50 Cent and Fat Joe’s feud in the mid 2000s spilled over into an NBA locker room, it has been revealed.
Stephon Marbury and Tim Thomas were New York Knicks teammates for the 2004 and 2005 seasons. Although they were friendly growing up and coming into the league, Thomas siding with G-Unit and Starbury being cool with Joey Crack caused a rift in their relationship.
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Thomas reflected on how 50 and Joe’s beef fractured his friendship with Marbury during a recent appearance on the WKND WRK podcast.
“Me and Steph grew up together, we went to Five Star Basketball camp. I knew his brothers, his mom, his pops. We actually played for Fat Joe with Terror Squad at the Rucker,” the Villanova product explained. “It was really no issues between us at all until 50 and Fat Joe got into it.
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“That’s when me and Steph kinda separated. We was actually teammates at this particular time. It was a lot of different things that transpired between those three years of them beefing. I remember Fat Joe being courtside and Steph showing him love. And I’m looking at them like, ‘Damn, I can’t go over there and say what’s up to him?'”
Watch the clip below.
After appearing in 95 games for the Knicks, Thomas then moved to the Chicago Bulls in 2005 before going on to play for the Phoenix Suns, Los Angeles Clippers and Dallas Mavericks.
However, he would return to the Knicks in the 2008-2009 season when the franchise’s relationship with Marbury soured, resulting in him being shipped out to Boston.
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Fat Joe and 50 Cent’s feud, meanwhile, reached a boiling point in the mid 2000s and their respective crews nearly came to blows backstage at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards.
All is well between the New York rap legends these days, with the beef being long squashed. Joey Crack even made an appearance as a special guest on 50’s Final Lap Tour over the summer.
The G-Unit mogul reflected on his feud with Joe in an interview with Rolling Stone earlier this year, where he expressed regret for dragging the Terror Squad leader into his beef with Ja Rule.
“I was using the same thinking in the very beginning of my career because it’s just the thinking you would use in the environment. If anybody went next to Ja Rule, I’d jump on the person who featured with them, anybody who was faintly near them, ’cause I put him on life support and you wanna go resuscitate him … so that energy, later you look at it and you go, ‘I was buggin,'” he said.
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“Fat Joe, his issues, I would see him a little uncomfortable with the success I was having, and I interpreted as, ‘He doesn’t like me,’ when he’s really the kind of guy you want to be friends with because he’s loyal to a default,” he added. “He’s so loyal for one record that [Murder Inc.] did with him that we became enemies.”
