J. Cole has never fully let go of the basketball dream, and the latest proof arrived Wednesday night when ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that the multi-platinum rapper has officially signed a contract with the Nanjing Monkey Kings of the Chinese Basketball Association.
The 41-year-old Fayetteville native had committed to playing a handful of games for the Chinese team last year and is now making good on that promise.
A Look At J. Cole’s Basketball Career
This marks the third time Cole, whose full name is Jermaine Cole, has suited up for a professional basketball team, adding yet another chapter to one of the most unusual sports stories in entertainment history.
The short answer to whether J. Cole played college basketball is yes, sort of, but not in the way most people would expect. Cole attended St. John’s University in New York on an academic scholarship and tried out for the men’s basketball program as a walk-on during his sophomore year. Out of roughly 70 to 80 players who showed up for tryouts, he was one of just 10 called back for a second day.
By most accounts, including his own, he had a legitimate shot at making the roster.
But in a moment he later described in remarkable detail in a 2020 essay for The Players’ Tribune, Cole chose not to show up for the second day of tryouts. He had spent the night weighing basketball against music, lying in bed staring at the ceiling, and arrived at the conclusion that New York was always supposed to be about rap, not hoops.
“I came to New York to be a rap legend,” he wrote. “Unlike basketball, in rap, I was highly advanced beyond any of my peers.”
He graduated magna cum laude with a degree in communications and business and never appeared in a game for St. John’s, though he regularly practiced with intramural players and even trained with the women’s team on campus.
Before St. John’s, Cole played varsity basketball at Terry Sanford High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He was not a star by his own admission, cut from the team in his first two years before becoming a starter as a senior.
He stood 6’3″ and described himself as a late bloomer with a high motor and competitive nature that compensated for what he lacked in fundamentals.
His first professional opportunity came in 2021 when he signed with the Rwanda Patriots Basketball Club in the Basketball Africa League. He played three games, posting a combined 5 points, 5 rebounds, and 3 assists in about 45 total minutes.
A year later, in 2022, he joined the Scarborough Shooting Stars of the Canadian Elite Basketball League, where he appeared in five games and averaged 2.4 points in 9.9 minutes per contest.
He shot 50% from three-point range in that stint before departing to go on tour. “I had to let them know how incredible this was,” he said at the time. “The players, the coaching staff, the organization, the league. It’s a crazy thing when you see it on paper.”
The China signing is the most ambitious step yet. The CBA is widely regarded as one of Asia’s premier professional leagues and is a step up in competition from anything Cole has faced at the professional level. The Nanjing Monkey Kings are not in playoff contention with the regular season winding down, but that is not the point.
Cole addressed the gap between his musical obligations and his basketball ambitions in a recent appearance on the Talk with Flee podcast. “I’m going to keep my word to them and show up and play a couple of games, although I know I’m not in the best of shape because of the album. I’m going to go out there and have fun with it,” he said.
The timing is worth noting given that Cole also released his seventh studio album, The Fall-Off, in February 2026, his first project in five years. Balancing a major album rollout with a professional basketball stint overseas is not something most artists would attempt. But Cole has never been one of the most talented artists, and his relationship with the game is as genuine as it comes.
He has been open about it since at least 2013, when he told Sports Illustrated, “Sports is where it started for me. It parallels my life. Rap is such a competitive thing. That’s why I have to watch sports. I got to keep up. It’s my life in just another form.”
He also holds a minority ownership stake in the Charlotte Hornets, another connection to the professional basketball world that keeps the two sides of his career intertwined even when he is not on a court.
