Why Fat Joe refused to fight 50 Cent for $10 million in the 2000s
While Fat Joe and 50 Cent have squashed their beef in recent years, there can be no hiding how vicious it once was. The two men despised each other throughout the 2000s, and their mutual hatred once raised the prospect of them fighting in the boxing ring.
Joe spoke about this potential duel with 50 back in 2020, shortly after the middle-aged boxers Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr had taken each other on in a fight billed as Lockdown Knockdown. The bout, which ended in a split draw, was marketed alongside another fight between the YouTuber Jake Paul and the former NBA player Nate Robinson.
Paul secured a knockout victory against Robinson, which led to a fair amount of mockery online at the latter’s expense. Fat Joe, however, wasn’t having it, calling out people for not holding enough respect for Robinson.
Addressing viewers and listeners of his Fat Joe Show podcast, Joe challenged Robinson’s critics. He asked how many of them would “have the heart to go in the ring” during a fight watched by so many people.
“Basically, you wouldn’t do the shit yourself,” he said, speaking to the online critics. “I wouldn’t do it.”
It was at this point that he revealed that he once turned down a whopping $10 million to go up against his old rival 50 in the ring. He wouldn’t do it, and he admitted that it was because he wouldn’t have been able to handle the pressure of such an occasion.
“I’m not scared of 50,” he claimed. “I’d fight him for free at the time! But to get knocked out, maybe, on TV?”
Joe wasn’t comfortable with that sort of stress, and he believed very few other people out there would be. That’s why he was backing Robinson, despite his heavy defeat to Paul. The fact that he’d decided to face the pressure by stepping into the ring was worthy of respect in its own right.
It’s probably for the best that such a spectacle as 50 Cent vs Fat Joe never came to pass. Had one of the rappers been knocked out by the other, would they have ever been able to bury the hatchet, as they ultimately have done in recent years? The pair apparently get on famously well today, but a very public boxing match may well have made that impossible.