In this media landscape, you see a lot of people trying to copy the aesthetic of the culture. They use the slang, they wear the sneakers, and they try to buy their way into the room. But you can’t manufacture a foundation that was built from the ground up when you were just a kid. Before the millions of streams, before the television lights, and long before I was breaking national NBA news as an independent CEO, I was a 12-year-old kid with a microphone, making history right in the heart of Northern New Jersey.
Back in 1997, while most kids my age were trying to figure out middle school, I beat out hundreds of applicants to become the host of Nets Slammin’ Planet, the official kids’ radio show for the New Jersey Nets.
When you start that early, your classroom isn’t just a building with a chalkboard—it’s the Continental Airlines Arena. Under the guidance of our executive producer, Chris Carrino, and sitting alongside guys like Evan Roberts and Albert King, I wasn’t just doing a “cute kid’s show.” I was doing real, unadulterated journalism. I was running around the floor, holding a live mic for Radio AAHS, and walking directly into NBA locker rooms. At 12 years old, I was looking up at giants like Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Allen Iverson, and Keith Van Horn, asking the real questions. I was watching legends like Stephen A. Smith and Chris Broussard lock in on their beats, studying how they moved, how they talked, and how they commanded a room.
That wasn’t just a gig; it was a masterclass that laid the blueprint for the rest of my life. My work from that era was catching eyes on Fox Sports and NBA Inside Stuff with Ahmad Rashad. But the biggest lesson I learned from the New Jersey Nets wasn’t just how to get the quote—it was how to value the history.
Years down the line, long after my time hosting the show ended, the Nets packed up, went through major corporate ownership face-lifts, changed their colors, and moved across the bridge to become the Brooklyn Nets. Just like that, the old archives, the old school radio files, and the digital history of that late-90s era got buried under corporate rebranding. If you look for those old broadcasts online today, the corporate links are dead and the server files are gone.
But if you know anything about Scoop B, you know I’ve always been a hoarder of the history.
Decades after those broadcast lights went down in East Rutherford, I went digging through my childhood bedroom in West Orange. Inside an old sneaker box, tucked away on dusty cassette tapes, were my original master recordings from Nets Slammin’ Planet. My interviews with Kendall Gill, Jayson Williams, and Dikembe Mutombo hadn’t vanished into a corporate black hole—they were sitting right there in my hands.
Those raw, archival cassette tapes became the literal foundation of Scoop B Radio. When I soft-launched the network years later, the very first episode featured “Vault Content”—a 1997 interview I did with NBA veteran J.R. Reid when I was just a kid. I didn’t need a network’s permission to look back, and I didn’t need a corporate server to validate my history. I had the masters.
That’s the difference between a journalist who borrows a platform and a creator who owns their legacy. The franchises can change cities, the team logos can get redesigned, and the corporate servers can wipe out the past, but they can never delete the hustle. My time with the New Jersey Nets proved that I was built for this game from day one—and keeping those tapes ensured that the kid who started in the locker room would grow up to own the whole network.
