LEAGUES News
50 Cent surprised by reaction to 1st pitch: 'This is never going away'
Had 50 Cent known people would still be talking about his ceremonial first pitch nearly four years later, he might have reconsidered taking the mound.
"Listen, no one warned me," the rapper and actor, who's real name is Curtis Jackson, told Neil Best of Newsday. "No one said: 'Risk versus reward!' I would have kept my (expletive) in the stands. This is never going away."
The infamous pitch happened on May 27, 2014 at Citi Field while Jackson was promoting his fifth studio album, "Animal Ambition."
Jackson has kept a sense of humor about it, though.
"They have baseball cards with me throwing the pitch - real baseball cards that they made!" he said. "I go, 'Wait a minute: Who cleared this?!' Whenever baseball comes up, there is no one worse than me, as far as throwing out a pitch."
As for what went wrong, Jackson says he got too amped up.
"I'm like, this is what happens when the fanfare and the energy of the people is involved and you start trying to get fancy and try to throw the ball harder than you have to," he said. "It just was the worst pitch ever ... I had pitched before. I rehearsed. I practiced. I threw the ball a little bit.
"I was throwing like, 'Oh, man, I'm about to throw a strike, a hundred miles an hour.' But that (expletive) damn near killed a cameraman!"
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