In the past week, Snoop Dogg has carried the Olympic torch through Saint-Denis, grappled with American judokas as they prepared for battle and jousted with the country’s fencers.
He sat with Meghan Dressel and her infant son August as they cheered her husband Caeleb to victory in the 4x100m freestyle swimming, and then turned up at the gymnastics wearing a T-shirt with Simone Biles’s face emblazoned on the front.
On the lucrative NBC dime, he’s flitting around Paris, cast in a role somewhere between official national mascot, cornrowed lucky charm, and the rapper who used to wonder, “Where the hoes, where the hoes, where the hoes at?”
If it would be difficult to find anybody in France knocking more fun out of these Games just now, Dogg’s ubiquity on American television underlines yet again his remarkable personal transformation.
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A former pimp and jailbird who defeated a murder charge and, in song, toasted his past life as a gangbanger with the Rollin’ 20s Crips in Long Beach, California, he has somehow evolved into the country’s favourite eccentric stoner uncle. The one who used to sneak out into the garden during family gatherings for a discrete toke. The Zelig-type character who wasn’t even lying when he boasted of being banned from certain countries over the years.
“Snoop Dogg has filled the Muhammad Ali space in beloved-by-everyone status,” tweeted the American sportswriter Jeff Pearlman above a photograph of the creator of “Drop it like it’s hot” hanging with Billie Jean King in France the other day. “It’s . . . amazing.”
He’s taken a long and winding road from rapping, “We got weed, hoes, drink, and bank, F**k the police, n**ga, pledge with the tank . . .” to adeptly performing the functions of glad-handling sporting ambassador and mischievous on-camera goofball. But he pulls it off with a certain élan.
Desperately seeking to enliven its excessively saccharine, painfully soap operatic take on the Olympics, NBC are only the latest corporation to realise Snoop Dogg lends instant street cred, humour, and perfectly pitched commentary. Witness his on-air reaction to sprinter Noah Lyles’s live interview during the interminable opening ceremony.
“You know Noah stays smooth as a broom, dipped and whipped, smooth as a booty,” said Dogg, “so you know he’s gonna be fresh to death, ya dig?”
Hardly the gangster rap lyrics that had him sharing a microphone and falling out with Tupac Shakur back in the day but easily the most entertaining part of a typical NBC dullfest.
The enduring popularity of his shtick is why the one-time street hustler has fronted a Chrysler advertising campaign, been the face of Corona beer, and co-hosted a television show with his unlikely buddy, the interior design and lifestyle maven Martha Stewart. Not to mention being bestselling author of From Crook to Cook: Platinum Recipes from Tha Boss Dogg’s Kitchen. Whatever he’s flogging people are buying.
This December, his hugely successful spirits company will sponsor one of the showcase end of season college gridiron games. A prestigious fixture previously known as “The Arizona Bowl” will, with a nod to one of his greatest hits, become “The Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl Presented by Gin & Juice By Dre and Snoop”. No better man to merge hip-hop and sport.
Like many Americans who grew up in the 1970s, he first fell in love with football following the fabled Pittsburgh Steelers and, aside from co-headlining the star-studded Super Bowl LVI half-time show alongside Dre, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, and Mary J Blige, he founded the Snoop Football League for at-risk kids in Los Angeles nearly 20 years ago.
Offering ex-gang members jobs running the operation, the children compete to play in the annual Snooper Bowl, and to date 12 alumni have made it all the way to the NFL from there.
“The Snoop Dogg league was super instrumental in CJ ‘s journey,” said Kimberly Stroud, mother of the Houston Texans’ quarterback and 2023 Rookie of the Year.
“It was a village that raised CJ Stroud, and it wasn’t just his mother. It was mainly God, but He put people on our path to help CJ along his journey. The Snoop Dogg league was one of those.”
Cordell Broadus, one of his own sons, was recruited to play wide receiver by UCLA before opting to pursue a career in music instead. He is credited with stoking his father’s interest in esports, via FaZe Clan, and lately their own outfit, Death Row Games.
Credited by serious cultural historians with making oversized hockey jerseys fashionable by donning them in his videos back in the 1990s, Snoop Dogg was part of a consortium that recently tried to pay $1billion to buy the Ottawa Senators of the NHL, a sport that also features him as a guest commentator option in its video games.
On tours of Britain, he’s been pictured in the colours of Norwich City and Burnley, learned quickly about the nature of rivalries when he wore a Manchester United shirt swinging through Liverpool, and declared “Celtic are my boys” after being gifted a green and white hoops number in 2005.
Given he then wore a Feyenoord shirt while performing in Rotterdam the same night the Dutch side took on the Glasgow club, there’s plenty of suspicion his perceived loyalty, like his sudden and quite hilarious passion for Olympic badminton, is a crowd-pleasing, commercial decision designed to amplify the brand.
Nuthin’ but a G Thang. Apparently.
