Suge Knight was born in Compton, California in 1965. His father was a custodian and his mother was a schoolteacher. Knight went to UNLV on a sports scholarshipfrom 1985 to 1987. It was during his UNLV football playing days that he was dubbed Suge, short for Sugar Bear. It was a fellow team mate dubbed Cuspus Crispy that first started to call him by his now present moniker. After setting up operations in Las Vegas he moved back to L.A. and played football as a replacement player for the Los Angeles Rams during the NFL strike. He then retired from professional sports and decided to become a bodyguard for musicians like Bobby Brown, when, according to him, he learned that the key to artistic and financial freedom is owning your masters.

A physically very large man, standing 6 feet and 4 inches (1.93 m) tall, Knight has been accused of acts of violence including forcing business rivals to drink urine and having extensive ties to street gangs, specifically the Bloods. Rapper Vanilla Ice has accused Knight of dangling him out of a window of a high-rise building several stories up. Vanilla Ice claims that he was forced to agree to grant him a majority of Ice's own royalties from his signature hit "Ice Ice Baby", which a friend of Suge's claimed he had written. Even though Suge Knight had business relations with him, Vanilla Ice later denied the whole balcony story or has told a toned-down version.

Knight has frequently been implicated in the murder of Death Row artist Tupac Shakur and his business rival The Notorious B.I.G. In 2002, British documentarian Nick Broomfield made a film called Biggie & Tupac, which explored the theory that Suge masterminded Tupac's killing because he was planning on leaving Death Row and wanted to retain his unreleased tapes and royalties, and that Biggie's murder was a cover-up to make Shakur's death look like part of an East Coast-West Coast conflict. Suge has vehemently denied this on several occasions, calling Tupac his "brother". Whilst in the film Broomfield never explicitly accuses Suge himself, when asked "Who killed Tupac?" in a BBC Radio interview dated March 7, 2005, Broomfield stated "The big guy next to him in the car...Suge Knight." A former policeman who investigated Biggie's murder testified that he had been told that Knight confessed to arranging it. Of course, a potential criticism of this theory relates to the fact that Suge Knight was also hit with a glancing bullet (some say it was only a glass fragment)