Athletes - Suge Knight

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	Athletes - Suge Knight

Marion Knight Jr., a.k.a Sugar Bear, Suge (pronounced Shoug) Knight, b. April 19, 1965, in Compton, California, is an entrepreneur in the hip hop music industry and co-founder of Death Row Records with Dr. Dre. The record label rose to dominate the charts after Dr. Dre's breakthrough success The Chronic in 1992. After several years of outstanding chart success for artists including Snoop Doggy Dogg, Tupac Shakur, Tha Dogg Pound and at one time even MC Hammer, Death Row Records disintegrated after Knight's incarceration on parole violation charges in 1996.

Early life

Knight's father was a custodian and his mother was a schoolteacher. He went to UNLV on a sports scholarship from 1985 to 1987. It was during his UNLV football playing days that he was dubbed Suge, short for Sugar Bear. It was a fellow team mate dubbed Cuspus Crispy that first started to call him by his now present moniker. After setting up operations in Las Vegas he moved back to L.A. and played football as a replacement player for the Los Angeles Rams during the NFL strike. He then retired from professional sports and decided to become a bodyguard for musicians like Bobby Brown, when, according to him, he learned that the key to artistic and financial freedom is owning your masters.

Accusations of violence

A physically very large man, standing 6 feet and 4 inches (1.93 m) tall, Knight has been accused of acts of violence including forcing business rivals to drink urine and having extensive ties to street gangs, specifically the Bloods. Rapper Vanilla Ice has accused Knight of dangling him out of a window of a high-rise building several stories up. Ice claims that he was forced to agree to grant him a majority of Ice's own royalties from his signature hit "Ice Ice Baby", which a friend of Suge's claimed he had written. Even though Suge Knight had business relations with him, Ice later denied the whole balcony story or has told a toned-down version.

Alleged involvement in murder

Knight has frequently been implicated in the murder of Death Row artist Tupac Shakur and his business rival The Notorious B.I.G. In 2002, British documentarian Nick Broomfield made a film called Biggie & Tupac, which explored the theory that Suge masterminded Tupac's killing because he was planning on leaving Death Row and wanted to retain his unreleased tapes and royalties, and that Biggie's murder was a cover-up to make Shakur's death look like part of an East Coast-West Coast conflict. Suge has vehemently denied this on several occasions, calling Tupac his "brother". Whilst in the film Broomfield never explicitly accuses Suge himself, when asked "Who killed Tupac?" in a BBC Radio interview dated March 7, 2005, Broomfield stated "The big guy next to him in the car...Suge Knight." A former policeman who investigated Biggie's murder testified that he had been told that Knight confessed to arranging it. Of course, a potential criticism of this theory relates to the fact that Suge Knight was also hit with a glancing bullet (some say it was only a glass fragment) wound to the side of his head in the 1996 shooting that ended Tupac Shakur's life -- the effect that this fact has on the validity of the theory is debatable.

Further time in prison

In 2001, Suge Knight was released from prison and tried to re-start his label by signing new artists such as Crooked I, Tha Realist, Eastwood, and, under the pseudonym "N.I.N.A.", the late Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes of TLC, before her untimely death in a car accident in 2002. However, in December 2002 he was jailed again for violating his probation by associating with gang members. After his release, he was arrested and jailed yet again in 2003, for assaulting parking lot attendant Mehdi Lazrak, even though Lazrak was punched in the back of the head and was admittedly unable to identify the perpetrator.

Knight was released on April 23, 2004. Original artist Kurupt is now the label's headliner, and his new LP Against the Grain is currently on hiatus. After his release, Knight announced Death Row Records would join with other labels to produce a Christmas hip-hop album to benefit families of soldiers serving in Iraq. However, as of early 2006, no such album has been released, despite a gap of nearly two years from the time of the announcement.

Recent history

Suge claims to be developing an autobiography entitled "American Dream/American Nightmare". However, a targeted release date of fourth-quarter 2005 came and went with no biography being released. He has hinted that he will describe his experiences as a bodyguard and rap impresario and relate stories about John F. Kennedy, Jr., Jennifer Lopez, and the "scoop" on Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, as well as his first public statement about the deaths of Tupac and Biggie. Suge also claims to be planning a movie to tell the "real story" of Death Row.

In October 2004, despite having not been formally invited, Suge attended the VIBE Awards -- ostensibly to support Petey Pablo, whom he manages. That night Dr. Dre was to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award. With Suge in the audience, a man approached Dr. Dre shortly before Dre was called up for the award and feigned interest in an autograph before punching Dre. In the resulting scuffle, G-Unit rapper Young Buck stabbed the man. Immediately, stories pointed fingers at Suge, who went on The Late Late Show and insisted he supports Dr. Dre. The man, one Jimmy James Johnson, faces life in prison due to the three strikes law in California, after Dre insisted he be charged. Johnson is now claiming that Suge paid him $5,000 to punch Dre in order to humiliate him before Dre received his Lifetime Achievement Award from Quincy Jones and Snoop Dogg.

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