Rappers want to be athletes. And athletes want to be rappers. It’s an adage that’s decades old and still applies today. But the mutual respect and admiration usually shared between the professionals from different genres isn’t always standard operating procedure.
Bad blood, often for very stupid and ridiculous reasons, has a way of boiling to the surface from time-to-time, most especially thanks to the proliferation of Twitter and Instagram over the past 10 years. At the very least, social media has given athletes a chance to respond, tell their side of the story, or clap back in ways that weren’t readily available 20 years ago over an occasional diss stashed in a random verse.
Whether the public clapping between rappers like 50 Cent and athletes like Floyd Mayweather is/was ever truly legit, or more likely just a bunch of bull so they could bask in the attention, we’ll leave the final interpretation up to you. But we’d be lying if we said it wasn’t entertaining as hell and fun to document the many notable verbal battles between rappers and athletes that are best characterized as silly and superfluous.