SportOxygen: How Jack Harlow's Old 2009-10 Sports Blog Foretold His Future Star Rap Career

I am sure you have seen his face everywhere lately. Coming off the release of his new album, Come Home the Kids Miss You, Jack Harlow has been one of the biggest rappers and artists of the past couple of years now.

Unfortunately, fame can come with a price. I've been seeing Jack getting flamed lately on Twitter. People (or haters) are trying to include his name with YSL to take him down, so much so that an unknown reporter did this:

Reporter: ‘The indictment’s got Young Thug, and a bunch of other rappers. But there’s one name I was expecting to see, and I didn’t, and that’s Jack Harlow. Can you speak to that?’

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis responds: pic.twitter.com/13YlMUFiAJ
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) May 10, 2022

People are flaming his new album too. I only listened to it once or twice, but it wasn't bad. That song, "Churchill Downs," with Drake is a masterpiece, though it leaked a couple weeks early. Pitchfork gave his album a lower rating than Peppa Pig's album.

Despite this, I am not sure if he cares too much. The man is getting his money and sales, and he was seen recently with Drake at the actual Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby.

But this article is not here to defend him or hate on him. In fact, I want to show you a side of Jack that you may not know of at all.

I know right now people are trying to fish for any dirt and things to hate on the man. From my personal experience, I'm gonna be honest—he's a cool, nice, and genuine guy...at least when I knew him as a middle schooler. He's not bad, even from when he was around 12 years old or so.

Now, you may be scratching your head at the last few sentences...unless you've seen this throwback video of Mr. Harlow:

That's the Jack Harlow I know—not that bearded dude you see today. And it's even deeper than that. This man's first career was not even a rapper, though you could see signs of it happening.

Like myself and several other kids around 10-13 years old in 2009 and 2010, we were into sports blogging. And believe it or not, Jack Harlow was one of those sports bloggers.

Harlow had a full-on sports blog on Google Blogger. He had an actual Blogspot called SportOxygen. At the time, many were fans of the NBA blog The Blowtorch by Trey Kerby, who is an #NBATwitter veteran.

You can see from my early writings in 2009 and 2010, as well as Harlow's blog, that we were influenced by Kerby and other popular sports bloggers at this time. Harlow and I came up at the same time with sports blogging.

I realized Harlow and I are only about a year apart, and I remember clicking with this kid instantly. We seemed pretty alike in a lot of things, including like rap music of course. I never was able to collab with him, but he was rapping around the time of 2009-10.

For some blog posts, Harlow would release some short rap videos. He looked hella nerdy, but it actually was not bad. He would have some skit videos on there as well on the SportOxygen blog.

There was even a time when I had two podcasts going. One was called "Pantsing Paul Pierce" on BlogTalkRadio, and Harlow had been a guest on the podcast a couple of times. He may have had one himself, if I am not mistaken.

There was another called podcast called Durantulas (a Kevin Durant fan site), which I formed with my school classmate Evan Sidery (check him out, he's a professional sports reporter now), where Harlow was a guest on there as well.

If you don't believe me, check out the blogroll he had on SportOxygen:

Harlow had listed three of my sites and I had link exchanges with him on my websites. I believe I was even friends with him on Facebook at the time, where he would post some of his early rap videos.

However, I did not realize this blog post would end up being the start of something huge for him:

According to Harlow's Wikipedia, he sold this mixtape at his school for about $2 a CD. I did not take it seriously at the time. After all, he was a 12-year-old white kid from Louisville, Kentucky. I didn't know if he was just trolling or not.

However, I believe after 2011, everything about Harlow and his sports blogging just disappeared. It was all gone and deleted. I did not know what happened to Jack. I remember following him on Twitter with his old username, @Jack_Harlow8 and @SportOxygen.

Some interesting mentions still exist from that time, and it directly connects to @JackHarlow, even though he scrubbed all of his old tweets:

His mother, Maggie Harlow, still has this tweet up:

Several years went by, and I never really heard of Jack until I saw the songs "Dark Knight" and "Sundown" blow up. The songs are fire, and at that time, I do not believe he had scrubbed his old tweets yet.

I had become a fan ever since. His music is pretty solid. Some people are calling him "diet Drake" on Twitter lately, but considering he is only about 24 years old, he has a lot of time to grow.

Overall, I have enjoyed seeing his progress, and I am surprised to see he has not mentioned this part of his past. His blog literally previewed his rap stardom. He promoted his first ever rap mixtape on his own sports blog.

And now look where he is. Honestly, it's pretty impressive, and I can't knock the hustle.

If you are curious, Wayback Machine still has his old blog up if you access this link here. It shows the archive of his old SportOxygen blog. The current SportOxygen.blogspot.com domain is something completely different now—Jack's was objectively better.

You are unable to access all of the articles from the archived link, though this archived FeedBurner link shows some more posts that are saved.

Another interesting thing is that he also went by the alias name "Jack Fernando." It is shown on SportOxygen and his Blogger profile. You can take a look at his archived Blogger profile here

His current Blogger profile is completely scrubbed, and looks like this now. It looks like he still has a blog up called Jack Fernando, which you can access here. There's nothing there, though.

[See more screenshots at the end of the article for more of Jack Harlow's blogging career]

It's all very fascinating to me. Imagine some guy from NBA Twitter and was a blogger ends up becoming one of the biggest rap stars today. That is Jack Harlow. This could be his version of Drake's "Degrassi" career.

I am not sure if Harlow really remembers much of this time, and I highly doubt if he remembers me. However, it was really cool getting to know the young 11/12-year-old Harlow and having a peer of mine with the same interests. It's definitely inspiring.

I never pursued a rap career, though I had some fun messing around in high school and college. I still have some songs existing somewhere on YouTube, SoundCloud, and the streaming services (thanks to TuneCore), but that will never be disclosed.

I continued blogging once Jack disappeared. I had my own successes here, but it was always a hobby. I am thankfully about graduate law school in a few days. It's just cool seeing where young bloggers like me, Jack, and countless others began and where they are at now.

Jack's blog actively promoted his and foretold his future star rap career. He had a whole ReverbNation account:

I would love to see Harlow talk about this someday. I still see some of that SportOxygen Jack when I hear those sports references in his songs, and whenever he posts stuff like this: