Before Drake was Drake, the biggest rap star in the world, he was Aubrey Graham, the guy who played basketball star Jimmy Brooks on the Canadian teen soap Degrassi: The Next Generation. Jimmy ended up spending several seasons confined to a wheelchair after being paralyzed in a school shooting, and Drake’s performance as “Wheelchair Jimmy” became a meme that haunted Drake throughout his early rap career. In the A.V. Club‘s new oral history celebrating Degrassi‘s 20th anniversary, writer James Hurst reveals that Drake actually almost quit the show over the whole wheelchair storyline: