Sitting down with VladTV in a newly released interview, Math Hoffa described receiving serious death threats following Summer Madness 3 and taking time off from battling to plot his next moves in the industry.
Asked about the nature of the threats, Hoffa said “it’s not random angry fans, this is something that got to my household.”
“It got to my family,” he said. “You know, a lot of people was spooked for a little while ‘cause somebody was spreading rumors that there was money on my head and all types of shit. I had to figure it out. I had to hit the ground and go figure it out like, ‘What’s really going on?’ I got a history man. That’s all I could say. I got a history. So, you know, you deal with what you gotta deal with. At the end of the day, I feel like I’ve always been protected for some reason. I get into crazy shit and somehow I just get out of it, somehow I make it through it. I been in shootouts. I’ve seen my friends shot right in front of me. I’ve had the same gun pointed at me [and] miss. People tried to stab me in my back, shit would destroy my leather but never touch my skin. I don’t know, man. I got some other shit going on around me, there might be like six angels in this room right now. I don’t know. I know I got a higher purpose than what I’ve really been concentrating on. I’m walking that road now.”
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Hoffa, who stirred up controversy last year by punching Serius Jones during their Summer Madness 3 matchup, also compared himself to Mike Tyson as a polarizing figure among fans.
“There’s two types of people: there’s the people who will support you and the people who just won’t support you,” he said. “You look at somebody like Mike Tyson. You talk about Mike Tyson, some people will say, ‘Oh, he was the youngest heavyweight champ. He had the quickest knockouts. He was a powerful man.’ Some people will be like, ‘That nigga bit ears. Yo, he went to jail for this.’ There’s always gonna be two types of people. There’s people who’s always gonna bring up the negative and the people who bring up the positive. Fortunately, for me, I feel like I have fans, like my die-hard fans, they’re real. They’re like, ‘We’re sticking with you through whatever. We see you in the streets if anything’s going on, we jumping in.’ They’re hardcore. But there are people who wanna just kinda like put a light on all the negative. It’s easy to develop a large picture if you focus on the negatives like my man Hollow [Da Don] said. It is what it is, it’s just part of what you gotta deal with.”
Presumably still talking about the Summer Madness 3 event, Hoffa said he’s “moved past it.” “Like, let’s just move on, it’s time,” he added later. “You look at my battles, you look at the Dose battle and you look at whatever footage came up from Summer Madness 3 and then you look at all the views from my other battles, I mean it’s obvious I get more attention for the battles than anything else. I just think that it’s something people that never seen, they just run with that shit.”
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Despite his recent hiatus, Hoffa described benefitting from other battlers referencing his name in their battles. “I swear to God I get the most mentions in every battle,” he said. “If it’s not somebody calling me out for shock-value it’s somebody using a reference or whatever. You know what? I’m not mad at it because at the same time like even though I haven’t been attending events…in a way that still keeps me there. I’m still in people’s minds, every battle. Every event, if there’s six battles, four or five of them is gonna have a Math Hoffa reference and that’s the truth. I’m not mad, salute to everybody, that’s just keeping me out there in the mix.”
Returning to the topic of his recent break from battling, Hoffa said that he’s been able to reflect on what direction he wants to carry his career. “It gave me time to really evaluate what kind of perception I put out there and how I can change that and what I really want out of what I’m doing,” he said. “When I started my run last year, it was, ‘I wanna be the top. I wanna be the greatest. I wanna show people this is how you make this work.’ Then [Loaded] Lux came along and got $40,000 I was like, ‘Oh shit. Fuck. Damn, I had to do like ten battles for that shit.’ You know, it’s cool—not really ten [battles]. It gave me a focus like, okay, Battle Rap is growing. Do I want to grow with Battle Rap or is it time for me to just accept that I’m supposed to be part of something bigger? For the people who show me love and give me attention, Dave Chappelle reaching out, wanting to meet me personally and all that shit. Being in the clubs with Spike Lee and Lebron James, Dwyane Wade, and Drake and all these people in the mix and they’re showing me love, it’s like, there’s something greater.”
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