Stephen A. Smith Is a Reckless Capitalist Who Turned on the Athletes That Made Him Rich

These n***s ain’t loyal

By Andrew Ricketts
(BLACKSTEW) — I met Stephen A. Smith on the street once in 2005. I didn’t know a lot back then but it felt like I knew him.

That summer, waiting near Penn Station, I saw America’s most famous sports reporter hop out of a cab on 8th Avenue and stride toward the Garden. In one of his billowy suits. (I’m sure I had cargo pants or an oversized knit cap on so it’s whatever.) His legs swooped over steam grates and skyscraper antennae like a mocko jombie.

“Stephen A. Smith!”

Although I was a random kid, he answered that call because it meant something to me. And it must’ve meant something to him, too, as a TV star on the rise, to be recognized with enthusiastic support. I was out there screaming the man’s triplicate name in broad daylight like a dope. He approached a hollering stranger because he was feeding off well-deserved admiration. His commitment to bringing uncensored, unquiet blackness into sports commentary meets a cultural need. I was not unique in this view. Many black men see Stephen A. Smith as a living symbol of their barbershop diatribes played out on the big screen. Shouting at him was fitting because he is every sports fan’s brewing rage unleashed. I spewed because he seems to only speak in outbursts. I thought that’s how he’d best understand me. Come to think of it, Quite Frankly with Stephen A. Smith, his ESPN hosting debut, did nothing to nurture or accept Smith’s best asset: his irksome volume. Vinson Cunningham’s excellent Stephen A. profile in the New Yorker asserts that it’s the Smith crescendo from dead stillness to full foghorn that amplifies his eventual roar and compounds its effect. But I disagree with that read of it because that stillness—that pensive rock—was a big part of Stephen A. 1.0 and it didn’t work. Quite Frankly was canceled within a year and Smith was briefly relegated to the minor leagues at Fox Sports.
Since embracing his inner loudmouth, his name has carried a network and a genre. Stephen A. Smith is ESPN’s Today Show: digestible, respectable, ham-fisted, and ever-alert. But what made him iconic to me in 2005, as a fan of his boisterous persona, makes him the perfect nuclear weapon of the elite establishment now. He’s both charming and power-hungry. As his cohort Skip Bayless trolled players on their flaws to reach sports media icon status, Smith angled himself as the clout chaser, preferring to cozy with players where others couldn’t. He did anything to position himself among the legends (A.I., Kobe) until he, himself, became one.

His recent heel turn—from populist pundit to benevolent dictator of sports gab—took years of gaslighting and nitpicking athletes to come full bore. And Smith’s opportunism really kicked in when ESPN took a conservative turn, led by John Skipper. That regime change was a catalyst for Smith to seat himself as the sole Black “centrist” voice in a fragmented landscape of niche audiences and sports takes as a virtue signal. But a weird twist happened on the road from Philly beat writer to Bristol talking head: Stephen A. ditched the athletes who gave him all that street cred and welcomed his slimy familiarity. He hopped the luxury bandwagon so he could meet owners and rub shoulders. Worse, he continued to use his intimate access to athletes’ interior lives to leverage that trust at their most vulnerable moments. At the dawn of the athlete empowerment era, he sided firmly with the establishment. He went from outsider’s insider to insider’s insider.
And he looks no worse for wear. At 50, Smith is ESPN’s highest-paid talent, easily skipping between his franchise First Take morning gig and Sportscenter and Get Up and Pardon the Interruption and the NBA Playoffs and on and on and on. Every morning, he holds court, sure to slide in corny quips about his co-host’s tie or dry style. Also included in his benediction: one dollop “my man,” a couple dashes of “I spoke to this brother last night,” and a sprinkle of “he’s actually texting me right now,” turns each Stephen A. intro into a roll call of his famous friends and surprising associates. Stephen A. is giving us black preacher elegance. He’s giving us folksy. He’s giving us tropes. Stephen A. is a trope and a meme. Stephen A. memes bring mirth, hyperbole, side-eye and a collage of incredulous faces perfect for shutting down an argument or diverting from it. As a student of television, he’s mastered stagecraft.

Let’s take a look at some moments that defined his turn from egalitarian writer to mole for The Man.

The Genesis of ‘Stay Off the Weed’

About this clip: Stephen A. Smith cut his teeth covering Allen Iverson from inside the moody basketball star’s orbit. He hyper-linked American teen culture directly to the mind of its presiding hip-hop rebel. But Smith was only a vessel. His relative Christian bent and goateed clean-cut took the edge off Iverson’s black-ass swagger (if by degrees). Smith playing both sides of the respectability fence was a deft move but one that often showed his straight-laced, wing-tipped leanings. Iverson, by some accounts, might’ve been around weed a time or two. Smith was willing to overlook it then. But when pro-cannabis legalization sentiment swept across the U.S., and Smith had already secured top rank at Disney’s ESPN, he doubled down on old Just Say No rhetoric, stripping the cannabis debate of nuance by repeating dusty Reefer Madness dogma. With a splash of color.
Sure, the logline of the video is ‘Smith bashes NFL players caught with weed.’ Beneath the surface though, it’s Smith seizing his moment to defend decorum and to chastise. This is Stephen A. Smith as Bill Cosby delivering the Pound Cake speech. But he’s more theatrical and less self-serious.

“It makes a pristine organization like the Pittsburgh Steelers look bad. And I think, from a moral perspective, it’s a blow to them. Is this something they’re going to recover from? Sure. Are they going to win football games? Absolutely. Are these guys going to end up getting suspended? Will they be on the field? They’ll be just fine. In terms of football. But in terms of imagery, these two individuals, LeGarrette Blount and Le’Veon Bell have to be two of the stupidest individuals that I have encountered on this day.”
Stephen A. Smith, First Take

Smith zeroed in on class signifiers and status symbols in his take-down. The players in question, Le’Veon Bell and LeGarrette Blount, had committed the cardinal sin of being black and flawed in public. Although Smith often claims his concerns are born from the violent threat of skewed public perception, his sound bites serve to enforce the racist myth that a black body can ever be well-behaved enough. He planted his tough-on-crime flag right where his player-friendly bona fides used to be. And dazzlingly, he cruised into the zeitgeist, coining a catchphrase on the ride: Stay off. The wheeeeeee. Duh. What a Fed.

The transformation had begun.

My Good Friend, Kevin Durant

In July 2017, Stephen A. Smith offended a famously sensitive NBA player. And, as is the way with the former MVP, his mother came his defense. He felt hurt that Stephen A. had scolded him in public (even though the whole ‘choose-a-villain/pick-a-side’ thing is part of First Take’s circus.) The athlete’s mom came up to the king’s live-taping castle to defend her son’s good name. Here is the clip of that mother defending her world-famous son.

Two things about this clip.
First, we see Stephen A. Smith’s innate conflict between the part of him that wants trusted access and the one that wants a giant media conflagration burning in his name. While he relishes the seasonal benefits of trashing the most-popular athlete in his texts, he realizes (on-air) that it also kills his ability to exploit inside info. The credos that endear him to audiences and his network bosses: pat disdain for overpaid athletes, a serious air of judgment—also alienate him from his well-placed contacts. And it draws the ire of their watchful mothers.

“Let me say this. Being in this position. Being somebody that speaks and we commentate and we talk about guys a lot of times. Let’s talk about Kevin Durant in this respect. Always a model citizen. Always class. Always conducts himself right. Always has been an elite player. And now he’s a champion. So I just wanna be clear, while Mama Durant is sitting across from me, my issue is competition. My issue is ‘Oh my goodness. Somebody tipping the scales.’ Under no circumstances is there anything—and I mean anything—else to say remotely negative about your son, not just as a basketball player, but as a person. And I just want to make sure you understood that’s exactly how I feel about him.”
Stephen A. Smith, backpedaling

‘Stay off. The weeeeeed.’ is Urkel’s ‘Did I do that?’ reborn.

Second, the confrontation between real-world Stephen A. and the athletes who squawk back at his barbs is always anti-climactic. Like the best performers, Smith does well playing to his strengths: when sweet compliments sandwich sour reviews, when he stays collegial but distant. A moment like this one, between the actual Stephen Anthony Smith and a scorned mom, feels pathetic and downright tense. Smith would need to defect from the ranks of the black athlete power to get closer to Mt. Olympus. He’d need to avoid face-offs like this one, that invited scrutiny.

The Clown at the Kaepernick Circus

Each morning, as soon as I settle into my five other activities, ready to ignore the droning voices of First Take in favor of hearing just about anything else, including my own slurps of coffee, Smith erupts into simplistic grunts about “scrubs” and “bums” and I perk up. Because he’s obligated to opine on all things sports, when the mainstream conversation veers into Smith’s personal quicksand—politics—it scrambles him. “Social justice” overextends his vocabulary and lays bare his more crude views. So he avoids substance and leans into his ample style. Smith performs magical code switches, dancing between “unmitigated gall”-s and “I’m not gonna sit up here and say”-s to trigger viewers without ever saying much. The words mean painfully little compared to the amount of time and wind he spends spouting them. So when the Colin Kaepernick-NFL debate flared up, mixing in all of Smith’s thorny issues while also forcing him to define allegiance to either players or owners, his persona had to tack in one clear direction. Conspicuous silence would mean risking his reputation as a leading voice so that wasn’t an option. Vocal support of Kaepernick was completely out of the question: the NFL is one of ESPN’s biggest clients and on-air talents like Jemele Hill and Bill Simmons had already been axed for levying their criticism against the infamous league. The choice was clear.

In the years between Kaepernick’s first kneeling protest and the recent controversial workout for NFL scouts, Smith pushed a steady agenda: blame the victim and exalt the NFL. He was careful not to call Kaepernick stupid but implied that the QB’s terseness worked against him, that others might be pulling the strings of his peaceful protest. It was odd for Smith to remain so averse to honest racial and political analysis, to say the least. There could only be one reason. Stephen A. Smith wanted to preserve and elevate his status at ESPN by kowtowing to the network’s pro-NFL bent. He wanted to create the illusion that a violent, uncaring, malicious, colluding league was nothing more than a necessary evil that Americans endured for their beloved slice of daily brutality. And he wanted to show his commitment to serving the needs of the NFL owners like Jerry Jones, who could seal his entry into the patrician class with a luxury box seat to boot.

The circus went full Jerry Springer, though, when Smith decided to oppose Kaepernick’s methods and assign blame and suspicion to the ousted quarterback. Although he would never be the Philadelphia Inquirer hoops writer again, he maintained nominal closeness to ballers. During his rise, he often stopped short of disparaging players when it came to securing money and labor rights. Until he didn’t that is. Soon, my morning coffee show of hyperbolic debate and ridiculous takes had transformed into a political battleground. First Take became social media for exactly one week. But nothing crystallized better how much Smith had ditched athletes, racial progress, class progress, like the November 19th episode.

The moments that vault this episode from the unlikely and into the surreal and absurd multiply with each replay. First, there’s Smith declaring, in all seriousness, that the NFL and Jay-Z had Colin Kaepernick’s interests in mind when they offered their short-order workout. Which…whew. Then, there’s Max Kellerman waxing woke-ly about America’s Original Sin, slavery. Kellerman has earned his stripes as a well-meaning white man who does his best to subvert privilege for a greater good. Still, he is white and that privilege often emboldens him to speak in a way that, for a Black voice at ESPN, would be dangerous and job-threatening. That painful irony underlines even Kellerman’s best intentions and limits their impact too. White folks ain’t trying to hear about their privilege during their morning bagel break, no matter how much I whoop and holler at the TV as he speaks big facts. But the most ridiculous speaker at the 11/19 roundtable was Michael Eric Dyson, who acted as a double-shill for the NFL and Jay-Z (whose reputation he was siphoning to release another flowery book about hip-hop for the Ivory Tower). Dyson sat there, dumbstruck, trying to square all of his “Black liberation theology” talking points with a naked capitalistic grab for power he and Jay-Z were now attached to. The audience picked up on the irony of this showcase. The two Black men with a proverbial seat at the table were doing their best to protect those seats while the one white man was flouting authority and racial hegemony. America finds ways to be both ass-backward and perfectly comical all the time. But all this by 11 a.m.? It was my lucky day. And the swift backlash cascaded down on Smith like so many hairline jokes. Once former NFL star Terrell Owens claimed the streets were saying Kellerman sounded more Black than Smith, it was a full-on roast. But easy slurs like “sellout” and “Tom” also missed the point.

Although it’s been much louder recently, Stephen A. Smith has always been blowing the horn about his priorities. In every profile, snippet, and debate where issues of money came up, Smith preached prosperity gospel. Smith praised owners, management, ESPN, the good ol’ U.S. of A. He was no longer part of barbershop folklore. He was just another Black capitalist icon, securing the bag at the expense of Black freedom. Sometimes, the part of me that still hopes hard and projects my wishes for a more just system keeps Smith too close to that 2005 version of him I ran into on 8th. He was jovial and known, but he still stopped in the street to speak. While I still believe he would do that now, the exchange would be tense if his money was in the way.

**This article was originally published Dec 16. on Big Black Commentary**