Kid Twist vs. PoRich

In the quarterfinals of the 2007 World Rap Championships, PoRich and Kid Twist came in as the bottom seed, widely expected to serve as nothing more than a light snack for Illmaculate and The Saurus.

The Toronto team, however, more than held its own against the two-time world champs, losing a hotly contested opening battle and winning the second before dropping the rubber match. Rich and Twist may have lost, but in defeat they managed to earn all of Canadian battle rap some much-needed international respect.

So when Organik was getting ready to put together the first battles for his fledgling King Of The Dot league, there was only one main event that made sense.

"It started on a couple of weeks' notice," Organik recalled, "where I just called Kid Twist and PoRich and was like, 'Yo, you guys want to battle each other? You guys can write your bars and everything, and we'll go and we'll just have fun.' And we met at a street corner, Dundas Square, downtown Toronto, got kicked out of there by security and just moved to an alleyway ... That was the first-ever King Of The Dot event — August 8, 2008."

Surrounded by the sort of lively crowd that Toronto has become renowned for, Rich and Twist punched back and forth in hilarious fashion for three rounds before the panel of three judges declared Kid Twist the winner. After the decision, the two WRC partners — both of whom later became KOTD champions — came back for an encore, spitting their overtime bars.

KOTD has evolved quite a bit in the seven-plus years since, putting together some of the most impressive mega-events in the history of battle rap. But the league's first marquee match-up remains a memorable one.

"That’s like the best battle I’ve ever done, I think," PoRich said in 2015. "And he was fantastic that day; we were both in fine form, you know? It was very enjoyable. And what was great about it, too, was it was an outdoor venue, so people who knew that it was going down, a select few saw it on Facebook or whatever — but then most of the crowd came from people who were just walking by, because it was by Dundas Square. All these tourists — it was awesome."

For KOTD, it was just the beginning of something huge.

Every Thursday, BattleRap.com posts a classic battle that you should know about, or at least be reminded of occasionally. See them all here.

Cover image by Dutch Photography via Facebook.

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