandwich, can’t even take five dollars for autographing a jersey for another student. They can’t accept money or benefits of any kind from anyone other than their parents or legal guardians, but these inner-city kids, their parents didn’t have shit to give them. They were all poor. Some of the athletes had families of their own. I had guys coming to me, saying, “I can’t feed my family. This shit ain’t feeding me, man. I got a daughter. My mamma and them crying. I got a thousand goddamn family members at home. Everybody think we made it, but I don’t got nothing. I gotta get money.”
It reminded me of my uncle Ricky and those invisible chains. These kids were working, but they didn’t own their own labor. They didn’t have the freedom to earn a living, on or off the field. It made me think back to when I was bused over to Miami Beach High, how they got me over there with the promise of education, making me feel like I was part of the club, but really they were just passing me along and using me to play ball. It was the same thing with the kids at Miami. On the one hand, they had a great opportunity. On the other hand, they were being used and exploited.
The University of Miami has a billion-dollar impact on the economy of south Florida. After Schnellenberger took over and the team started winning, applications to the school went up every year for years after that, all driven by the popularity of the team. You’re talking about millions of tuition dollars to pay for new teachers, new programs. Damn near every time the team went to a bowl game, the administration put up some new building on campus, but the kids responsible for it weren’t getting shit. And we know damn well they weren’t in there getting the same level of education. They were like me, coming out of school and reading on a fifth-grade level, and if they didn’t make it in the NFL, they were done.
I knew these kids were being forced into a situation where some of them were going to do some bad shit, make some big mistakes. So I’d tell them, “Guys, if you’re having problems, come talk to me. If you’re about to go into somebody’s house and rob some kids, whatever you do, don’t do that. Before you go do any kind of stupid shit, come see me. If you need to feed your family, I’ll get you some money to feed your family.”
I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I couldn’t even hire them off the books. That was too high profile, and people could find out. Going back to my roots and how my parents raised me, I wasn’t about giving handouts. You want something, you work for it. You want to go to the high school dance, get your ass out there and clean the windows. I didn’t want these guys demeaning themselves, coming around and begging, asking me for a couple hundred bucks here and there. It’s degrading for anybody to have to do that. Back to common sense: how can I do this to where I can help these kids help themselves in this situation?
I decided to pay them to be the best at the work they’re already doing. If the school won’t pay them a fair wage for their labor, I would. I told the guys, “If you get a tackle, come by the club and I’ll give you twenty-five dollars. If you get a sack, I’m gonna give you fifty dollars. An interception, one hundred dollars.” It was comparable to what my parents did when we received good grades as kids. It was always that way with youth football, too. You went out to the park, you got a touchdown, Uncle Joe gave you five dollars. That was customary shit in the neighborhood.
I wasn’t paying for dirty hits, or for knocking opponents out of the game or anything like that. It was just for clean tackles, completed passes, for doing their job well. I wasn’t some booster, bribing these kids just because I wanted to see my team in the playoffs. Hell, I wasn’t even an alum. My focus was 100 percent on the kids.
After I started paying them, these kids worked their asses off even more than before, because that’s how they were gonna take care of their family.
The players developed that same work ethic I always had. They were increasing the value of their stock. You accumulate sacks and become one of the dominant players in college football. Every NFL team wants you. A million sacks will get you drafted in the first round, or a million receptions will get you drafted in the first round. I gave them the incentive to help them out of a fucked-up situation. Together, me and those guys started to change the game of football forever.
I was having the time of my life. I was helping these kids but also, as a fan, I was more involved with the game. There weren’t any security checks, and the players started inviting me down to the sideline. I became a part of that crew every week. If I was in Miami and there was a home game, I was there watching from the sidelines. It was fucking incredible. Every year, from the Schnellenberger era through Jimmy Johnson and Dennis Erickson, these kids from Liberty City and the poor black neighborhoods of south Florida were building one of the greatest dynasties in college football. There were more national championships in ’87 and ’89 and ’91. They put together the longest home-game winning streak in NCAA history. These players were coming out as top NFL draft picks year after year: Warren Sapp, Michael Irvin, Alonzo Highsmith, and dozens more.
The Hurricanes were dominating the game, but the sports media hated them. They were too black, had too much attitude. The sports media has a story they want to tell, same as the regular media does, and the story they wanted to tell about college football was that old bullshit about Knute Rockne and the Fighting Irish, Lou Holtz and Joe Paterno molding the fine, All-American white boys of the Midwest with a few respectable negroes thrown in, some Jackie Robinsons, to show how far everything had come.
The black guys at Miami didn’t fit that story, so the media started writing a different one. There were sportswriters in New York claiming that the University of Miami is a bunch of thugs. It came from everywhere. The 1988 game between Notre Dame and Miami, they named it “Catholics vs. Convicts.” Sports Illustrated named Miami “Thug U.” In one issue, instead of the players’ game stats, they printed the players’ criminal records. These were kids that came from neighborhoods where life was tough, where you didn’t always make good choices and where the cops would arrest you for any kind of bullshit. They were playing at Miami because they were good kids who wanted like hell to get out of that life. The media had already made up their minds on it: these kids are no good.
The Miami Hurricanes and 2 Live Crew, we had a lot in common. We were both outcasts. We were both winning teams that got no respect for our success. They were living the same life I was living. We’d sit in my living room talking about what to do about it.
They wound up taking on a lot of ideas from my life because our situations were similar. The way I responded to all my censors and critics, they decided to do the same: If you think we’re too loud, we’re gonna be louder. If you think we’re too black, we’re gonna be blacker. Because we can. Because this is our game. Because we’re better than you, and we can prove it on the field. We don’t have to back down and lower our heads for you anymore.
Those guys became the Muhammad Alis of college football, not just dominating the sport but boasting and
talking shit about it. It became known that there was a certain type of guy who played on this team, a Miami guy, a guy who played the game with a chip on his shoulder. Miami became known for that swagger, that flashy attitude. Those guys used to sit up in my house during the week, Wednesday or Thursday, and talk about the shit that they were gonna do at the games. “Yeah, I’m gonna take my helmet off and we gonna dance!” “Yeah!” The end-zone dances, the finger wagging, the high-stepping across the goal line, doing backflips, dancing over the guy you just tackled. We all concocted that shit. It was our way of venting our frustration with the way we were treated. It was our way of saying: “Fuck everybody.”
That changed the game forever right there. These guys weren’t just numbered jerseys anymore. They had personalities. They were superstars. Eventually, the NCAA tried to censor the team the same way it was being done to me in the music arena. After the 1991 Cotton Bowl against Texas, when Randal Hill ran a forty-eight-yard touchdown straight through the end zone and then up the stadium tunnel, pretending to shoot the Texas players with imaginary pistols, the NCAA passed new regulations against excessive celebration on the field. People called it the Miami Rule. The video they put together to show teams how not to behave was pretty much just a Hurricanes highlight reel.
For a long time, nobody knew I had anything to do with the team. I was just another black guy on the sidelines. Covering the sport were old white sportswriters from the Miami Herald, guys like Edwin Polk, who didn’t know anything about 2 Live Crew, didn’t know anything about the hood. I wasn’t immediately recognizable to them like a Mick Jagger. These old guys didn’t know who the fuck I was. Then came this young journalist, Dan Le Batard, who went to Miami before going to work at the Herald. He knew what was going on. He was aware of the hip-hop influence. The writer questioned what the fuck is a rapper doing down on the sidelines? Maybe he’s a bad influence on these kids?
One part of my thing was that I had these Luke Records scarves that I wore during my performances. It was part of my persona. Offstage I was Luther Campbell, playing golf and taking meetings with my lawyers and accountants. Onstage, I’d put that scarf on and turn into Luke, Uncle Luke, Luke Skyywalker, up there yelling, “Fuck everybody! Fuck you! We want some pussy!” It was my thing, to put that scarf on and transform. Before I knew it, all the black guys at Miami were going, “We want the scarf.” They were wearing the scarf on the sidelines. And when they put that scarf on, it had the same impact as it did on me. “Fuck it. Fuck everybody.” They were talking shit, walking all over people, dancing on top of folks, getting in everybody’s face.
The president of the university, Tad Foote, and the athletic director, Sam Jankovich, didn’t like the street attitude these guys were bringing, and they didn’t want to be associated with some rapper. Jankovich did an editorial in the paper saying the scarf had to go and they were going to have this big meeting to put a stop to it.
At the big meeting: “Anybody wearing the scarf, you’re going to be suspended.” At that time, it was just the black kids wearing the scarf, and for them it was really a black pride, Black Power kind of thing. What happened was surprising. The day the administration had this meeting was the day the white players asked the black kids to bring them to my warehouse to get scarves. They all wore them at practice that day. The white kids and the black kids, scarfed up. That’s what integration was supposed to be. Integration didn’t have to just be blacks submitting to white folks’ rules. Integration was supposed to be young blacks and whites together, making a new set of rules.
The scarf, by extension, meant Luke Records wasn’t just a black thing anymore. It was a Miami thing. It became a totem. Now if a kid didn’t go to the University of Miami, even if he went to another college, he called for the scarf. Ben Hanks, this kid from Overtown who went to the University of Florida, called for a scarf. Derrick Thomas wore one. He came from Miami and went to Alabama and then on to become the all-time sack leader for the Kansas City Chiefs.
I had successfully blended sports with hip-hop. It all started at the University of Miami with Luther Campbell and 2 Live Crew. We had players in Luke Gear out on the field. We had girls in Miami gear dancing in our videos. We were bringing the hip-hop culture together with the culture of college sports and, later on, with the culture of professional sports.
A few years later, Snoop Dogg was out on the sidelines at USC games, head to toe in Trojans gear. There was Ice Cube hanging with the Oakland Raiders, the fucking tough guys. Big-name rappers started wearing the jerseys of the tough guys, the players we felt were hip-hop oriented. I had read about Allen Iverson. He was a tough kid who grew up in a tough neighborhood. He was a hip-hop kid. He made it out of the ghetto, similar to what we did. I related to him. So I got me an Allen Iverson Georgetown jersey and I started wearing that onstage.
On the other side you had the pro ballplayers acting like the University of Miami guys. They started bringing that swagger to the NFL, to the NBA, wearing the cornrows and shit. They all wanted to be rappers. You had Shaquille O’Neal putting out platinum rap albums, Kobe Bryant putting out singles. A few years later, it all came together at the highest possible level: Jay Z bringing the Nets to Brooklyn, owning a piece of the team, designing the gear with an all-black hip-hop style to it.
The marriage of hip-hop and sports was an important cultural moment. Same as we did with the music, we used the power of sports to tell the rest of America, “Hey, we’re coming in. This color line y’all tried to put up, get ready, because we’re coming over and we’re bringing all of our blackness with us.”
I taught those kids who came down to my club, not knowing how to feed their families. I taught them how to walk that line that every black man from the hood has got to walk. I taught them to leave that thug shit behind. No breaking the law and doing wild shit. But you also don’t ever apologize for who you are or where you come from. You don’t ever apologize for being black. You obey the law, you play by the rules, but that doesn’t mean for a second that you conform to what other people want you to be. You be yourself. Be as loud and as flashy and as nasty as you wanna be, and don’t ever apologize for it.
NASTY
The arrest of the store clerk in the Panhandle, the trial in Alexander City, the harassment I was getting from the administration at the University of Miami—I knew I was doing something right. If the morality police hadn’t come after 2 Live Crew, I probably would have gotten tired of the dirty rap and just moved on to the next thing. But that’s not what happened.
By 1988, around election time—any kind of election, from Congress to district judge to county commissioner—2 Live Crew became a target. To get some instant press, politicians would make a speech about the dirty nigger music corrupting the youth of your Podunk Alabama town, then they’d send the cops to arrest some store clerk and make a lot of noise about how we needed to be locked up, too. We had sheriffs coming after us, city councils coming after us. We had judges, lawyers, the PTA. We even had Vice President Dan Quayle making statements about us. It’s when I became more aware of all these hypocritical right wingers with nothing better to do.
For whatever reason, censorship became the white establishment’s big crusade that year. All these local two-bit sheriffs and district attorneys weren’t just spontaneously deciding to come after us: the morality police had put us in their sights, as well as every major Christian and family organization in America—Tipper Gore and the rest of the Washington housewives of the PMRC, the American Family Association, the Moral Majority, Focus on the Family, the 700 Club, the PTL Club. Every two-bit pro-family anti-obscenity group you can name, they all came out of the woodwork to attack us. All you needed was a fax machine or a TV camera and you could join the crusade to save little white kids from the evil of four-letter words. At first it was moms and church groups going after heavy-metal bands with bullshit accusations of satanism and devil worship. Later it was Jesse Helms and Congress going after the National Endowment for the Arts and artists like Robe
rt Mapplethorpe for using tax dollars to create “homosexual pornography.” Following came the biggest villain of all: hip-hop. The dirty, horny, violent, angry, oversexed black man. Pretty soon all the attention was on groups like N.W.A, Public Enemy, and 2 Live Crew. We put the black in the blacklist.
When Move Somethin’ went gold and we had the problems in the Panhandle and Alexander City and I felt the controversy starting, again I wasn’t afraid. These family groups were usually good for business. They got us instant notoriety. Most of the white people buying our records were hearing about our music for the first time when somebody tried to ban us. But at the same time, it pissed me off. It was the same as when we played the concerts in African Square Park back in the Ghetto Style days and the cops tried to break us up. I wasn’t doing anything wrong and people were messing with me for their own political ends. I was young. I was stubborn. I was part of a generation of young black folks who weren’t going to do what we were told anymore. We were going to stay true to who we are and what our fans liked about us.
It was my introduction to how the media worked, how politics worked. It’s not about telling the truth. It’s not about giving people the facts. It’s about telling a story, making the facts fit an exciting narrative, either to get ratings or to get elected or to get people to give you money. Every story has to have a good guy and a bad guy, and the way this story was being told, I was the bad guy. This was an old-time western, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and I was the guy in the black hat. I realized that no matter how many stickers I put on the records or how many times I called record stores to say please do not sell this to kids, no matter what I did, I would always be the guy with the black hat. I embraced it. If I’m the bad guy, I’ll be the bad guy; if that’s the role they want me to play, I’ll play it to the hilt. If white folks were scared of the big, bad, oversexed black man, I’d be the biggest, baddest, nastiest, dirtiest oversexed black man they could possibly imagine—just to prove that I could be. Just to prove that I had a right to be that if I wanted to. When we went into the studio for our next album, I was angry. This shit was personal. The result of that was our biggest album ever and one of the biggest rap albums of all time: As Nasty as They Wanna Be.
The Book of Luke Page 13