Blender shows him the belt. It is one of our prize possessions. The buckle is a silver orb-shaped cigarette lighter, which can be removed to impress ladies with. When Blender flicks its Bic, Ludacris gasps.

“I want that,” he says.

“I bet you do,” Blender tells him.

A mischievous smile flashes across his face, and he rubs his chin thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you what,” he says. “If I win today, I get the belt.”

But what does Blender get? Ludacris goes quiet and looks around the room. His eyes settle on a pair of black trainers over the television set and he exclaims with triumph, “Jam Master Jay’s tennis shoes!”

A deal is made.

The occasion is the first annual (and last annual) Ho’lympics, an epic summit in which two great powers—the hip-hop nation and the mass media—will engage in a fierce battle of wits, brawn, and libido to determine which is more fly. Representing the hip-hop nation is Ludacris, the crown jewel of the Dirty South, with over six million albums of fast-rhyming twang sold in his name. Representing the mass media is Blender, whose many merits should be obvious by now and, besides, they’re too numerous to mention anyway.

The instigation for the summit is Ludacris’s new video, “P Popping,” in which the former Chris Bridges tries to beat the 2 Live Crew world record for the most tits and ass in a three and a half minute film clip. It is a spectacle of women contorted into spread-legged poses that only R. Kelly could write the appropriate metaphor for. Elsewhere on his new CD, “Chicken and Beer,” Ludacris tries his best to upend every expectation of him and outdo his rivals in lewdness, sensitivity, and skill.

“There’s competition in sports, and there’s most importantly competition in hip-hop,” he says, sitting in his basement playroom after winning a warm-up game of Connect Four against his manager and business partner, Shaka Zulu. “That’s a factor that you can’t get away from, even if you don’t think about it. And in trying to do my best, I compete against other people and I compete against myself.”

“Man, who thought of this idea?” Ludacris asks. He pauses, and then realizes the answer: “It was me.”

Arranged kneeling on a black leather couch in front of him are five women, oiled up and wearing only their undergarments. The challenge is to see who can unhook all five bras, with one hand behind their back, quicker. A stopwatch is at the ready. There will be two heats.

“The only reason you might win,” Ludacris tells Blender, “is because girls always be taking them off for me.”

He fumbles with the first bra, but eventually pops it open. His crew—assistants, friends, managers, and record label flacks—cheer him on from the sidelines. The second bra is a snap (literally), the third is a challenging array of six clasps, and the fourth a complicated fastening system. Seconds tick by as he tries to figure out how it works. He reddens, but eventually get it off before moving on to the fifth. His time is just over a minute.

“We got to start doing this in the crib for real,” he says. “We can have Ho’lympics parties and shit.”

Having watched carefully, we move through the line with relative ease until running afoul of the fourth bra, during which Ludacris cries “cheater” as we look over the woman’s shoulder to figure out the clasping system. Our time is 45 seconds.

Prepared for round two, Ludacris moves through the line like KY Jelly as bra after bra comes off between his nimble fingers. As soon as he pops the last bra, he looks up at the timekeeper. “How was that?” he asks.

“Eighteen seconds,” she says.

Ludacris runs through the room, throwing his fists into the air, galloping into the foyer, and punching the walls. The event is his. Or so he thinks. Blender moves down the line with equal dexterity. Our time: 18 seconds. A draw is declared.

Ludacris takes a step back and addresses the crowd. “I’d just like to thank lady number three,” he begins, “for making this possible.”

“Did anyone bring a Scrabble board?” Blender asks.

The assistants, stylists, prop people, photographers, sketch artists, referees, and fans look around dumbly. Suddenly a voice calls out, “I have one.” That redeeming voice belongs to Ludacris, who runs upstairs and fetches a still-wrapped Deluxe Version of the game.

“I have a lot of stuff like this,” he says, “because I like entertaining.” Indeed, his house is a self-styled theme park: with a lake for bass fishing, a dirt track for 2 Fast 2 Furious-style racing, a swimming pool and barbecue pit for summer parties, a full-size basketball court, tennis courts, a golf driving range, a plush movie theater complete with a glass-encased snack counter, and indoor games from Uno to pool.

Ludacris settles at a table near his theater, the Ludaplex, and spreads out the Scrabble tiles. He hands the instructions to his assistant, who will act as referee.

The rules are simple: only hip-hop lingo can be used. Thus, words like “here” and “there” are not allowed, but “herre” and “thurr” are golden.

Ludacris draws seven tiles, arranges the letters on his board, and claps his hands together. Slowly, eyes dancing with glee, he lays his first word onto the board: N-E-G-R-O.

“That’s a hip-hop word right there,” he declares.

However, Blender lays down an even longer word, S-E-R-V-I-N. And the race is on. Ludacris parries with M-O-F-O.

Shaka Zulu’s son stands nearby and asks Ludacris, “What’s a mofo?”

“It’s somebody who’s crazy,” Ludacris tells him.

Blender, at the ready, adds the letters C-R-A-Z-Y in front of mofo. The judge adds up the points and then asks Blender, “Do you want to know what the secret to this game is?”

But Ludacris cuts him short. “Hey, chill out, the game ain’t over.” The heat is on. He then lays down the letters N-I-G-G-A-S.

And so it goes: HOVA, HumV, Tweet, Ego, Ride, Real, Fo, Raw, Nann, and Punann. It seems as if anything goes, but when Blender lays down the word H-O-Z, Ludacris balks.

“That’s not right,” he says.

Evidently, from the man who wrote one of rap’s biggest hits about the subject, it can only be spelled hoes or hoez. But, evidence in the form of the Juvenile song “Hoz ain’t Nuthin But Hoz” is presented, and Ludacris relents. He then bends the rules with his next work, J-E-N.

“Like Jen from the block,” he says, in reference to J-Lo. “That’s a double word score, you bastard.”

And that double word score puts Ludacris over the top. He ends up taking the game, 256 to 236.

There is such a thing as being a good winner. Ludacris is not one. “Y’all are a loss for words,” he gloats as he snatches a victory chicken breast from the hands of a Def Jam employee. “I beat you in Scrabble.”

Ludacris walks along the side of his lake, muddy from the rain, with a .22 caliber shotgun. It is the only gun in his arsenal that he is allowed to shoot outside. “There’s two things in life: to be scared or prepared,” he says, “and I’m prepared like a motherfucker.”

A Def Jam employee is hard at work setting up a pyramid of 40-ounce beer bottles on a dirt mound. Well, actually, she couldn’t find any 40-ouncers at the store, and the Coronas she’s bought have been guzzled already. So a Diet Root Beer pyramid is erected instead.

Ludacris stands at the ready, lovingly polishing the muzzle of his rifle. “We live by the motto: I wish a motherfucker would,” he says as he wheels to face us.

“Um, is the safety on?” we reply.

The goal is to first shoot off the very top can, and then systematically wipe off each layer of the four-level pyramid, one at a time.

“This is the best thing ever,” Ludacris says as he sticks a.22-caliber bullet in the chamber. He cocks, aims at the pyramid, and squeezes the trigger. Nothing happens. The safety is indeed on.

He fires off his first shot, and demolishes both the first and second row of cans. With three more shots, the entire pyramid is eliminated.

He hands the gun to Blender.

“Beat that,” he says. We do.

With the first shot, we knock off the top can alone. The crowd gasps in admiration. The second bullet eliminates the second row, and a third shot explodes the rest of the diet root beer. Victory is ours.

Remember that opening chase scene in “2 Fast 2 Furious” when Tyrese Walker careens over an open drawbridge? Well, Blender’s race with Ludacris was nothing like that. What Blender possesses in marksmanship skills, it lacks in motorcycle experience. And Ludacris’s brand-new four-wheeler ATVs operate just like motorcycles. Shaka Zulu gives Blender a quick lesson in shifting gears, and then pauses to discuss with Ludacris the bra models they want to mack. “Well, that one’s mom is here already, so she is out,” Ludacris says. He then turns to another, “Hey, how old are you?” The answer, 20, is satisfactory.

The 20-year-old holds a checkered flag in her hands. She lowers it, and the race around Ludacris’ lake is on. Actually, race wouldn’t quite be the right word for it. Let’s just say that Ludacris won by about 25 bras.

Ludacris sits in the corner and discusses the awards ceremony with Shaka Zulu for several minutes. Finally, he stands up and is ready to receive his accolades. “We sit down and we think about everything,” he says about his conferences with Shaka Zulu. ‘We do that on everything man. We have a science, and it’s ridiculous and it moves and it works.”

That, he says, is how he picked up the rapper Chingy, why he raps in songs by everyone from Kylie Minogue to Trick Daddy before his own albums come out, and what made him decide to compete for the Ho’lympics gold in the first place.

“That’s funny as hell,” Ludacris says as the bra models come by with the medals. “They got the gold and the platinum awards.”

He is told that the second metal is actually a lesser silver one. “In hip-hop,” he says, “that’s platinum.” And, as the world champion of hip-hop scrabble, he does have final say in the matter. So bra model #4 kindly bequeaths the world’s number one mack with the winning platinum as the world heaves a sigh of relief. The artist has triumphed over the lecherous press once again.

As Blender walks away with the ignominious gold medal around our neck, Ludacris stops us. “You forgot something,” he says.

We reach under our jacket and give him the belt from off our pants. Fair is fair.