STEPHEN PAY SMITH
ESPN to give blowhard big bucks despite being wrong all the time
BORED? Given that a lot of baseball around here has disappeared behind take-us-forgranted paywalls, we need to find something fun to do.
How’s this: Let’s spend the week asking sports-minded folks if they find ESPN’s top man, Stephen A. Smith, representative of why they watch ESPN or now assiduously avoid ESPN.
Do those in your milieu find Smith loaded with applicable insights, superior knowledge and clever takes on the sports he addresses?
Or are they more likely to hear and see him as just another boastful empty fraud, in his case one who has adopted the theatrical persona of a stereotypical holyrolling preacher man but with conspicuous grammatical deficiencies?
Not that ESPN shot-callers know bad from worse, and seeing that the odds are not available on ESPN Bet, I’m gonna guess that those who find Smith to be a loud, transparent, tired act given to race-reliant hustles while shouting fabricated facts, far outnumber those who who’d even consider that he has a flake of credibility.
And there will be those surveyed who recall that Smith didn’t always speak with heavily nuanced, grammatically deficient cultural declarations, but chose to be heard as more of a button-down professorial type who preferred to be heard as scholarly, an educated adult.
But that was before he became reliant on race and racism — some real but often wishfully imagined — as a self-sustaining and self-enriching gimmick and shield.
Last week came word that Smith, near the end of his five-year, $60 million ESPN deal, has been offered $18 mill per year to stick — a ton, but far less than the $25 million per his agent reportedly has asked.
But with CBS paying Tony Romo nearly $180 million for 10 years of seasonal work and NBC now paying unpopular know-it-all Cris Collinsorth $12.5 million per for seasonal work — and to remain an unpopular gasbag — why not?
What I know for sure is that if I had done, even once, what Smith regularly does on and for ESPN — broadcast fabrications as facts — my words would have served as my professional obituary.
So much to choose from. But two favorites:
Prior to a 2018 Chiefs-Chargers prime-time game, Smith, who had previously provided indisputable evidence on national TV that his knowledge of football was predicated on rotten guesswork, cited two matchups on which viewers should focus.
One was between players who were out with injuries, another included a Chiefs player who was no longer on the Chiefs.
In 30 “First Take” seconds he shouted that we should focus on four players, three of whom were ineligible to play. My thesaurus, stapler and sorry soul, never to return, would have been hauled out by security. And good riddance, I earned it.
Yet his knowledge of football was witnessed long before when he scolded the Jets for not trying a game-ending field goal on third down because, “Had they missed it, they could try again on fourth down.”
But some don’t qualify for disqualification.
Then there was Smith’s polemic on behalf of all blacks after the Nets hired Steve Nash as their coach:
“Ladies and gentleman, there’s no way around it: This is white privilege. This does not happen for a black man. No experience on any level as a coach, and you get the Brooklyn Nets job?”
Fact is — not that Smith much cares about facts — at the time, nine black men with no experience had been hired as NBA head coaches, including those who played locally thus were hard to miss. They included Mark Jackson, hired by the Warriors, and Jason Kidd — who, in fact, was named head coach of the Nets nine days after he retired!
And did not Doc Rivers, Paul Silas and Bill Russell — Smith claims Russell to be among his all-time heroes — not count?
No problem, Stephen A., carry on carrying on!
But ESPN is both weak and woke, thus Smith is likely to be paid the money he wants as opposed to the money he has earned. Then he can resume his factually bereft race and assorted baloney hustles, continue as the voice, face and disgrace of lost-at-sea ESPN.
Where else would Smith land? Fox would make a nice fit. It’s already loaded with ex-player and ex-coach creeps and facts-fabricating hosts posing as experts.
But there’s always room — and money — for one more.