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

Flavor Flav, rapper and hype man for the US women’s water polo team. Photo / Jessica Koscielniak, The Washington Post

THREE KEY FACTS:

• Flavor Flav is an American rapper and founding member of the rap group Public Enemy.
• In May, US water polo captain Maggie Steffens posted a plea on Instagram, shedding light on the lack of funding for sportswomen and the reality of working two to three jobs to get to the Olympic stage.
• Flavor Flav made the decision to sponsor, not only Steffens, but the entire US water polo team for the Paris Olympics.

Dan Zak is a reporter for The Washington Post. He writes a wide range of news stories, features and profiles from local, national and foreign assignments. He joined The Post in 2005.

OPINION

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

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 jnr, aka Flavor Flav (aka 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 endeavours using their own power to find new fans. Steffens is the captain of the US 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 Centre 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.

“These girls are my girls,” Flav says. The signature clock around his neck says it’s time – you guessed it – for water polo.

“His energy and positivity is infectious,” says Steffens, who has scored more goals in the Olympics than any other female water polo player in history. “And that’s something we want to bring to the game. We want to be a joy to watch.”

The US women’s water polo team waves to the crowd after defeating Greece on Saturday. Photo / The Washington Post

American women have won three consecutive Olympic gold medals in water polo, and they’re going for a fourth in Paris. This is dynasty territory. But they do not get the attention or the money bestowed on, say, the men’s basketball team.

That’s where synergy comes in. Partnerships between sponsors and Olympic athletes are way down compared with the Olympics in London in 2012 and Rio in 2016, according to Brant Feldman, Steffens’ agent. On May 4, at Feldman’s urging, Steffens posted an Instagram photo of her team with a caption that courted new support.

“Many of my teammates aren’t just badass champions, but also teachers, business owners, coaches, physicians assistants,” Steffens wrote. “Most Olympians need a second (or third) job to support chasing the dream (myself included!) and most teams rely on sponsors for travel, accommodations, nutritional support, rent/lodging, and simply affording to live in this day and age. Especially female sports.”

Feldman made sure the post was seen by his friend Rhiannon Rae Ellis, a talent manager. Ellis thought of one client in particular.

“I have crazy ideas,” Ellis says, “and Flav says yes to almost all of them.” So she asked: why don’t we sponsor an Olympian?

And Flav said: let’s do the whole team.

He then commented on Steffens’s post: “AYYY YOOO,,, as a girl dad and supporter of all women’s sports – imma personally sponsor you my girl,,, whatever you need. And imma sponsor the whole team. My manager is in touch with your agent.”

How this is playing out here in Paris is different from all the self-promoting corporate synergy NBCUniversal creates every time you see a Kelly Clarkson or a Snoop Dogg or a Minion as you’re watching the Games. If there’s a gold medal for creating synergy from scratch, give it to Feldman and Ellis. Flav signed a five-year sponsorship deal with USA Water Polo, gave the team a monetary donation, and committed to hyping the women and the sport. Within two weeks of Steffens’s Instagram post, Flav was spotted at Yankee Stadium wearing a “USA Water Polo” shirt. His Instagram became a water polo bonanza.

“Flavor Flav is the first celebrity of any sort to do something like this,” Feldman says, referring to Flav’s partnership with a national governing body of sport (in this case, USA Water Polo). “This may become the norm in the future.”

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On Sunday, as if to prove the point, US rugby player Ilona Maher posted an Instagram video in which she asked former NFL player Jason Kelce if he would publicly endorse her team. Maher began her pitch: “Women’s water polo has Flavor Flav as their superfan.” (Kelce rattled off a quick endorsement.)

A couple of weeks ago in Berkeley, California, Flav jumped in the pool to practice with the team, as video was captured for everyone’s socials.

Treading water with women a third his age, Flav said: “This. Is not. Easy.” The video on Flav’s Insta has at least 121,000 views.

“I read through the comments [on the post], and I see people asking questions about water polo, and people of colour wanting to start playing,” said goalkeeper Ashleigh Johnson, who in 2016 became the first black woman to make the Olympic water polo team. “And that’s a different community than I’ve seen talk about our sport – in the way they were talking about it – than I have this whole time I’ve been on this team.”

Water polo has elements of many sports: the passing of basketball, the speed of hockey, the strategy of soccer, the pitching of baseball, the physicality of rugby or judo or wrestling. The women glide like dolphins and fight like grizzlies.

“The first thing everyone needs to know about water polo,” Steffens says, “is that never once – not even in warm-up – do we touch the bottom of the pool. It is all our own power, our own strength”.

At dinner in Los Angeles before the Olympics, Steffens asked Flav what his version of a gold medal was.

“And right away, he said: ‘Honestly, my Olympics is every time I get to get on that stage,’” Steffens said. “I loved that, because that’s my mentality.”

In Paris, Steffens and her teammates have been keeping rigorous training sessions and “grandma sleep schedules”. They play Monday, Wednesday and Friday this week.

Flav, meanwhile, has been living his best life in the run-up to the Olympics: appearing on sunset terraces in Ibiza, hitting a Taylor Swift concert in Hamburg (“Flaavorrrr Flaaaav,” the singer mouthed to him from the stage), then arriving in Paris, where he gave Public Enemy swag to the US ambassador to France after a tour of her residence. (Apparently, there was synergy here, too, with Flav’s Instagram account reposting some State Department travel information for Americans headed to Paris.)

Flavor Flav cheers for the US women’s water polo team during a game against Greece on Saturday. Photo / The Washington Post

These past few days here, “Flaavorrrr Flaaaav” seems to be ringing out from passersby as regularly as bells from all the churches.

“Another thing that I’m doing for the team... is after this water polo thing is over: putting ‘em all on a Virgin cruise,” Flav said at a news conference here – the only Team USA news conference on the schedule for a nonathlete. (Flav is not a spokesman for Virgin Voyages. He just loves the cruise line. But it’s all synergy. He got Virgin to give the team and staff an all-expenses-paid, seven-night cruise anywhere in the world, according to Ellis, who added this via text message: “Maybe more companies will step up now.”)

On Saturday, at the women’s water polo match against Greece, first lady Jill Biden sat front and centre while Flav was up in the nosebleeds. During the third quarter, reps for the team and the US Olympic Committee arranged a meeting spot for Biden and Flav, who embraced in the stands, in full view of NBC. (Synergy, synergy, synergy.) The first lady praised Flav’s work with women’s sports.

“They got three back-to-back gold medals,” Flav told Biden. “I’m just trying to cheer them on to get that number four.”

After the match, which the US team won 15-6, the first lady and her delegation met the players in the athlete’s lounge on the bottom floor of the Aquatics Centre.

“That was incredible,” Biden told the team, marvelling at their prowess. “Most of us had never seen this before, so we were learning. I mean, I don’t know how you have the strength to do it!”

“I don’t want to trade jobs,” Steffens replied with a laugh, implying that Biden’s job was much harder. “We all have our lanes.”

But for this moment, in these Olympics, all lanes seem to be intersecting in the pool.