DJ Big Tigger’s feelings on Washington, D.C.’s basketball culture can be summed up pretty easily. As he puts it: “DC is basketball.”
His reasons for thinking so are many. “You got a lot of legendary courts here, you got legendary players here, you have legendary summer leagues,” he says. “Players bring their own flavor and swag to the court.”
But flavor and swag will only get you so far in the District of Columbia. “D.C. goes hard, definitely, with the basketball,” Big Tigger says. And if you can’t cut it on the city’s famously intense street courts, then you’ll never become a legendary player. “Barry Farms, that’s about the most official go-hard-or-go-home court that there is in D.C.,” Tigger tells us. He then adds, with a begrudging smile, a shout-out to a legendary court of a different city: “That would be the equivalent of the Rucker in New York.”
In the video above, DJ Big Tigger takes us on a tour of his version of the authentic Washington D.C., from the vinyl shopping experience of the hard to find—yet must-not-miss—Som Records, to the footwear and streetwear at Commonwealth, to the city’s “win or go home” outdoor courts where it’s “real basketball, at all times.” Watch to learn more on why D.C. wasn’t made the nation’s capitol by accident.
