# The Long Game *A Biography of Snoop Dogg* — Legendary Biographies No. 116 - **Subject:** Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. - **Written by:** Jamal Whitestone - **Shelf:** Music / Hip-Hop - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 196 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-111-6) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · 6h 39m · read by Nadia Kerr (ISBN 979-8-90623-174-1) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/116-the-long-game.html ## About this book Doggystyle arrived in November 1993, and by then the argument was already settled. The verses Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. cut in 1992, on Deep Cover and on The Chronic, had put him on every major rap critic's year-end list before he had released a solo record of his own. Dr. Dre had found him rapping over an instrumental that Warren G handed across. Two years before that, the three of them, Broadus, Warren G and his cousin Nate Dogg, had recorded together as the trio 213. 1993 carried the other thing too. He was charged with first-degree murder over the August killing of Philip Woldemariam, and he had not yet turned twenty-three. The acquittal came in February 1996. He had grown up in Long Beach, California, the second of three sons of a single mother, Beverly Tate, who called him Snoopy because he looked like the Peanuts character; he was born there on October 20, 1971. Jamal Whitestone's biography traces the arc through the Long Beach childhood and the Rollin 20s Crip set membership, the Death Row years and the 1993 Doggystyle and the 1996 Tha Doggfather, the No Limit signing with Master P in 1998, the commercial recovery of No Limit Top Dogg, Tha Last Meal and Paid Tha Cost to Be Da Boss across 1999 to 2001, the Pharrell collaboration Drop It Like It's Hot in 2004, the eight-month run of Snoop Dogg's Father Hood, Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party with Martha Stewart, the FaZe Clan board seat in 2022, the NBC pre-game host role at the 2024 Paris Olympics, and the long years at the Inglewood family compound. Two careers sit inside one life. The first belongs to a Long Beach Crip teenager whose Death Row debut remade what mainstream American popular music sounded like. The second has run thirty years, and it made him one of the most ubiquitous American celebrities of the 2020s. ## Contents 1. Long Beach, 1971 2. Calvin Cordozar Broadus 3. The Eastside Rollin' 20s 4. The Tape 5. The Chronic 6. Nuthin' But a G Thang 7. Doggystyle, November 1993 8. The Sound of G-Funk 9. Philip Woldemariam 10. The Trial 11. Death Row 12. No Limit and Master P 13. Snoop Lion and the Rastafarian Phase 14. The Football Coach 15. Martha and the Cookbook 16. GGN and the Brand 17. Death Row Acquisition and the Super Bowl 18. The Longest Career ## Questions **Who is The Long Game about?** Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr.. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Long Game — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,770 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 196 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 6h 39m, measured from the finished masters. ## The writer Jamal Whitestone is a Brooklyn-born hip-hop critic whose work for The Source, XXL, and The New Yorker established him as one of the most careful chroniclers of the East Coast rap canon. He spent years interviewing underground tape traders and neighborhood DJs to assemble his debut biography, The Hand-Sold Cassettes. His subsequent books, including The Long Game, The Quad Studios Shooting, The Howard Years, and The Riverdale Block Parties, explore the cultural geography of New York City through its defining musical eras. He avoids grand theories, focusing instead on oral histories and archival police and radio records. He lives in Brooklyn, where he collects vintage vinyl and operates a small community workshop teaching local youth the basics of music journalism.