Warriors exec still finds time to rhyme
Golden State’s expert on salary capping has background in rapping
OAKLAND >> David Kelly stood in front of the Warriors’ rookies in 2012 and talked to them about some important things they needed to know about entering the league. It was the usual spiel from the team’s general counsel and vice president of basketball legal affairs — save your money, plan ahead, use this opportunity wisely because it spans a very small window.
But Draymond Green was caught off guard. Kelly had briefly and casually mentioned that he used to be an underground rapper.
It’s not what you would expect from an attorney who is an expert in business issues and salary caps. So instead of asking about his retirement plan, Green had another question for Kelly — he asked him to rap.
“You don’t expect that from the
general counsel, so, yeah, I was surprised,” Green recalled. “It was good, though. It was solid. It had the oldschool type flow to it. It shows you a different side to him. It’s good to see that side.”
Shock, doubt. Those are the typical reactions Kelly gets when people learn about his past life, about his other skill. But to Kelly, a black man
who grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago, where his elementary school was predominantly white, fitting into stereotypes and neat little boxes was never his reality anyway.
Kelly’s father was an accountant and his mother a homemaker. He grew up listening to music of all genres, spanning The Cure to LL Cool J. When he entered high school, he and his buddy, Tony Fields, started DJing at parties.
Before long, Kelly, who grew up writing poetry, shifted to writing rhymes. He and Fields formed their own group, All Natural, and Kelly rapped under the name Capital D or Cap D.
He ended up going to college at Morehouse, where he studied English, but rap was his main focus and passion. He used his lyrics as a forum to express himself and be heard.
“I always tried to be more thoughtful than your typical (rapper) — political stuff, racial issues, just the image people have of the black man or black people, I wanted to attack that,” Kelly said. “The image that black people have of ourselves, I wanted to attack that.”
During college, he and Fields performed at Morehouse, Xavier, Emory and Jackson State. They even opened for A Tribe Called Quest and Arrested Development.
All Natural got a record deal with Wild Pitch Records during Kelly’s junior year in 1994, and Kelly decided to drop out of school to pursue music full time. His parents were less than thrilled with his decision.
“Neither of them were pleased, but my mother was more understanding,” Kelly said. “She kind of ran interference for me. But my father was pretty done with me.”
But Wild Pitch Records soon went bankrupt, and Kelly decided he needed to go back to school.
“That was the first awakening that I had to the tentativeness to all of that,” Kelly said.
Kelly graduated college in 1996, and went on to publish his own albums and tour Europe over the next couple of years. He once performed in front of 3,000 people at a music festival in Sweden.
But in 1999, after Kelly met the woman he wanted to marry, Zeenat, he decided he needed a more secure path. She was in medical school at the time at the University of Nottingham. The two wed in 2001.
“Doing shows and living check to check was fine for me, but if we were going to start a family, that’s not how I wanted to set things up for the kids,” Kelly said.
He pondered getting an MBA, a masters in journalism or even pursuing religious studies. But ultimately he chose law school.
In his personal statement, he called himself an entrepreneur and a selfstarter for creating his own company and publishing his own records.
He graduated law school at the University of Illinois in 2004 and went on to work for Katten Muchin Rosenman in Chicago, where he helped work on merger and acquisition deals representing the Bulls, White Sox, A’s, Boston Celtics and then the Warriors. In 2012, he was hired as the Warriors’ general counsel.
“There’s only 30 of
these jobs, and to be able to work in sports is a dream,” Kelly said. “And of any sport, basketball is a super dream.”
Kelly’s career has taken a 180, but he said being a rapper and a lawyer aren’t that different — you have to be a good writer and quick on your feet.
Never is that more apparent than during the free-agency period, when he’s expected to give the team’s ownership fast and extremely accurate information on the salary cap so it can make split-second decisions on whether to retain players.
That’s still stressful, of course. But unlike Kelly’s contemporaries, he has battle rap experience under his belt.
After you’ve verbally sparred with other rappers in front of audiences that would either raucously cheer or boo, everything seems a bit less daunting.
“Everything we went through has helped him,” Fields said. “The ability to adapt to various environments, various demographics.”
Most people who come across Kelly nowadays know him as a guy who wears a suit and tie, and is skilled at litigation. They don’t know that he once judged Eminem in a battle rap, or that a solo album he released in 2010, “Polymath,” was named the independent album of the year by the Chicago Tribune.
Chip Bowers, the Warriors’ chief marketing officer, said he was incredulous when he first learned that Kelly was a rapper. He immediately went on iTunes and listened to his music — then it all started to make sense.
“He’s extremely diligent, focused and articulate,”
Bowers said. “He’s a student of the business, much like as an emcee, you have to be a student of the world around you.”
Now married and a father of three young children, Kelly still finds time to make music.
Oftentimes after working 10-hour days at the Warriors’ practice facility, he’ll sneak downstairs to his private home music studio after reading bedtime stories.
“I’d probably worry about him if he weren’t doing music,” said Zeenat, who is now an emergency medicine physician.
“I’m jealous. Not many people have a passion where they can just sit and do something for hours and hours. Not many people are blessed with that. As much as I wish he’d come upstairs and communicate, I’m really just jealous of him for having that.”
Kelly is currently working on a couple of projects, some in hip-hop, some spanning other genres, including electronic music. He still wants to release more albums.
The other night he was up until 1 a.m., alone in his studio. He got into a zone, and got lost in the music.
Once in a while he thinks about how different his life would have been if he hadn’t gone to law school, if he had kept rapping full time.
In the recesses of his imagination, he can picture himself as an artist similar to Common, someone who impacts the world through socially conscious music.
But then he looks at the life he has given his family, and he can’t help but smile at the fact that his children have already been in two championship parades.
“You wonder, ‘What if,’ but I don’t have any regrets,” Kelly said.