Juelz Santana made an appearance on the Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson podcast, and asked the boxer to help explain an awkward clip from 2003.
“I need to pull this up because I got Mike here … I need to justify this,” Santana said at the 35:50 mark of the video above.
The video he pulled up shows Tyson meeting with Santana when he appears to grab the rapper and raise up his arm a little while gassing him up. “This our lil man on the scene right here,” Tyson can be heard saying in the clip as they posed for a photo.
“One day we was with Cam… I always get like, crucified on the internet when this clip is posted. Mike grabbed my arm or something and put my arm up, and it was like, ‘Damn, Mike pressed you,” Santana said of the clip. Tyson then clarified that he never intended for the moment to come off that way, but he did joke, “You must have been 12 years old back then.”
When they stumble across the clip, Santana throws up his arms when he reads that the clip is described as Mike “manhandling” him. “We gotta fix this shit, Mike,” he laughed. “Look at Mike, man! … What did I do, Mike?!” When pressed for an explanation, Mike replied, “I was saying, ‘Tell all those n****s you the man.’”
Santana added, “We got it clear, Mike was not pressing me, he was trying to get me to tell y’all n***as I’m the man!” He also said that the clip has followed him around for years and will always pop up “somewhere and somebody making some kind of joke.”
Around the 45-minute mark of the interview, Santana also revealed that he was close to doing a project with Jeezy but it never came together.
“Jeezy kinda, he took off and he got real big, I don’t wanna say he got like… I mean, basically, the mixtape didn’t happen. Me and Jeezy did about four records then he kinda got real big, whatever, we didn’t do the mixtape,” he said, noting it would have been titled Best of Both Hoods. Because the plans fell apart, it led to his friendship with Lil Wayne, with whom he made an unreleased mixtape. “Wayne called me up and said, ‘Yo, what’s up with the tape you supposed to be doing with Jeezy?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, man. Jeezy’s moving, he’s doing a lot of things right now,’” he explained.
It was at this point that Wayne suggested they do their own project. “We went on tour and me and Wayne just got super close, we did a bunch of records on tour,” Santana continued. “Wayne is a studio rat, so after the shows Wayne always had the studio booked. Me and him would go to the studio, record, we recorded so much music. We just became super close, and that’s been my brother ever since.”
Watch the full interview with Juelz Santana and Mike Tyson above.