The escalating feud between Jay Z and Drake has claimed its first collateral damage, as Jay Z shot back on Drake’s suggestion that he eats fondue and caught the sport of lacrosse in the crossfire. There were no survivors.
More specifically, there were survivors, and they wear colorful polo shirts and enjoy the sport of lacrosse—so much that they have already made their displeasure known with Jay Z’s apparent disregard for it. The insult in question came in DJ Khaled’s track “They Don’t Love You No More,” where Jay Z contributed a verse saying, “Haters wanna ball, let me tighten up my drawstring / Wrong sport boy, you know you soft as a lacrosse team.”
All told, it was tantamount to insinuating that Drake wouldn’t know capelin caviar from beluga. Or that his last performance of dressage was not with a warmblood, but rather some farm-broken stock horse. Except in this case, Jay Z made the mistake of referencing lacrosse, a sport fiercely protected by many a roughneck Princetonian.
Now Major League Lacrosse, the most major of leagues lacrosse, has responded with a statement calling Jay Z’s lacrosse familiarity into question. Indeed, given his apparent ignorance, it’s almost as though Jay Z was using “lacrosse team” as some sort of shorthand evoking a rich, privileged upbringing—or even just as an almost-rhyme for “drawstring”—rather than anything based on an intimate knowledge of the sport.