Believe it or not, LeBron James vs. DeShawn Stevenson was once a legitimate NBA feud. Back in 2008, Stevenson made headlines when, after a Wizards win over the Cavs, he made the absurd comment that LeBron was overrated. When LeBron was asked about it, he fired back by saying it was the equivalent of Soulja Boy trying to go at Jay Z.
And because the NBA is an going work of avant-garde performance art, both rappers actually got involved in the beef. First, Soulja Boy did a show at a Wizards home game (rocking a Stevenson jersey, naturally), then Jay Z actually wrote and recorded a diss track about Stevenson, re-appropriating the Too Short track “Blow the Whistle.”
According to the legendary Oakland-based rapper, Jay Z had ulterior motives for dropping the track. Here’s what he had to say about the whole thing to Brandon ‘Scoop B’ Robinson on the Scoop B Radio podcast.
“So I guess in his mind he was gearing up to, at that point,” Too Short says, “I think he was thinking about signing LeBron and having him play for the Nets, and he was courting LeBron and LeBron was special to him and ol’ boy [Stevenson] stepped on LeBron’s toes talking s***, and Jay was like, ‘I’m going to shut this down,’ And he probably saw the moment where the crowd reacted to the song and then that was on his mind.”
We all know how it played out from there. LeBron would ultimately spurn the Nets and take his talents to South Beach, where incidentally Stevenson would get his revenge on him as a member of the 2011 Dallas Mavericks team that stunned the Big 3 Heat in their first Finals appearance together.
The beef has long since cooled, to the point where Stevenson even announced publicly that wouldn’t mind joining up with LeBron and the Heat in 2013. That didn’t happen, of course, and Stevenson’s NBA career pretty much ended after that. Still, the whole thing was fun while it lasted.
Here are the operative lyrics to Jay’s track, so judge for yourself exactly what he was trying to accomplish:
Uh! Ask my n**** Lebron!
We so big we ain’t gotta respond
When you talkin’ to a don, please have respect like you’re talking’ to your mom
We let the money do the talkin’
As you see we be talkin’ rather often (chatterbox!)
The ROC Boys in the buildin’
Another hundred fifty million don’t it sound like we yellin?!!!
Who the f*** overrated?! If anything they underpaid him
Hatin’ that’s only ‘gonna make him spend the night
Out of spite with the chick you’ve been datin’
We the best of the best
We ‘gon be here so the rest could take a rest
I gotta get this off my chest
No pause none of that s***, get off my d***!!!!
