Naaman Roosevelt keeps one of his talents under raps

Kevin Glenn could hardly wait to get to his cellphone.

The Saskatchewan Roughriders’ quarterback had just been told that Naaman Roosevelt — a soft-spoken, perpetually smiling receiver with the CFL team — is one of the stars of a rap video that was uploaded to YouTube in 2011

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“I know he enjoys (rap), but I didn’t know he has videos out there,” Glenn said with a hint of incredulity in his voice. “Now I’m going to have to go check the videos out.

“I can see him being that type of guy. But I can also see him being the type of guy who wouldn’t talk about it, either, if it was out there. That’s probably why some of us don’t know about it.”

Roosevelt laughed when he was told that Glenn didn’t have a clue about the receiver’s recording career.

“Only a small few probably know,” Roosevelt said. “The people I hang out with every day probably know. Other than that, I haven’t talked about it in a couple of years now.

“Sometimes I’ll play (my material) in the locker room and they won’t know who it is. It’d be funny to see the reaction of people. They won’t ask, ‘Who is this?’ or anything like that. They’ll just be vibin’ to it. It might not be that bad.”

Roosevelt was one of the Grind Hard Boyz, a football-themed ensemble whose members also included Domonic Cook. The two men went to high school together, attended the University of Buffalo together and were teammates with the NFL’s Buffalo Bills.

Other Bills players at the time — including Stevie Johnson and Marcus Easley — also rapped with Roosevelt and Cook, but the two long-time friends were the driving forces behind the Grind Hard Boyz.

Football ended up being Roosevelt’s ticket to stardom, but rap could have been.

“I’ve probably done it since I was about 12, just playing around with my friends,” said Roosevelt, a 29-year-old product of Buffalo. “After the school year, we used to play around all the time and whenever we got bored or whenever we wanted to do something instead of play sports, we did rap.

“It was just something that everybody did around my neighbourhood. We used to hang around and freestyle when we weren’t playing basketball.”

Growing up, Roosevelt was a big fan of 50 Cent, but the aspiring rapper was equally inspired by his older brother and some of his friends.

“They were really into it and wanted to make CDs and stuff like that,” Roosevelt recalled. “We used to watch them and wanted to be like them. We pretty much just had a love for music.”

Roosevelt played the drums in high school for a short time, but he stopped because, in his words, “I wasn’t very good at it.” Besides, he was more interested in creating his own songs than he was in playing an instrument.

And rap was his preferred method of creation.

“It relieves you,” he said. “You could talk about stuff you were going through, things you saw growing up and stuff you wanted to get off your chest. It was you and the music and you were free at that moment.”

Roosevelt estimated that he has written around 100 rap songs. He and some of his teammates at the University of Buffalo — including Montreal Alouettes receiver Ernest Jackson — did a lot of rapping while with the Bulls, especially during the summertime after completing workouts.

They didn’t shoot many videos in college, but a meeting with a couple of producers resulted in a video for “We On.” The video, which also features former Bulls linebacker Justin Winters, came in at No. 46 on one blogger’s list of the 50 funniest athlete music videos of all-time.

“That’s not bad; as long as we’re not No. 1,” Roosevelt said with a laugh. “I’ll take 46.”

(FYI — “Break It Up,” by former U.S. track star Carl Lewis, came in at No. 1. It’s awful.)

The video of the Grind Hard Boyz’ “Take Off” is much more polished. The duo also can be seen on YouTube performing that song live at a club in Jamestown, N.Y., in November of 2011.

That may have been the last time the Grind Hard Boyz performed. Roosevelt said he hasn’t recorded a song in about six years as other things — most notably football — became his focus.

“I just got a little too busy,” he said. “My friend had a studio at his house and I haven’t got over there too much.

“It’s something I just put off. But I would love to keep doing it. I still write a little bit. If something’s going on or if I feel some type of way, I’ll write it down and keep it there just to have it. If I find a beat or anything, I might just rap to it.”

Roosevelt was Saskatchewan’s leading receiver in 2016 with 76 catches and 1,095 yards despite playing in only 11 games. Through seven games this season, the third-year CFLer again leads the Roughriders in receptions (40) and receiving yards (538).

He’ll look to build on those numbers Friday, when the Roughriders visit the Edmonton Eskimos.

“He has a high football IQ to where you can explain things to him or you can tell him certain things and he can adapt to it,” Glenn said when asked how he developed chemistry with Roosevelt. “Sometimes it’s not as much a quarterback adapting to a receiver as he’s adapting to you, so it makes for a very good relationship.

“He does an awesome job of understanding what the quarterback and what the offence is trying to accomplish. That makes it a lot easier for a quarterback to come in and be able to have a rapport with him.”

Or “rap-port,” as the case may be.