I had the pleasure of speaking to Freeway Ricky Ross about multiple topics.
Ross is a man of many talents who turned his life around after being incarcerated for drugs in the late 90s. Since 2009 he has been involved with multiple successful ventures, and as you know, many have used his life story to enrich themselves. Others have just blatantly stolen his name.
But the first thing we spoke about was why he decided to get into boxing.
I have really been, I really been dabbing in the boxing for about seven years now. I wasn’t really making no noise, going around the fighters, trying to learn the business aspect of it, and seeing what was missing.
One of the things that I know about myself, what I do is I always look for the holes in the line, you know, like a running back, when he runs in line, he has to find out where the gaps are so that he can, uh, fill those gaps in. And that’s pretty much what I was doing.
Well, what I’m going to be doing for fighters, it’s going to be something that nobody’s ever done before for a fighter. I would be helping them with the management, the promotion, and the marketing, but I’ll also be teaching them how to be better people. How to have credit and you know how to do real estate, whatever, whatever other things they want to go into, you know, I’ll be there to assist them in what my guys would be doing, acting the ones who want to do acting.
I’ll be getting them into movies. We have a couple of roles coming up already from my guys. Cause you know, I’m also in the movies and TV as well. My guys will have books, you know, cause I published my own book. I have a publishing company. So there are aspects of this game that nobody else is really doing.
One of the things we spoke about is how his story and his name have been used to make other people rich.
I wanted to know if that was something that bothered him.
I’m watching this TV show Snowfall right now. I started a new podcast called after the Snow. And it’s about a TV show that literally stole my story.
I mean we were very happy, we were excited. We were to the point where we would almost say that God had blessed us to sell drugs and, you know, anything that God blessed you to do.
You are absolutely overwhelmed, and that’s how we felt when we were selling drugs, that we have been blessed to become millionaires and multimillionaires at such a young age. And, and at one time, we didn’t feel like we may not be anything in life. So we were anything but angry. And, and on this TV show, as you look at it, you see a bunch of angry, young black men, uh, walking around with high power weapons and literally just killing people at will.
And it was anything but. We need to change that scenario because that’s not how we live. Usually, when somebody in the neighborhood gets killed, it is for a reason. It wasn’t just because of somebody else’s turf or stepped on their shoe.
Those are usually not the cases. Those stories need to be told to rectify some of the negativity that we get from the news.
I also asked him about the rappers that are using his name and story very freely.
Ross was pretty chill about it, but you could tell he felt like he had been slighted.
Well, you know, it, it’s definitely strange that people would, would do something like that, you know?
That stems back from even slavery, you know, in slavery, we weren’t allowed to, to own our names, uh, our creations or anything. Yeah, that we have done, we weren’t allowed to have intellectual properties, and it’s kind of the same way today. It’s still very hard for us to hold on to intellectual properties, you know, in the show business, the money is key.
You know, whoever puts the money up at the end of the day, rules, the project, and what’s happening. There are so many black people who go in for a check. You know, they pretty much do whatever the studio is them to do. When somebody comes along, you know, like me who don’t really care about money, you know, I’m not money-driven.
Also, if people really want to know more about me too, they should go and pick up the magazine LA magazine, 2013, the story was called Rick Ross. And also the Esquire magazine, 80th anniversary.
A lot of people don’t know it. Esquire voted my story the most significant story in the past 80 years. And it’s an article that people should definitely read. Thank you again.
Definitely check out those stories if you want to know the real Ricky Ross.
