Being known as big and cuddly is not how Knight rose to fame. Instead he is best known for helping promote West Coast rap in a field that had long been dominated by East Coast artistsand elevating an East Coast/West Coast hip-hop feud to a level that many still hold accountable for the deaths of two of the genre’s biggest stars.
How the co-founder of Death Row Records — who is being held in connection with one’s man death in an alleged purposeful hit-and-run — came to be considered such a tough guy is equal parts legend and rap sheet.
Born in Compton, California, as the youngest of three children and the only son, Knight had sports ability and size, earning a football scholarship to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His former coach told the Las Vegas Sun in 1996 that Knight was a good kid.
“He wasn’t a problem guy at all,” said Wayne Nunnely, who was school’s head coach in 1986 when Knight played there and who later went to work for the New Orleans Saints. “You didn’t really see that street roughness about him.”
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His legal issues and the departure of many of his top acts resulted in Knight’s label filing for bankruptcy in 2006.
In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2013 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Snoop’s debut album, “Doggystyle,” Knight portrayed his label as a trailblazer. “Death Row wasn’t only a black-owned record label, Death Row was pretty much the only American-owned record label,” he said. “Everything else was either Sony or some other thing.
“It became the blueprint for any label that’s out, including the majors,” he said. “I was the first person doing 360-degree deals with all the artists; the majors would tell the artists, ‘It’s the worst piece of s**t deal in the world, don’t go for it.’ And now they’re doing it.”
