Bunduki Ramadan can do it all. He is the mic man you see on the sidelines during football games at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, leading chants and cheers — a position he auditioned for after hearing about it through his first friend at the University of Florida.
He’s the new Mr. Orange and Blue, after having the torch passed to him by Richard Johnston Jr., the man who has been asking Florida fans to "Give me a G!" for three decades before kickoff.
Those things are fun, and the former Preview staffer is far from shy in front of an audience, but the confidence comes from his first love, rap music.
Duke, as most people call him can and will rap about anything, anywhere, like when he sat down with The Alligator and pulled a verse about his day off the top of his head, the only beat to this freestyle track consisting of snaps provided by UF cheer coach Cortnee Alexander.
"So today I woke up came here to practice and I was like, interview I gotta have this / I saw you here and we got to sittin down, and you will understand why I am around / I had to drop in and tell you ‘bout my life, so we gonna do it and I’ma do it right / we could sit here and I can tell you all night, or we could stop it here and you know I just might / And you can write everything about my story and you can write about how I might have some glory, in the future, and do it, and then I can rap about more music."
To understand him, all you need to do is listen to the rhythms and sounds around him, the things that move him.
It’s the beat that motivates him to do what he loves, whether it’s the deafening noise of nearly 30,000 students on Saturdays, the slow tune behind his single Old School Pt. 2 or the flute-like melody that plays behind his single "specialty."
He works at his talent, describing a practice-makes-perfect mentality that a basketball player has when working on his or her three-point stroke, coincidentally steps away from where Michael Frazier II and Eli Carter show showcase their crafted strokes inside the Stephen C. O’Connell Center.
"What I used to do is I used to read the dictionary to learn new words and figure out more words that rhyme with each other," Duke said. "My mind’s just contained with a library of words and phrases that go and rhyme with each other so I’m able to rap about whatever anything that anybody throws at me."
He is motivated by struggle and family. His father and mother were a policeman and an agriculturist respectively back in what was then only referred to as Sudan before civil war tore the country apart and his parents moved the family to Egypt as war refugees. Duke was eventually born in Cairo, but it wasn’t a typical birth.
"My shoulders were really wide. I couldn’t come out, and there was no time for a C-section because I was losing oxygen and pretty much the doctor saw that and he was like ‘Either I pull this kid out or he dies,’" Duke said. "So like the doctor pulled me out and it kinda deformed my wrist a little bit, but hey, I’m alive."
His right wrist functions, but he’s unable to rotate it backward. His right hand is permanently facing palm up. He never got a diagnosis for his arm but said he still can do everything he wants with it.
Duke still has family in the southern portion of Sudan, officially recognized as the Republic of South Sudan in 2011, and Africa is prominent around his music. He has multiple pictures and videos on his website wearing a necklace with the continent’s outline and references to South Sudan’s capital are heard in Old School Pt. 2: "they gon’ feel me from Duval to Compton, Juba, South Sudan, I do this for all them."
"My parents always talked about living back at home and they always taught me not to take stuff for granted that I have here and sometimes like just like running water they’d have to go somewhere else," Duke said. "You’d have to walk a mile just to get some water and bring it back all the way home, and you wouldn’t have hot water to bathe in, you’d have to heat it up yourself or go ahead and take that cold shower."
When Duke was young, his family moved to Jacksonville because his parents wanted a better educational experience for him and his four siblings. As he grew up, he began a love of poetry that turned into a love of rap. His musical influences include Wale, Ludacris and Lupe Fiasco because they rap about things that aren’t mainstream like money, cars and clothes, something he tries to do in his own music.
He’s an economics major, and he minors in Arabic. After he graduates in December 2015, he hopes to travel the world.
For now, he’s a valued member of UF’s cheer team and a promising musician.
There was a disconnect between students, athletics and the spirit squads, and the mic man position was created to fill that void, something Duke’s energy made him perfect for in part because of "his enthusiasm for life in general," as Alexander puts it.
The enthusiasm comes from Duke doing what he loves with passion and intelligence, like this line from Old School Pt. 2.
"This is for everyone that’s wishin they could be in my position / all it takes is some ambition and a little bit of wisdom."
Chloe Stradinger contributed to this report, follow Richard Johnson on Twitter @RagjUF
Bunduki "Duke" Ramadan hypes up the crowd during Florida's 42-13 loss to Missouri on Oct. 18 at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium.
