Juice prides himself on being part of hip hop history, and rightly so. He played mental games with Eminem, introduced him to Wendy Day, and shared brotherhood with his opponents before a Rap Olympics competition. It was real hip hop underground.
Juice talked about this page of hip hop history in his interview with 247HH. He presented a slightly different version of events around the Rap Olympics, but his account is fascinating and full of vivid details:
It started out in Cincinnati when I battled Eminem. I was fortunate enough to beat him. After I beat him, Wendy Day called me and told me she was doing a Rap Olympics competition, and I told her about Eminem. She was like, “Who is he?” I’m like, “He’s the coldest rapper I’ve ever heard. We should bring him to LA”. When she got us the hotel room, me, him and Thirstin [Howl] were staying a room away from each other. So, I’m in LA for the Rap Olympics. It’s Wendy Day’s event. Wendy Day is a savant visionary who owns a company called Rap Coalition, and she was the sole engineer of this Rap Olympics competition. She got Thirstin Howl, Eminem, me, Kwest Tha Madd Lad and Wordsworth, and she got us all hotel rooms in LA. We were all staying by each other, cyphering. Thirstin Howl had some girls with their kids and a hot plate, cooking chicken braiding people’s hair. It was a crazy time. We ended up giving Eminem’s demo tape to a friend of ours named Evan, who was producing for Interscope at the time, and Evan gave the tape to Jimmy [Iovine]. Apparently, Jimmy had already got the tape from somewhere, and when he saw it twice, he was like, “Wait a minute, I gotta really look at this tape”. That’s basically how it happened. Then we all went to the Wake Up show because I was gonna go anyway.
When I first met Eminem, I met him in Cincinnati. And in Cincinnati, he was a brash young dude who had never lost a battle. He was like, “If we battle, it’s gonna be ugly”. We was at the bar, and I ordered three Heinekens, and I gave him two. And he’s like, “Why’d you give me two Heinekens?” I’m like, “You are M&M, there’s one for both of you”. So, the mental game started there. But I knew he was as good as me, possibly better. But I felt like I had enough to pull it off if we went head-to-head.
I never saw what would happen for him because I never saw him getting a record deal because what we did was underground. We never did it for that. I never thought we’d go to LA, and then Dr. Dre, of all people, would hit him and have Jimmy behind it. And then, with Jimmy behind it, it would blow up. And then it would blow up to a level bigger than anybody else, even Snoop [Dogg]. And then be the number one dude in the world. I never could have thought that. I never thought I was intertwined in that. I have a rap line where I say, “They will never get sick of me, this is hickory smoked. I rap just to be soaked in different histories”. I just did it for the history, for the sake of it. I just wanted to be part of the history, but now I’m actually part of the history, and only now people are starting to understand how I was part of that history and why. How I was good enough to do that and why to this day, is still that way. So I’m blessed for it.
Eminem pays Juice respect until this day. Most recently, in his interview on Mike Tyson’s podcast, Eminem said again that it was not a tragedy to lose to Juice because Juice is that good.
