How Flavor Flav and Maggie Steffens found a new kind of Olympic synergy

The hip-hop legend and water polo champion had no business being in business. But their agent and manager had a crazy idea.

8 min
Flavor Flav, rapper and hype man for the U.S. women’s water polo team, stands for a portrait outside the Aquatics Center before the opening match between the United States and Greece at the Olympics. (Jessica Koscielniak/The Washington Post)
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PARIS — It was the yellow ball, for her. It was the piano keys, for him. That first touch of the future.

“Ever since I was 5 years old, man,” he says.

“From diapers,” she says.

That’s when they knew where they were headed.

Sports, specifically water polo, for Maggie Steffens.

Music, specifically hip-hop, for William Jonathan Drayton Jr., a.k.a. Flavor Flav (a.k.a. Flaavorrrr Flaaaav).

Steffens, 31, was born to a water polo family in Northern California a few months after Flav went to his fourth Grammys ceremony as a nominee with the monumental hip-hop group Public Enemy, which fought the power and then accumulated its own.

Three decades later, Flav and Steffens have found themselves together at the Paris Olympics — two veterans of their chosen endeavors using their own power to find new fans. Steffens is the captain of the U.S. women’s water polo team, and Flav, 65, is the team’s sponsor and official hype man.

Maybe you’ve seen a lot of Flavor Flav over the past several days. If so, that means you’ve seen more women’s water polo than you’re used to. That’s synergy. It’s the magic that buoys niche sports and keeps old careers afloat.

There’s Flav now, way up there in the muggy nosebleeds at the Aquatics Center in Saint-Denis, wearing a water polo cap, a golden glint on his clock-faced sunglasses, swooping his arms and shouting a signature hype-man phrase at the women — “Yyyyeahhhh boyyyy” — as they play Greece.

There’s Steffens down in the chlorine, cleaving and thrashing, egg-beating her legs so she can rise from the water, swivel her throwing arm like a threatened cobra, and collapse the distance between ball and net through deltoids and determination.

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