Let's remember the time Diddy attacked a UCLA football coach with a kettlebell

Nine years before the famed rapper and producer was arrested for truly horrifying crimes, he was briefly the central figure of the college football world

Sean “Diddy” Combs was arrested earlier this week and charged with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution.

Last November, the singer Cassie, Diddy’s former and longtime partner, filed a lawsuit alleging physical and sexual abuse against her over the course of their relationship. Though the suit was settled within a day, the rapper and producer’s legal woes continued to mount, with seven more women and two men suing Diddy for rape, sexual harassment, sex trafficking and nonconsensual pornography, among other alleged misdeeds. The details are lurid.

In March, the feds raided his properties in Miami and Los Angeles, and six months later, a grand-jury indictment led to his arrest. Even in a country in which being rich, powerful and influential can get you out of a whole lot of seemingly inescapable messes, Diddy’s in a good deal of trouble.

It’s a fall from grace for a man who, for decades, was an omnipresent cultural figure. 

When I was young, he was the guy, then known as Puff Daddy, dancing in music videos, interjecting himself into the songs of much more talented artists and producing hit tracks that would inevitably make my dad angry whenever he heard them because they blatantly ripped off the beat and melody of old songs he enjoyed. Beyond music, he has had a habit of just showing up in places, whether it was at a big event or in some film or television show (his current legal predicament aside, he had an all-time great guest spot on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”).

For the segment of college football fans who can remember it happening almost a decade ago, there’s something else that the mere mention of Diddy will conjure.

In June 2015, Diddy was embroiled in what remains one of the more bizarre stories of the past 15 years in a sport in which that kind of a qualifier is truly saying something.

At the time, Diddy’s son, Justin Combs, was a defensive back on the UCLA football team who was heading into his junior season for a Bruins team that would rise as high as No. 7 in the Associated Press poll that year. Since the younger Combs had joined coach Jim Mora’s program as a scholarship player in 2012, Diddy had been a semi-regular presence at UCLA practices, sometimes simply roaming the sideline and other times chatting up the Bruins’ defensive backs coach once practice wrapped up.

(Interestingly enough, Combs wasn’t the only progeny of a rapper on the UCLA roster at the time. Cordell Broadus, Snoop Dogg’s son, was one of Combs’ teammates.)

During one fateful practice, Diddy became connected to the UCLA football program in a way few could have ever imagined.

During a summer practice for the Bruins, and with Diddy watching from the sideline, strength and conditioning coach Sal Alosi verbally berated Combs for what he perceived to be a lack of effort, according to reporting at the time from TMZ.

"I don't care if your dad's here,” Alosi said, according to TMZ. “This is UCLA. I'm going to treat you just like I treat everyone else."

The exchange left Diddy enraged, believing the coach was intentionally belittling the younger Combs. After the practice, Diddy went to Alosi’s office at UCLA’s Acosta Athletic Center to confront him about the treatment of his son.