Touré played one-on-one basketball with Prince at Paisley Park, which was glorious. The purple man had game. He shot, moved, and dribbled like a ballplayer. Eventually one on one morphed into two on two with Touré and Prince on the same team. One problem. This was during Prince’s symbol era when his name wasn’t Prince, it was an unpronounceable symbol. So what do you do when you pass the ball to Prince, and he doesn’t see it coming, and it’s heading right for his nose? You’re not supposed to say “Prince,” but you don’t want your two-on-two to end with him getting a bloody nose, but they told you absolutely, positively never call him Prince but you don’t know anything else to call him so you yell out… Prince! Chaos ensues.
Full transcript below.
ANNOUNCER [00:00:00] You are now listening to theGrio’s Black Podcast Network. Black Culture Amplified.
TOURE [00:00:05] I’m Touré. Star Stories is brought to you by theGrio Black Podcast Network. Home of the Blackest Questions with Dr. Chrissy Greer and Dear Culture with Panama Jackson. This episode of Star Stories is about Prince.
TOURE [00:00:24] It was like a dream, but it was real. I was in Paisley Park playing basketball with Prince, and I was passing him the Rock because we were teammates, and he was driving to the hole like, Wait, wait, wait, let me go back, because I did play basketball with Prince at Paisley Park. And that’s an incredible story. But the reason why that happened is that in all my stories, I tried to get behind the mask so I can uncover who you really are. And the first time I interviewed Prince, he had his mask all the way on, and the interview was terrible. This is about the time I played basketball with Prince and almost hit him in the nose. The year was 1998, and Prince had summoned a horde of journalists to Paisley to interview him. But I was the only one who had a cover story, which meant I needed more than a nice little interview. I needed a longer interview that would give me a lot of good quotes and time to hang out with him so that I can have anecdotes and color and stuff. So I’m in a little recording studio waiting for my turn to interview Prince and watching each of the other journalists go upstairs and interview him and come back with this smile, and this glow like they just met Jesus Christ. So I’m like, okay, all right, this should be good. But when my turn came, and I got up there in this white conference room and started talking with Prince. As I said, it’s terrible. Don’t get me wrong; Prince was funny and brilliant and fun to talk to. We talked about the clothes he was wearing and Michael Jordan with the Bulls. But mostly, Prince stuck to his talking points. He wanted to talk about the importance of owning your masters and taking control of your music. That was critical to him. It was the main and really only thing he wanted to talk about. He wouldn’t talk about his music, only the business around it. He was then in the midst of a huge fight with his label, which had led him to write “Slave” on his face to suggest that his massive recording contract, which paid him millions, wasn’t fair treatment. And it wasn’t. No artist is paid fairly, but he was a long way from being a slave. But in an attempt to screw with the labels, he had changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, as if they owned the music made by Prince and not whatever his name was now. But in all of this, Prince was wearing a mask and not letting me see his real self. My mission as a journalist doing a major profile is to get you to take your mask off so we can get down to who you really are. Prince was giving me a performance of Prince. But who was he, really? I walked out of our interview crestfallen. I’d gotten nothing real. I asked the publicist if I could email him a few questions. She said okay. I emailed him ten questions, and a few days later.
AOL [00:03:48] You got mail.
TOURE [00:03:50] I got an email back. Prince had answered seven of my questions, and he’d used the letter U for you in the letter I for e-y-e. So I felt like I was really talking to him. My last question was, Will you play basketball with me? To that, he had written, “Any time, brother. ” Any time. Brother. Really? I wasn’t about to let that pass. I got on the next flight back to Minneapolis with a basketball in my bag. But I had no idea what I was stepping into. I thought basketball was something Prince had done way back in high school. I didn’t realize he was out here playing ball all the time. I mean, he was making music. 23 to 24 hours a day. But he was also squeezing in a little hoop time whenever he could because he loved the game. So when asking him to play, I had unwittingly hit his sweet spot. He was way more interested in playing ball than in interviewing. So I’m at the photo shoot for my story, and I’m standing there holding my balls saying, You said any time was up. I was trying to be cool, but I was kind of like a little brother saying, Hey, you said you’d play with me. What’s up? Then Prince says something to someone off to the side. Prince is focused on the camera, and he was posing and beaming and cracking jokes. But then he turned to an assistant and said, Ask them to clear out in the back to play basketball. What? Black baby Jesus. Hold me tight. Because, Lord, I cannot stand. Did Prince just say we were going to play basketball? See, kids dreams do come true.
ANNOUNCER [00:05:40] Thank you for listening to Star Stories with Toure. If you like the show, you’ll love the animated version of the series. Watch the adult cartoon series Star Stories with Toure at theGrio.com or the Grio Black Podcast Network’s YouTube channel. You’ll find the video links in the description section of this episode.
TOURE [00:05:57] Did Prince just say we were going to play basketball? See, kids dreams do come true. So we go around the corner, and there’s a hoop. Oh, my God, This is happening. And there’s a box of sneakers, a little brown cardboard box with a bunch of sneakers piled in, just like any one might have. He pulls out some Nike Air Force high tops, white with a red swoosh, and he puts them on with his black bell-bottom pants and his black scoop neck top. And now we are both one on one with Prince. Oh, my God. Later on, his manager told me Prince is not a person who finds it easy to share himself. He’s always guarded. Someone else told me he’s more comfortable holding a guitar and standing in front of thousands of people than he is talking to one person. But when we started playing ball, I saw the mask come off. As soon as he started dribbling, he was no longer the reserved and too-cool-for-school dude he’d been during our interview. He was open. The first time he checked the ball, he made a face like I’m a kick your ass. And then he started knifing around the court, moving quickly, dribbling fast, sliding under my arm to snatch rebounds. He played like one of those darting little guys you have to keep your eye on every second. Blink, and he’s run past you. Lose control of your dribble for a second, and he’s stolen the ball. Prince is a baller. When he shot, his form look like Steph Curry’s. I’m not saying he shot that well. I’m saying he had good classic form. So after a while, our one-and-one turned into two on two. Me and Prince against my photographer and his keyboardist, Morris Hayes. I’m playing basketball with Prince. I can’t. Prince took over immediately. Making great passes, moving without the ball, slicing through the defense for great layups. It was a close game, but he played with confidence and nailed a lot of shots, and sank the jump shot that gave us the win. But that was not the most memorable moment of the day. Remember I said Prince back then had changed his name to a symbol, and there was no way to pronounce the symbol. And we weren’t supposed to call him Prince.
TOURE [00:08:25] Guests to Paisley Park were specifically told don’t call him Prince. Media called him the artist formerly known as Prince. But if you were in his presence and you had to call him. What were you supposed to say? We weren’t told. We were just told, whatever you do, don’t call in Prince. But what if you need to get his attention in a flash? Like, for example, you’re playing two on two basketball with him, and you have the ball, and you see him make a cut that leaves his defenders so confused, and suddenly Prince is wide open. Let’s say you noticed that, and you pass the ball to him quickly. So you pass the ball right toward Prince’s face, but he doesn’t know it’s coming. He doesn’t see it coming. So a basketball that you threw is heading toward his nose, and he doesn’t know it’s coming. What do you do? You might freak out, and that would be a very reasonable response. But there’s no time for that. We’ve got to do something. Well, what I did was yell out Prince because I was not going to be the one who broke his nose. No, not me. But after I said the first syllable of Prince, I thought, Oh, my God, calling him Prince will get us kicked out of here entirely. So I grabbed my mouth like I was trying to grab the words and push them back into my mouth. So the ball flew past his head and went out of bounds. Didn’t hit him. Phew. He joked off into the corner to get it. And when he came back, he was kind of pointing at me and giggling. I had never seen him giggle. The mask was totally off. I said, What’s so funny? He pointed at me and said, “You didn’t know what to call me.” And he was elated that he’d put me in a weird spot where I didn’t know what to do. He didn’t really care if you called him Prince. He was really just messing with the record label. But I had gotten to see The Real Prince, someone who was actually okay with being called Prince. Someone who is cool, someone who’s competitive. Someone who was a jokester, someone who’s athletic, someone who was a shit talker, and someone who loves to battle and loves to win. I’d gotten to the Real Prince, and it felt good to pull away the mask for a minute and see the real man. You can’t write a good cover story about someone if you don’t know who they really are. You can’t know who someone really is until you can see behind the mask.
TOURE [00:11:15] Star Stories is brought to you by theGrio Black Podcast Network, home of theGrio Daily with Michael Harriot and Writing Black with Maiysha Kai. Do you like this Star Stories episode? Check out the one about Jay Z. Remember to rate and review. It does matter. I’m Toure.
Maiysha Kai [00:11:40] We started this podcast to talk about not just what Black writers write about but how.
Guest Ayana Gray [00:11:45] Well, personally, it’s on my bucket list to have one of my books banned. I know that’s probably bad, but I think,
Maiysha Kai [00:11:51] Oh, spicy.
Guest Charlayne Hunter- Gault [00:11:52] They were yelling N-word, Go home.
Maiysha Kai [00:11:54] And I was looking.
Guest Charlayne Hunter- Gault [00:11:55] Around for the N-word because I knew it couldn’t be me because I was the queen telling people to quit this.
Guest Keith Boykin [00:12:00] Mentality of identifying ourselves by our word, to start to live our lives and to redefine the whole concept of how we work and where we work and why we work in the first place.
Guest Missy Copeland [00:12:15] My biggest strength throughout, throughout my career has been having incredible mentors and specifically black women.
Guest Omar Epps [00:12:21] I’ve been writing poetry since I was like eight. Know, I’ve been reading Langston Hughes and James Baldwin and Maya Angelou and so forth and so on since I was like a little kid.
Guest Rhiannon Giddens [00:12:30] Like the banjo was like the black, right? For many, many, many years. Everybody knew because sometimes I’m just doing some that because I just want to do it.
Guest J. Ivy [00:12:43] Honor to be here. Thank you for doing the work that you’re doing with Shining Bright. And we, and like you said, we all keep writing black.
Maiysha Kai [00:12:50] As always, you can find us on the Grio app or wherever you find your podcasts.
