If it weren’t for basketball, Atlantic Records wouldn’t have signed him. His group’s album “Watermelon, Chicken and Gritz” wouldn’t have gone multi-platinum as the biggest-selling hip-hop album of 2002. He wouldn’t have played a rally for the first black presidential nominee so that he could later laugh that Barack Obama warned him, “Don’t go out and do something to make me regret this.”

If Melvin Adams Jr., or Fish Scales, to those who know him for his part in the Southern rap quintet Nappy Roots, hadn’t come to Western on a basketball scholarship, he wouldn’t have met the other members of Nappy Roots and might be strolling the walkways of Frank Scott State Prison as a correctional officer like his father and brother.

“Daddy was a playground legend in the projects for basketball,” Scales said.

He shot hoops with his father on their dirt court throughout his youth but said he started rapping when he was in third grade.

“I would be writing lyrics instead of taking notes, and the teacher could tell sometimes ’cause I’d be bobbing my head,” he said.

His parents often discovered lyrics on little scraps of wadded-up paper but didn’t realize that he was serious about music. He left home to be a power center for the Hilltoppers when he was 19. His father believed he would make it in basketball.

“He was a force to be reckoned with,” Melvin Adams Sr. said.

His son had been playing with him and the older and bigger men in the neighborhood his whole life until Scales outgrew his father by nearly a foot.

When he left his hometown, Milledgeville, Ga., he had been a star on the basketball court.

“He brought the crowd,” said his mother, Edna Adams. “He was known for dunking. He didn’t do no simplified dunking – he’d put a show on.”

No one, including his best-friend Rayvon Farris who roomed with Scales and also played power center, foresaw that he would quit the team to pursue music. Not until he showed up with a letter to the team explaining why he was leaving.

“I was shocked,” Farris said. “But I didn’t want to be selfish on his dreams.”

Before Scales read the letter to his teammates, he showed it to his parents.

“When he told us, there were tears in his eyes,” Edna said. “He didn’t want to leave his team.”

Even so, Scales saw that he’d come to a fork in his road. He put the ball down and picked up the microphone. But in his letter to his teammates, he promised to keep the team in his heart.

He left the team and Western altogether in 1998, with the release of the group’s first album. Since then, Nappy Roots has produced two more records, started their own record label and was nominated for awards including MTV, American Music Awards, the Grammys and Soul Train Awards.

He said he wants to tour forever. He loves the life and the money he counts at the end of the night.

And he still loves the team.

“I’m like the hub now to keep the team together,” he said. “When I’m traveling from place to place, I’ll check in on this old teammate or that one. Then I can bring that to the next guy I visit. That way, I’m keeping everybody together.”