Even by his standards, ESPN pundit Stephen A. Smith has in recent months achieved a level of omnipresence that few sportscasters have ever reached. He secured a new, lucrative contract, has managed to get cable news networks to buy into his prospects as a presidential contender and has spent weeks in a back-and-forth with LeBron James that has become increasingly personal.
To briefly recap, James earlier this year expressed displeasure with the state of NBA media coverage, an opinion that is of growing purchase among players and fans. Like Charles Barkley weeks earlier, who turned a similar complaint by J.J. Redick into a viral rant, Smith took it upon himself to take the criticism personally. Not too long after, James confronted Smith at a Laker game — not about the media complaints, but about how Smith has discussed the NBA career of James’ son and teammate — which led to more back-and-forth. James upped the ante by appearing this week on “The Pat McAfee Show,” hosted by the new belle of the ESPN ball Pat McAfee, whose growing profile at the network has reportedly been a sore spot for Smith. Following that appearance, in which James took a few shots at Smith, Smith responded with some personal comments on “First Take” Thursday that included him suggesting that he would blow the whistle on James failing to appear at Kobe Bryant’s memorial service five years ago or at Dwyane Wade’s Hall of Fame induction last year.
Smith has in the past made veiled threats toward players — one wonders how long Kevin Durant laughed after Smith said on air, “you don’t want to make an enemy out of me” — which is not exactly sterling behavior by someone who is ostensibly a journalist. Regardless, it does not even appear as if he has the goods. Beyond the fact that James was reportedly at Bryant’s memorial service, per a Los Angeles Times report at the time, Wade’s Hall of Fame Ceremony occurred less than a month after James’ son suffered a cardiac arrest. One imagines James might have had a reason for skipping the event.
(In any event, bringing up Bryant’s death in the first place is particularly odious behavior even by the low standards of ’embrace debate’ fare, a fact that Smith himself apparently recognized, apologizing on social media later Thursday that and admitting that he “[s]hould not have even broached that subject.”)
There has been much discussion over who is winning the James-Smith conflict, as any engagement for Smith is seemingly a benefit — providing him the attention that has fueled his rise from a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist to a ubiquitous media personality. It is rarely asked what exactly Smith is winning, beyond the obvious fame and fortune. In sports, fame and fortune are never a substitute for what truly matters, championships won and legacies left behind.
Despite his role as pundit, Smith has been elevated arguably into athlete status by his employer, which prior to a Game 7 in last year’s NBA Playoffs showed him arriving at the game as if he were one of the players. So, it seems somewhat fair to ask the legacy question of Stephen A. Smith.
Smith in historical context
It may seem as if Smith is now flying quite a bit too close to the sun, but in an era of compulsory shamelessness, he is unlikely to suffer any great fall as a result. To an extent, that is because for all of the shouting he has done in a two-decade television career, all of it has been into a veritable hurricane of content. Angry insult is the primary language of cable and tabloid television and has been long before Smith ever took the air.
Smith likes to act as if he is an eternal, historic figure in media, with his ‘I was here before you and I’ll be here after you’ line of thinking. In reality, Smith is the latest in a long line of provocateurs like Morton Downey Jr., Jerry Springer, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, even his old sparring partner Skip Bayless.
Perhaps the most flattering comparison for Smith is to Howard Cosell, the face of ABC Sports in its early years and arguably the most polarizing sports journalist who ever lived. Like Smith, Cosell was shoehorned into every major property ABC carried, and his exposure levels were — in a time of three channels — beyond anything even Smith could reach today. Like Smith, he could be combative, insulting, and egomaniacal.
Yet Cosell, for as obnoxious as his personality so often was, provided more than sneers during his career. He could speak to the social ills of the time not by puffing up his presidential chances in cable news hits, but by preparing and performing detailed essays on the air. He cultivated a relationship with the most prominent and controversial athlete of his (or any) day, and if one wants to pronounce his friendship with Muhammad Ali as irresponsibly chummy for a journalist, it still gave viewers a greater window into Ali than Smith’s constant heckling of his various targets ever has.
Indeed, Cosell made lasting contributions to the industry that go beyond a few rants here or there. His relationship with Ali was the subject of books; his words on Tommie Smith and John Carlos still reverberate.
As part of a conversation about sports journalism unrelated to this article, Bob Costas said on the Sports Media Watch Podcast last week that Cosell was, for “all his bombast and obnoxiousness at his worst, deeply intelligent and courageous at his best — because he said things that now are self-evidently true, that brought him a lot of heat when he said them.”
Smith has in the past given an example of his speaking truth to power as a student journalist, calling for Winston-Salem men’s basketball coach Clarence “Big House” Gaines to retire — a move that was particularly bold given that he was a player on the team at the time. According to his telling, he risked being thrown out of school, saved only by Gaines’ own intervention. Perhaps that is what Smith believes he is doing now, speaking his version of the truth to James and any other player with whom he has conflict, though criticizing James in particular is going out on one of the most crowded limbs in all of popular culture.
The company man
One of the aspects of Smith that is often overlooked is that he is a company man. There is a long record of ESPN personalities executives eventually found unmanageable, from the ultimate example of Keith Olbermann to Jemele Hill, Sage Steele, Dan Le Batard, Michele Beadle, and even McAfee.
Smith, save for a handful of clumsy comments along the way, has rarely put himself or ESPN in an uncomfortable position, even as he strays further and further into politics. (When someone can talk politics as often as Smith does without becoming truly radioactive on either side of the political spectrum, finding comfortable spots on both “The View” and “Hannity,” some might argue that is an indication of bipartisan appeal. Others might consider that he is simply not saying anything meaningful.)
To be a company man in an industry like television means to have the kind of approach that would satisfy a network executive: the ability to incite an audience without touching the third rails that might get a little too real for the advertisers.
Smith is the product of a particular view of sports media, one that views the games as secondary to debate. That he was hired by Mark Shapiro, the brash executive who embodied the phrase ‘move fast and break things’ during his early 2000s ESPN tenure, is no surprise. In a recent interview, Shapiro perhaps unintentionally summarized his approach to sports by saying flatly that “sports is argument.” Certainly, any number of sports fans agree, at least to an extent, which is why the sports debate shows generate healthy enough linear audiences to stay on the air. Nonetheless, it has never been the case that the debates outdraw the actual games. The games are the show, but for Shapiro — whose ESPN tenure was marked by everything from debate shows to reality shows to dramatic fare — the human drama of the games was never enough.
In a 2005 profile of Smith by Sports Illustrated, Shapiro provided the following quote about his role in Smith’s hiring: “There were 28 people in the room, and they were all vehement: ‘No way, never, never!’ I said, ‘We’ve gotta get this guy in here.'” If not in said room, one of those in opposition was NBA commissioner David Stern, who Shapiro said in “Those Guys Have All the Fun” pushed back on Smith’s involvement in NBA coverage. One can only imagine what Stern would think today as Smith’s various feuds have taken center stage on ESPN airwaves ahead of actual highlights — whether Stephen Curry’s 56-point night last month or James’ game winner Wednesday night (in both instances, Smith was more focused on his feud with James the following morning). If ‘sports is argument,’ the actual highlights are ancillary, just a little something to set the stage for the real show.
(As previously noted, for ESPN actual NBA games have always taken a backseat to its coverage of said games. A network often criticized for ‘shoving the NBA down viewers’ throats’ is less a shill for the league than a consistent source of conflict and bad headlines.)
There is of course nothing inherently wrong with eschewing highlights to discuss the overarching context surrounding the game. It is in fact necessary that the on-court product sometimes take a backseat. When Smith ignores the on-court product, it is not to discuss substantive issues, but to litigate his various beefs and ultimately make himself the story.
The legacy question
One cannot be so high-minded as to ignore the simple reality that television must be in some way entertaining. (Cosell, Costas said last week, “was entertaining. Even people who hated him couldn’t turn away from him. If Howard was just deeply thoughtful, but came across like Mr. Peepers, maybe it wouldn’t have been as good television. It was simultaneously journalistic, controversial and good TV.”)
Yet entertainment that is solely sensational, whose purpose is solely to evoke an emotional reaction, can be corrosive. The thing about guilty pleasures is that they eventually erode one’s standards to the point where they are no longer ‘guilty pleasures.’ You can only indulge mindless entertainment for so long before you yourself become mindless.
Consider the most famous clips of Smith through his career. Exclaiming that Lamar Odom was “on crack!” Ripping Kwame Brown. He is as much an entertainer as he is a journalist, perhaps moreso.
It may be cliché to suggest that Smith is all style and no substance, but if one were to evaluate his career in full, what would one say? He made sports debate more popular? He denigrated athletes, trolled a few fanbases, and made a lot of money? Surely that can be said of Skip Bayless, or even Jason Whitlock — a brazen provocateur who Smith loathes.
Smith has to his credit tried to give back. “First Take” does not show up at HBCUs by accident. It is nevertheless fair to ask what he is leaving behind for the next generation. His playbook is to denigrate, insinuate and inflame. His primary tool is conflict. His goal is not to chronicle the story — to shed light, contextualize and inform — but to be the focus of attention. There is a lot of money in the attention economy, but it is an easy business to break into if you are sufficiently shameless. To put it in legacy terms, it is far from the hardest road.
If at the end of his career, one can simply say that Smith shouted on live television for two hours a day over 30-40 years, and made quite a bit of money doing so, perhaps that will be a best-case scenario. He may be akin to his 1990s tabloid forebears, who blew in like a hurricane, lowered the standards, raised the temperature, and left nothing but debris in their wake.
Either way, his will be a legacy of sound and fury. Whether it signified anything will be up to debate.
