Streetball's most copied handle — and every line below carries a source.
Philip Champion was born on 13 June 1976 at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. By 2004 his own AND1 player card gave his hometown as “ATL; Columbus, GA; and Jacksonville, FL”, his homecourt as Run-N-Shoot, and his height and weight as 6′1″, 160 lb. Asked his age, he answered: “Ask me in person and I’ll tell you.”
He played Imperial Valley College in 1999 and turned professional in 2000, joining the AND1 Mixtape Tour in the year it started. Wikipedia's AND1 roster lists him simply as “Philip Champion a.k.a. Hot Sauce from Atlanta, Georgia”. He toured 2000–04 and again 2006–08; the tour itself ran 1998–2008 and was broadcast as half-hour Streetball segments on ESPN2.
In 2006 he made his film debut as Jewelz, frontman of the team Platinum, in Crossover — a TriStar/Sony picture opposite Anthony Mackie, Wesley Jonathan and Wayne Brady. In January 2009 he signed with the College Park Spyders of the ABA, where he played to 2012, and from 2012 he has been with the Court Kingz.
Twenty years on, the tape came back around. He appears in Netflix's Untold: The Rise and Fall of AND1 (23 August 2022), and cites ESPN's 30 for 30 The Greatest Mixtape Ever (31 May 2022) among his credits. The ESPN appearance is his own claim, made on his Cameo profile; it could not be independently confirmed here.
He signs himself G.H.O.A.T — which, in his own words, stands for Great Handles Of All Times.
Everyone knows me as Hot Sauce. 2 Chainz shouted me out in one of his verses. I’ve been in a Mountain Dew commercial. I’ve been in movies.
