Things ran pretty smoothly for the remainder of 1998. 'They had me fly down there, and I get dropped off at the hotel,' Curtin says, 'and and his whole entourage show up, and it was almost like a group, 'Woahhhh! A white guy!' It was the funniest thing, the look on their faces.' He agreed to join Hawkins, Scott, and McAfee as a No Limit Sports agent.Īll of the aforementioned names then met up in Baton Rouge for a press conference announcing the signings of Anderson and Mercer. Curtin, who was living in Indianapolis at the time, had legitimate sports industry experience, working with Joe Montana and a number of football players in years prior, and he realized what dozens of other fearful agents at the time did, too: athletes wanted to find ways to slide into the world of entertainment, and an agency that could offer such a large doorway into that realm held a shitload of untapped potential. McAfee and Andy Curtin ran a small agency years earlier, and though they hadn't had much success before parting ways-Curtin says their players kept leaving for bigger competitors-there was enough mutual respect between the two that Curtin was McAfee's first call. (He hired Compton, too, outfitting both him and McAfee with slick Mercedes Benzes.) The two were visiting P to ask if he'd fund Compton's basketball program, but in the meeting, P asked McAfee to come aboard No Limit Sports, to which McAfee agreed, asking if he could bring a former business partner of his into the operation with him. Not long after the agency was formed, P found himself in a meeting with Maurice Compton, P's former junior college basketball coach at Merritt College in Oakland, California, and Miles McAfee, a sports agent who had previously represented a number of baseball players. (Anderson now says he only signed a marketing deal, never allowing No Limit Sports to fully represent him.) Anderson was such a big No Limit fan that years earlier he had the No Limit logo tattooed on his right bicep. No Limit Sports launched by signing NBA players Derek Anderson and Ron Mercer, who both defected from bigger agencies to join P's start-up. Tevester Scott, the chief operating officer of No Limit Records, became an agent, too. Hawkins, who had initially joined No Limit as legal counsel when his client Mystikal signed on in 1996, became an agent. P stocked what became known as No Limit Sports with faces from both within and outside his inner circle. These things go hand in hand.' I said, 'OK, I guess it does.' I looked around the room and those cats were around all the time.' Then one day P walks in and says, 'Man, we're gonna start a sports agency. 'They wanted to be around the Snoops, the Ps, the Silkk the Shockers, the C-Murders. 'The fact is, there were a lot of these ballplayers who wanted to hang out with No Limit,' says Edwin Hawkins, then an attorney working at the label. No Limit was seated firmly on top of the world as the respective cultures of hip-hop and sports crashed into each other in the late 90s. P reportedly made $56.6 million in 1998, while his company reportedly generated a whopping $400 million in revenue, per an ESPN Outside The Lines report.

Records regularly went gold and platinum strictly off brand strength, with little marketing at all straight-to-VHS movies grossed millions. Not all of it worked, but between the music and movies, dollars flowed in. The company released movies, clothing, toys, even a phone-sex line-any and every financial opportunity was seized. The Baton Rouge-based No Limit Records put out 51 albums from 1997-2000, with a stable of rappers that included Silkk the Shocker, Mystikal, C-Murder, Mia X, and Snoop Dogg, amongst many others. 1 on the Billboard 200.īut P's real triumph came with No Limit, his record company, which churned out albums in the late 90s with assembly-line efficiency. Ice Cream Man went on to become P's first platinum album its follow-ups, MP Da Last Don and Ghetto D, both hit No. 3 on Billboard's R&B/Hip-Hop Albums list and No. Both the record and the album exploded, with the latter peaking at No. In 1996, Percy Miller, known to the world as Master P, released 'Ice Cream Man,' the lead single on his fifth studio album of the same name.

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