Basketball's Best Kept Secret and That Time Gary Payton Rapped Like Too $hort

No other league can match the NBA's roster of athlete-slash-something else crossovers. A number of the NBA's all-time great players are also best-in-class successes in politics (Bill Bradley), business (Magic Johnson), humanitarian efforts (Dikembe Mutombo), and Jeet Kune Do-slash-scholarly sociology (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). It makes sense that the NBA would also be the league that produces the best athlete-slash-rapper. Anyway, it would seem that way. But also there's Shaq.

When Shaquille O'Neal released Shaq Diesel in 1993 it was considered a novelty record. And it's not really anything spectacular by the standards of '93-'94 hip-hop, the most ridiculously fertile moment in the genre's history. Still, Shaq sounded more like he belonged in EPMD's Hit Squad than the Chicago Bears Shufflin' Crew, and he wound up going platinum with an album released two weeks before Enter the Wu-Tang and Midnight Marauders. For someone whose Allmusic page pegs him as "similar to" Deion Sanders, Ron Artest, and Def Jef, Shaq's commercial success as a rapper was impossible to discount.

With Shaq's mic skills at least somewhat legitimized, nearly a dozen other NBA players signed on for B-Ball's Best Kept Secret. The compilation's title feels technically inaccurate—circa 1994, that honorific would probably refer to the exact reasons Michael Jordan retired, or just how fixed the NBA Draft lottery really is. But this record also seems, with the perspective of the 21 years since it was released, like an artifact of a vanished world. On B-Ball's Best Kept Secret, superstars and journeymen are given equal merit—come for the Shaq, stay for the Cedric Ceballos—and a chance to be passed the mic by Diamond D.

It's a pretty unfocused collection in a lot of respects. With beats that careen between Cali g-funk and hardcore NYC boom-bap, the album scans like a super-low-stakes echo of the coast beefs of the mid-'90s. And individual star power is less a selling point than the ambitious attempt to seamlessly tie hip-hop to basketball; this is a bit less forced than when Stephen Colbert did it, but not by much. It's hard to imagine anyone picking up the record due to a passionate urge to find out how hard Chris Mills can rock a mic, or in search of namedrops more esoteric than Phife's Scott Skiles shoutout on A Tribe Called Quest's "The Infamous Date Rape." Since B-Ball's Best Kept Secret didn't even go gold during the peak years of double-diamond record sales, maybe we could just stop at "it's hard to imagine anyone picking this up."

In the sense that most aspiring MCs tend to stick with what they know, you will not be surprised to learn that most of these basketball player's lyrics remind listeners that the person rapping is a basketball player. Usually this just means either rhyming about how good you are at basketball—Oakland native and shit-talk titan Gary Payton affects a good-enough Too $hort flow on "Livin' Legal and Large" on some "look how much money I'm making by being a great point guard" boasts—or using it as a strained metaphor for life's travails, as the late Malik Sealy does on "Lost in the Sauce," which includes the unfortunate and unforgettable couplet "life's just one big jump shot/you're either on or you might be off." The closest you get to a player refusing to coast on his athletic rep is Dana Barros on "Check It," which finds the three-point gunner flowing like a lost member of Lords of the Underground and going on an MC shout-out spree—"on and on and on it don't stop/Goin' straight to Mecca with C.L. and Pete Rock"—that makes his track an exact performative inversion of Kurtis Blow's "Basketball".

The challenge, as the record goes on, becomes figuring out which is more retrospectively cringeworthy: when an underachieving disappointment attempts to immortalize his untapped bonafides through his lyrics, or when a marquee star with a near-20-year career absolutely embarrasses himself early on. Authorial bias is going to come into play here when discussing the former: I admit that it's hard, as a Minnesota-based sports fan, to listen to J.R. Rider's "Funk in the Trunk" without feeling kind of miserable about how that whole situation panned out. So it carries over in listening to his "Funk in the Trunk" that what could've been the hardest track on the collection is damaged by a stilted, mush-mouthed flow. He could've tapped into something interesting if he actually worked at it. But everyone that cares about the Wolves is familiar with that thought.

On the other side of the scale, Jason Kidd's "What the Kidd Did" tries to position the Mavs/Suns/Nets playmaking icon as a creator of lowrider anthems worthy of a guest spot—and ghostwritten verses—from Digital Underground's Money B. But along with some tryhard similes—"At St. Joe's the hoes treated me different/But I was good on the dribble like an infant"—the future Hall of Famer sounds like Warren G with a mouth full of Cheetos and a belly full of NyQuil. (As it turns out, the distinctly musically uninclined Kidd wound up on the album mostly as a chance to hang out with fellow Oakland-raised players Payton and Brian Shaw.) Kidd stuck around the game long enough, and got good enough, that his contribution to B-Ball's Best Kept Secret dogged him as a comedy footnote twenty years later.

And yet this comp is not actually terrible, and certainly never achieves the level of mortifying cornballery that its goofball poetry-slam intro hints at. (Since said intro is titled "Hip Hop Basketball Genie," maybe we can pin its bigger crimes on potentially inspiring 1996's Shaq-vehicle Kazaam.) Even if some of the baller/MCs are kind of stilted and uninspired, there are enough strong attempts at parlaying some fun side hobbies into something more.

Check out Shaw's "Anything Can Happen," which incorporates some harrowing autobio moments like the loss of his parents and sister in a car accident into a deeper, more moving lost-ones anthem than anybody has any right to expect from a ballplayers-who-rap novelty album. And B-Ball's Best Kept Secret's best-kept secret is that the beats are almost uniformly excellent, with Bay Area icon Ant Banks's ruminative Minimoog creep giving added weight to "Anything Can Happen" and Diamond D's D.I.T.C. banger "Ya Don't Stop" making Barros and Ceballos sound like convincing cohorts of Brand Nubian.

Those two cuts alone make B-Ball's Best Kept Secret worth far more than the penny plus shipping that it costs through Amazon, and if you throw in "Check It," you can hear a pretty good beat from the dude Tribe wrote "Luck of Lucien" about. Oh yeah, and Shaq's on this one, too, but it's a track ("1-2 Check") that came out on Shaq Fu - Da Return literally one week earlier. Long live the eight-day golden age of hoop-rap.