Rapper 50 Cent is known for a lot of things. Drinking rum like it’s your birthday. Grapefruits. Or maybe his role as Air Marshal 50 Cent in Soul Plane 2.
All of these are memorable Curtis Jackson moments in pop culture. But if you’re a sports fan, your first thought might be of his truly awful first pitch before a Mets game before you recall any of that. The now infamous pitch is one of the worst celebrity first pitches in the history of baseball, which is a high bar to clear, but 50 Cent is nothing if not an overachiever.
The pitch happened in 2014 when he was promoting his Animal Ambition album. If you somehow haven’t seen it, please enjoy this beautiful footage of his wildly inaccurate effort at throwing a baseball over home plate.
That was nearly four years and people still can’t help but wonder what happened. With 50 Cent out to promote a movie in 2018, Den of Thieves, he’s still getting questions about it as Newsday‘s Neil Best talked to 50 Cent about the pitch and what went wrong. 50 Cent’s reaction to it all is pretty great.
“Listen, no one warned me,” 50 Cent said. “No one said: ‘Risk versus reward!’ I would have kept my [expletive] in the stands. This is never going away.”
Jackson does try to explain what went wrong, which he claims is just that he was too amped up about the pitch to do it properly. He does have a good sense of humor about it.
What went wrong? He originally offered a joking explanation that cannot be repeated in a family news outlet, but now he says he merely got too amped up.
“I’m like, this is what happens when the fanfare and the energy of the people is involved and you start trying to get fancy and try to throw the ball harder than you have to,” he said. “It just was the worst pitch ever . . . I had pitched before. I rehearsed. I practiced. I threw the ball a little bit.
“I was throwing like, ‘Oh, man, I’m about to throw a strike, a hundred miles an hour.’ But that [expletive] damn near killed a cameraman!”
It’s good that he has a sense of humor about this, and you do kind of have to feel for him. It’s not easy to do something like pull off a first pitch, even if you’re used to large crowds. It is kind of amazing what the incident has evolved into.
“They have baseball cards with me throwing the pitch – real baseball card that they made!” he said. “I go, ‘Wait a minute: Who cleared this?!’ Whenever baseball comes up, there is no one worse than me, as far as throwing out a pitch.
“I had no idea that throwing a bad pitch would be so big. It was coming across CNN! ESPN, CNN, I was like, whoa, not the way I want things out here at the moment when I’m getting ready to run this music and I’m on CNN and it looks like my arm’s broken. I’m like what the [expletive] happened to me?”
I, for one, would love to get a 50 Cent baseball card. I didn’t know they made those, but now I kind of need one to commemorate the occasion. Maybe they’ll package them with Den of Thieves when it comes out on DVD.
