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Stephen A. Smith shouldn’t be talking right now. It’s 6 A.M. the morning of Game 3 of the NBA Finals, and the biggest name at ESPN has come down with a sore throat that ambushed him in the middle of the previous night. As a result, Stephen A. isn’t gonna do his usual radio show today. He’s not gonna even cut a promotional teaser for First Take, the sports debate show that he presides over that is now the crown jewel of ESPN’s daytime TV programming. We’re at the Lake Chalet restaurant in Oakland for a remote taping of that show today, and when a production worker asks Stephen A. if she can borrow him in ten minutes to do a promo, he blanches.
“So they got me teasing, knowing my voice?” he asks her, betraying no hint in his firm words that said voice is anything less than 100 percent. “Why would they do that? I need to save my voice. Don't ask me to speak until I have to. Doesn't that make sense?”
There’s a line wrapped around the outside of the restaurant: people who have been waiting here since as early as 4 A.M., either waking up before dawn or forgoing sleep altogether. There are Warriors fans in this line, naturally—all of them cocky and blissfully unaware of the disastrous Finals endgame that awaits them. There are also Lakers fans, a lone Bulls fan, a Sharks fan, a Browns fan (who told me he likes the Cavs AND the Warriors), parents with small kids, and a Kansas City Royals fan for some reason. They each have their own particular team loyalties, but they’re here because they are ALL fans of Stephen Anthony Smith, and they have little compunction about explaining why:
I love his reactions to stuff. He’s not afraid to look stupid on camera.
He makes it okay to be yourself, to speak your mind.
I like how Stephen A. is very vocal as a black man. He does more than a lot of other analysis on a lot of other platforms like Fox News and stuff like that and don't even be compensated for it. He does it for the love of the culture, and he's one of the few people that actually do it for you.
One guy in line didn’t like Stephen A.’s hardline stance against smoking weed. “You're in the Bay Area. I'm sorry, bro. You should be smoking weed, bro.” But of course, such objections didn’t stop this guy from coming. He’s still a fan of First Take. Also, he’s definitely high.
Stephen A. (and I’m gonna refer to him as Stephen A. the rest of the way here, because it would feel deeply wrong not to) must carefully preserve his voice for these people. His people. He has a lot of them now. It took a long-ass time for the general public to embrace the man; particularly white Americans who were perhaps not used to a black guy on TV being so unapologetically assertive and brash. Tough shit for them. First Take is the No. 1 cable show in its time slot with young men: a total audience of nearly half a million people and growing. Over half that audience is black, but it contains no shortage of white folks, either. In fact, Stephen A. is so popular across the board that when he went to Toronto for the first two games of these Finals, he got a police escort to the arena.
Even the people who love to hate Stephen A. love him, and he loves them right back. ESPN’s VP of production, David Roberts, told me so: “When we go to Dallas for the NFL kickoff, I'm sure there'll be 2,500 people wanting to get his autograph and boo him at the same time.” Fellow ESPNer Dan Le Batard told me Stephen A. is “the closest thing we have to Howard Cosell in 2019.” And many of his contemporaries agree. He is not merely the biggest name at ESPN; he is often the biggest—and perhaps highest-paid—star when he walks into any given NBA arena. (According to Andrew Marchand of the New York Post, ESPN has made Stephen A. their highest-paid talent ever with his newest contract extension: nearly $8 million a year.) He’s such a big draw now that he can no longer watch games in person from a seat, opting instead to watch from the tunnel, often flanked by arena security guards who happily let him into the joint without a credential. His name and his voice...those ARE his credentials.
And Stephen A. won’t apologize for being afforded such privileges. He never has. Former SportsCenter co-anchor and current Atlantic staff writer Jemele Hill, who says Stephen A. was instrumental in getting her nationally known on television, remembered seeing him for the first time at a press bureau in Athens during the 2004 Olympics. There he was, complaining loudly about his accommodations and the “abundance of stairs,” in his words, that he had been forced to navigate along the way to his quarters. He was not shy about vocalizing his belief that he deserved better.
“I was just like, Who is this dude? And why is he so loud? I was honestly impressed because I really wasn't used to seeing black reporters behave as if they were entitled to things,” Hill remembers. “I thought that was cool because it showed me the kind of self-confidence I hope to have at some point. In a lot of [black people’s] jobs and positions, people are constantly asking us questions or putting us under a particular scrutiny. Almost as if to say, How did you get here?”
Stephen A. gets better hotel rooms now. There are no more abundant stairs to climb. He’s here. The question is: Now that Stephen A. Smith has reached the penthouse...now that nothing and no one is in his way any longer...now that he has become ESPN...what’s he gonna do with himself?
Garry Howard knew right away that Stephen A. would be a star. Howard was a deputy sports editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer back in 1994 and in desperate need of someone to go cover a Drexel basketball home game. With a snowstorm raging outside. A friend in New York gave Howard the number of a then unknown 26-year-old guy from Queens named Stephen A. Smith. At the time, Stephen A. had started off his career in journalism as a college newspaper columnist who once demanded, in print, that his own basketball coach retire. After graduating, he worked the homicide beat in New York. One day he was sent to interview the family of a victim of notorious Long Island serial killer Joel Rifkin. After knocking on their door and encountering a mother who was crying her insides out, Stephen A. decided, “I never wanted to do it again.”
He then moved to the sports beat. Once there, Stephen A. accepted Howard’s assignment, and its somewhat onerous travel demands, instantly. When Howard got the resulting copy, he says, “I was fucking blown away.”
I ask, Could you ever envision him becoming what he is now?
“Yes. Do you see I'm not hesitating? I thought he could be the best ever.”
Shortly thereafter, Stephen A. moved to Philly to join the Inquirer full-time. From there, his profile grew like an unmonitored weed, eventually landing him at ESPN, where he became a fixture on the air while still filing columns to the Inquirer that he had reportedly composed on his BlackBerry—a seemingly sloppy way of writing that, if you ask many of his contemporaries, becomes astounding when you realize he wrote on the go because he was fitting work into all the empty spaces when he wasn’t doing other work. (A representative for ESPN says he only did this when no other device was available.)
That relentlessness, combined with an innate desire to please, is why Stephen A. Smith has been everywhere on ESPN this decade. This is often to his haters’ chagrin, but it’s worth appreciating the ludicrous amount of energy the man has had to summon—often without coffee—to be everywhere. As NBA insider Brian Windhorst told me, the culture at ESPN “is to be a workaholic.” Stephen A. has come to fit right in with that culture.
Ask anyone who knows Stephen A. if he’s like that in real life—and they get that question endlessly—and they’ll tell you it’s not an act. That’s really him. He is not coached to have opinions he doesn’t believe in. He is not gesticulating like a Vegas magician on camera just because he’s a creature of television. Camera or no camera, he is on. A natural ham. “My mother,” says Stephen A., “said I came out of the womb talking.”
Hence, our man is ready to talk this morning in Oakland. A pesky sore throat cannot keep him in check. It will not keep him from his appointed take rounds, nor even an early wake-up call that he detests with a primal fervor. Stephen A. rarely sleeps more than three to five hours a night, and he hates getting up in the morning, telling me that “everything bad happens” that time of day. To keep his voice fit here at the Lake Chalet, he’s sipping honeyed green tea with a splash of coconut milk. Sometimes he treats himself to a vanilla latte, but in general he is powered by tea and little else (“My family is from the West Indies. I've always drank tea”).
In the green room, he is waiting for the exact right moment to unleash that voice, his most prized instrument, upon the boisterous Lake Chalet crowd awaiting him. He eagerly awaits them as well, eager to please—or, in some cases, joyfully rankle—the hungry masses. For Stephen A. Smith possesses a frantic, never-ending ambition that has made him who he is but that is also poised, at times, to devour him whole.
To stay sharp, he remains disciplined in both mental and physical fitness. He works out constantly, including sit-ups and push-ups and “a little boxing” (MMA is next on his radar). He limits himself to two drinks a week and never more than that. It’s not hard to verify his moderation with his co-workers; many of them are unaware that he drinks at all. He stays off the weed, though maybe he shouldn’t, bro. He’s never touched harder drugs, determined to avoid them after growing up in Hollis and seeing the aftershocks of the crack epidemic land right on his doorstep. “Drug dealers were right down the block. Hell, crack addicts were on my block. You see how drugs ravage human beings. And I was always committed and dedicated to the fact that was not going to be me. No way in hell. I would never allow that to happen.” As such, Stephen A. will not dabble in “anything that I think can derail my progress.” But there is one notable exception to that self-imposed edict: junk food. Stephen A. is trying to cut back on it, but he won’t ever quit cold. “I work out six days a week, I'm getting me some White Castle on the seventh day. Or a bowl of Crunch Berries. I'm cheating one way or another. It's going to be my Cheez Doodles, it's going to be the Crunch Berries, or it's going to be White Castle.”
If you happen to be the kind of person who hates Stephen A. because he has the temerity to be loud, his First Take fellow featured commentator Max Kellerman has an effortless rebuttal: “That's how you argue about sports! Have you ever argued sports with your friends? Do you do it in hushed tones?” (I do not.) First Take is an argument show that, despite its off-the-cuffness, requires a lot of preparation and care to pull off. It was originally hatched by then ESPN exec Jamie Horowitz in 2007 with yippy Oklahoman Skip Bayless as the main draw. Stephen A. was selected to be his daily sparring partner after other candidates were considered (Hill says she was among those included in the search) and eventually ruled out. According to fellow ESPN star Bomani Jones, for a long time Stephen A. was “the guy on First Take who wasn't Skip Bayless.” And to this day, Bayless remains revered by everyone on the show, Stephen A. included; this despite the fact that Bayless has utterly deranged opinions, almost all of them about Tim Tebow and LeBron James.
But Bayless’s intractable bullishness made him a reliable enemy for anyone facing him. Kellerman, by contrast, is more nuanced. You could argue that makes for a much better dynamic for the show. It’s not certain that Stephen A. feels likewise. “I'm not satisfied with where we are,” he tells me. “I am the kind of person who debates you, and I don't give a damn about how you feel. If you don't agree with Max, he tries to convince you as if you don't comprehend what he's saying. Sometimes that works for the show. Sometimes it doesn't. There are days that I feel that we are absolutely phenomenal at debating each other. There are other days where I don't feel that way. And the days that I don't feel that way, I'm not happy.”
I ask Kellerman what he thinks about Stephen A.’s assessment of their dynamic. His answer is both blunt and diplomatic. “Stephen A. is never going to be happy. That's why he's successful. When you're on the top, the reason you are there is because you are a chronically dissatisfied person.”
“I can sense tension on the show sometimes,” fellow ESPN star Pablo S. Torre tells me. “Sometimes there have been moments that are tense and antagonistic and you're like, Wow, this is amazing TV. But also I don't know if I'd want to be either of those people if it was me on there right now.”
Without Skip sucking the air out of the studio anymore, Stephen A. has grown into a far more versatile performer, particularly when he rants about the Knicks, which he does with near-scheduled regularity these days. He can be self-aware. He can be theatrically appalled. He can be serious. He can be pissed in a way where you know he’s happy to be pissed. Like the most gifted television performers, Stephen A. knows exactly what his face looks like when he’s making one. When I ask him if he has a favorite face, he gives me the stiff-arm.
“No. You're not getting that from me,” he says. “Stay tuned. Watch. I have several of them. I use them all.”
At the restaurant, members of the First Take cast assume their respective positions in front of the camera, fans waving First Take–branded towels and giant cutout heads of Stephen A., Kellerman, and host Molly Qerim Rose given to them by the production crew. One Warriors bro in the audience is jangling three miniature Larry O’Brien trophies in giddy anticipation. Kellerman is wearing mirrored shades. Stephen A. is wearing his trademark hangdog scowl. Blue suit. Brown shoes. A tie knot wider than a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Qerim Rose sits between the two men, there to serve as anchor, judge, and referee. Stephen A. is ready. His jacket has been de-wrinkled. His hair has been lovingly spritzed. His First Take–branded mug is turned at an atomically precisely angle so that the camera can see the logo in full. The main event is set to begin.
Watch First Take wire-to-wire, and you quickly understand that Stephen A. is a master of silence. At one point, he whips out his phone when other people are talking on the air, and it doesn’t come across as rude or lazy. It scans like he’s gathering crucial intel to hurl back at Kellerman to flatten him. At another point, Stephen A. literally rests his chin on his fist, Thinker-style. He can do this without irony and get away with it. He really is thinking. Plotting. “He's an incredible deployer of negative space,” observes Torre. “It is really hard to have the confidence to be quiet on TV. What he can do is fall silent and then re-emerge with a thunderbolt.”
During any given telecast, Stephen A. acts as both orator and stage manager, letting the words breathe while offering up an assortment of nonverbal expressions and cues, directing traffic while letting everyone in the audience know that he’s barely tolerating what Kellerman has to say. These are, by his telling, natural television instincts of his. Oh, he’s gonna let you finish. But you better believe he’s got something to say when you’re done. Even when he’s quiet, he remains in control, gathering up his thunderbolts.
Kellerman trolls the crowd by (correctly) predicting the Raptors will win Game 3. Mini-O’Brien guy is not happy. The crowd sees Stephen A. making his best Quietly Fuming Face, senses his agita, and feeds off it.
“First of all,” Stephen A. says to Kellerman, “I don’t wanna hear that opinion from you.” He then throws the Oakland crowd some red meat and (incorrectly) picks the Warriors, to raucous approval. Kellerman, again on a run of prescience, says Kevin Durant should sign with Brooklyn after the Finals are over and insists, more than once, that “Brooklyn rings bells around the world.” Max asks the crowd if KD would have “the No. 1 brand in the world” if he joins the Nets, expecting vehement agreement. I’m too depressed by the question to react one way or the other. Stephen A. is clearly indifferent to Max’s arguments and wears that indifference with bravado. It’s his biggest fit of the day.
Later on in the show, Stephen A. unveils his list of top five players in the NBA to his cohorts:
5. Steph Curry (“Not an elite defender.”)
4. Anthony Davis (“His game is elite.”)
3. Kawhi Leonard (“He is elite.”)
2. LeBron James (“That doesn’t give us a license to exercise amnesia.”)
1. Kevin Durant
MC Hammer, who appears for a segment because this is that kind of show, moves Steph up to No. 2 on the board and the crowd rejoices. You’re free to contest Stephen A.’s list (where’s Giannis?!), but just know you will hardly be the first stranger to make the attempt. Stephen A. says armchair pundits step to him all the time. In airports. In restaurants. On the subway, which he can no longer ride. Everywhere. One time, Stephen A. was out to dinner with his mother, Janet, when a Knicks fan came up to the table to rudely chew him out for something he said on TV. Stephen A. was about to hit the guy, but his mom talked him out of it.
Were you glad you didn't hit him?
“Not really. Fans want pictures and stuff with other people. Me? They want to debate. And I'm just not subjecting myself to all of that. I'm not trying to do that for free.”
After the show ends, Stephen A. and I go off to chat privately as he indulges in an early lunch of chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, a burger topped with caramelized onions, fries, and a slice of cheesecake. Takes require fuel, after all. Stephen A.’s voice has not once wavered this morning. That sore throat couldn’t knock him down. Never had a chance.
Co-workers praise Stephen A. as compassionate and caring (when coordinating producer Antoine Lewis experienced sudden heart failure last year, one of the first people he saw when he opened his eyes in the hospital was Stephen A.). But it will not shock you to learn that Stephen A. Smith is not an easygoing fella. His armor stays on at all times, particularly when he’s got a reporter like myself throwing a hodgepodge of intrusive questions at him. He knows how this works, so he is very forthright about what he will and will not be forthright about. And he is far too shrewd to be caught off guard. He is wickedly evasive.
Life hasn’t given him much choice in this regard. It has subjected him to great losses, and he has had to engineer ambitious methods to distract himself from those losses. Last June marked the two-year anniversary of Janet Smith’s death from colon cancer. She worked multiple jobs to support Stephen A. and his siblings when they were growing up in Hollis, including working for over two decades as a registered nurse at what was then known as Queens General Hospital, which may explain why Stephen A. is a huge fan of ABC’s General Hospital. He has appeared on the show several times as a surveillance expert for mobster Sonny Corinthos named Brick. According to Torre, he once asked if Brick could carry a gun on the show, but they wouldn’t let him. (A representative for ESPN denies this.)
Stephen A.’s reverence for his mother borders on the holy. He is not over her passing. He never will be. No sudden cold or debate opponent could ever hope to silence Stephen A. Smith fully. But grief and depression are very much up to the task. “The crying every day stopped after about a year,” he tells me. “Now it's once every few days. The misery that hits you before it ventured towards paralysis, where the memories hit you and you sit down and hours pass before you do anything. You suddenly don't move. You don't want to talk to anybody. I've been going through that for two years.
“My mama,” he adds, “was everything to me.”
Stephen A. says that his older sisters watch him on First Take and can tell when the grief has surfaced. He doesn’t say or do anything on the air to give himself away, but Janet’s daughters can see it. He’s gotten professional counseling for the heartache, but it still visits when his guard is down. He can hear Janet’s voice in his own. He can hear her voice in his mind. He drove by a store the other day that sold Jamaican beef patties and it made him despair, knowing he could never taste his mother’s again. He could hear her voice when he had to do Mother’s Day promos for ESPN Radio nearly a year after her death, and...
“It was excruciating,” he says. “You turn on SportsCenter and it's Mother's Day, and you see people giving thanks to their mom and my mom's gone. I'm relieved that she's not suffering anymore. But it doesn't take away from the fact that I miss the woman that I've loved more than anybody in my life.”
Stephen A.’s relationship with his father, who died a year later from Parkinson’s, was more fraught. When Stephen A. was a child, he says, his dad would sit down with a Budweiser to watch his baseball game and was not to be disturbed. Stephen A. was only to speak when spoken to, and sometimes even not speaking could have consequences. One time, his father spanked him good and hard for giving his fifth-grade teacher a dirty look in detention.
Did you think you earned that spanking?
“Whether I earned it or not is irrelevant. In today's generation, you got too many people negotiating with kids. Little kids—wet behind the ears, breath smelling like Similac—don't know anything. You don't get to go to somebody else's house, have your hand out for what they provide, while at the same time making rules.”
What was your relationship with your father like when he passed?
“Better.”
Why?
“Time. The fact that I'm a grown man. The fact that it was important to my mother that that happened. When you see somebody staring at their own mortality… Well, guess what? One day it’s going to be you. How would you want to be treated at that time? And that helps you heal. If you can't find forgiveness in your soul at that time, you never will.”
How did you feel when he passed?
“He was still my dad. I loved him. But nobody's my mother. I consider my mother to be the greatest human being I've ever known. She loved my daddy. And that says a lot about him, to be worthy of [her love].”
Did he reciprocate that love?
“I'm not qualified to answer that question. That's between them. I think he did. I could tell you for a fact my mother would not have answered your question.”
The day after his mother’s funeral, Stephen A. went right back to work covering the Finals because, he admits, work is a good distraction, and because his sisters told him to “finish the job.”
The first two times Bomani Jones met Stephen A., Stephen A. didn’t even bother to ask Jones what his name was. He’s not going to be distracted from his mission. Ever. “I don't know if you know this about me,” Stephen A. tells me, “but I have an uncanny ability to tune people out. It's actually very easy for me to do. I've been in arenas with nineteen, twenty thousand people, I never heard a word when I didn't want to. When I want to lock in, I don't hear anything.”
I’m gonna need Stephen A. to hear me right now, because I have a lot of shit I want to ask him, and not all of it pleasant. Very quickly, it becomes clear that our conversation is going to go where he wants it to go, and on his terms. You cannot fight against his current. There is no question I can ask Stephen A. that he is not prepared to answer with impregnable confidence.
“I just don't know of anybody who's important enough to lie to,” he tells me.
As on TV, Stephen A. is always prevalidating what he’s telling you, garnishing his monologues with a “make no mistake” or an “it’s just that simple” or an “I have always said.” His truth is the truth, and your truth is perhaps irrelevant. Those nonverbal cues Stephen A. uses on the air? He’ll use them on you, too. He’ll stage-manage you. Talking to him is work. He is equal parts irresistible force and immovable object.
So now I’m the one who must process while listening...to time my questions and responses so that they have the desired effect. I do not always succeed. He’s way better at this shit than I am. I start by gathering the basics. Stephen A. lives in North Jersey now. He lives there to get away from the noise, the irony of which is hopefully not lost on you. He is not married. He was engaged once. When I ask him why it went sour, he tells me it’s none of my damn business.
“It didn't work out. Matter of fact, I just told my sister that the other day: none of your business.”
What was the question she asked you?
“Something about my job and my money. I said this is not a discussion. You'll get an answer if I want to give you an answer.”
Surprisingly, then, he does want to answer if I ask him if he’s a father. He has two daughters, ages 11 and 10 at the time we speak. They have, in his words, given him a “new lease of life” since Janet died.
“It's a blessing,” he says, “but that love is also a curse, because you're never, ever, ever at peace.”
Neither girl is obligated to root for the Knicks, which Stephen A. and I both agree is a healthy rule. No debate required. Neither girl is allowed to watch First Take without asking their dad first.
Why?
“Because I might wanna go off.”
Though Stephen A. Smith normally does First Take out of ESPN’s South Street Seaport studio in Manhattan—freeing him from the obligation to trudge up to network headquarters in the hinterlands of Bristol, Connecticut—he is still like other prominent ESPN names in that he willingly subjects himself to an unreasonably long commute. In his case, it’s an hour and 45 minutes each way. “I can't tell you how many times I walk in and people look at me and had an attitude,” he tells me. “I was pissed off because of traffic! It was the damn Lincoln Tunnel.”
You might think traffic is of little concern to Stephen A., that maybe he has a personal driver. You would be wrong. Stephen A. Smith drives. Always. Twenty-seven years ago, Stephen A.’s older brother died in a car accident. Basil Smith was 33 years old at the time. “He was a traveling salesman and fifteen people were in the passenger van with him. He was the only one that died, because he was asleep.”
He continues: “Everyone else was awake. They were able to brace themselves. He got thrown from the van and he was killed. And so I prefer to drive myself. Period.”
Can you sleep in a car if you’re not the one driving?
“I'd have to be knocked out, practically drugged with sleep. I'm just on high alert at all times.”
Do you remember where you were when you got the news?
“I was in my apartment [in Archdale, North Carolina]. It was October 11, 1992. It was a Sunday. Every Sunday morning myself, my brother, and my oldest sister, Linda, would get on the phone together for our NFL picks. I picked up the call and I said, ‘Let's go.’ And she said, ‘No. Basil was in a car accident. He's not breathing on his own. It's not good.’ ”
Stephen A. hung up, prayed for his brother, and did some busywork around his place just to keep himself distracted. Forty-five minutes later, the phone rang again.
“I heard screaming in the background and Linda said, ‘He's gone. He passed away.’ Then my mother grabbed the phone from her and she said, ‘He's in a better place.’ And I just hung up on them. I started crying, and that was that. I didn't want to hear that my brother's in a better place.”
Can you hear it now? That he's in a better place?
“Not with her. But with him, yeah.”
After that, Stephen A. was his mother’s only living son. And while Janet Smith suffered no fools, she still doted on her boy. When Janet made her signature Jamaican beef patties from scratch for the family, she knew they were Stephen A.’s favorite food and would make him extra.
“My sisters would get so mad because my mother would set aside ten for me, because she knew I wanted them. As a matter of fact, she wouldn't cook them unless she knew I was coming over. That's why my sisters would just look at me: You're so spoiled. It's ridiculous. I'm like, Hey, it comes with perks. That's what happens being the youngest.”
Was it fair that you got so many?
“Who cares? I don't care. My sisters got plenty of stuff from my mother. So what if they didn't get the beef patties? I always get more lasagna than everybody else. I always get more biscuits than everybody else. Absolutely. I'm gonna take these perks. When it comes to food, it's a wrap. I'm not gonna have any sympathy. As long as y'all ain't starving, we good.”
What is your favorite food, apart from the beef patties?
“Carmen's lasagna. Now that momma's gone, the beef patties are no longer the favorite. The favorite is the lasagna.”
Do you travel to get your lasagna fix?
“Yes, I do. I have driven 45 minutes to Union just to get her lasagna, and left.”
Stephen A. now finds himself a favorite son of ESPN as well, but it wasn’t always this way. His career there has been, in the words of former network stalwart Bob Ley, a “multi-act play.” In 2005, he was given his own program at the network, dubbed Quite Frankly with Stephen A. Smith. He did not waste time in attempting to revolutionize the format, telling his old mentor, Garry Howard, “I'm going to put four guys on the show, and they're all gonna be black!”
Howard was invited to be one of those panelists. “So I go into the makeup room,” Howard tells me. “My stomach is starting to turn, ’cause I'm not built for this shit. Stevie comes in, looks at me right before we walked out, and says, ‘I'm going to kick your ass when I get you out there.’ ”
Despite its groundbreaking status, or perhaps because of it, Quite Frankly lasted less than two years before getting formally axed by then ESPN EVP of Content John Skipper. Two years after that, Stephen A. left the network (he says ESPN lacked a clear vision for his future) and disappeared into a kind of purgatory until 2012, when he came back to ESPN, joined First Take, and resumed his steady ascent. Since then, he has continually bet on himself, and bet that ESPN is the right place for him to do it. That self-investment has paid off for both parties, and they are now inextricably loyal to each other.
At a certain point, according to Hill, there was talk that ESPN wanted Stephen A. to co-anchor the same 6 o’clock SportsCenter show that Hill herself ended up co-anchoring. He never took that chair. But with his new contract in place, he’s gotten his own NBA pregame edition of SportsCenter that airs every Wednesday night. His show, his way. He has more than earned it, and those around him agree. Ley says that, at least in the professional sense, “some people are worth a hell of a lot more than other people.” ESPN feels the same way. They prize Stephen A.’s voice and his willingness to do everything, all the time. He prizes their platform, as ESPN demands all their on-air talent do. Bomani Jones says, “ESPN definitely believes that what they give you along with the paycheck is the ability to work at ESPN. I've been through enough negotiations to know this.”
For Stephen A., his faith in authority has paid off in multitudes. That faith has put him at the top of ESPN and given him tremendous clout, the kind that allows him to brush off difficult questions and to wield significant power internally. He’s a member of the boys’ club now. “I'm not somebody that you want to get on your bad side by lying to my face,” he says to me. “I'm the Mack truck that they see coming.”
One of those people who didn’t see the truck coming was one of his own co-workers. Back in May, ESPN writer Baxter Holmes (who respectfully passed on commenting for this story) published a deep dive on Magic Johnson’s time as then president of basketball operations for the Los Angeles Lakers. He found that Johnson was a ruthless dilettante who went out of his way to constantly remind subordinates that they were expendable. That story dropped the same day Magic was due to appear with Stephen A. on a SportsCenter NBA Finals special. Stephen A. was not at all happy about the timing of Holmes’s story, and said so publicly. He wanted a heads-up that the story was firing, and when that heads-up never came, he “was ticked off,” says Stephen A. “I'm not going to sit around and feel disrespected.”
In fact, Stephen A. tells me that Magic was, by all accounts, right to be a cruel overlord, and that anyone complaining about it is too soft to handle living in an unfair world. “Okay, you were a mean boss. People didn't want to work for you. Some people had anxiety attacks because they felt you were a bit harsh on them. You know what I'm thinking?” Stephen A. says to me, setting me up for his uppercut. “[The Lakers] missed the playoffs six straight years. What did you expect? If you're telling me he didn't smile, he didn't talk to you, he assured you that if you don't get the job done, others will? Those are the conditions under which I've worked all my life. You get the job done or somebody else will.”
Have you issued such edicts to your own subordinates?
“Well, no, because I'm not in a position of authority to make that call, but make no mistake about it, if I was in a position of authority and you were failing, you would know immediately your days are numbered unless you turn this thing around. I'm trying to win.”
During the Magic affair, Stephen A. was letting his Crunch Berries hang out for all to see. Henry Abbott witnessed it. Abbott, whose TrueHoop blog was purchased by ESPN in 2007, and then more recently relaunched as an independent newsletter, told me, “I feel like Stephen has moved to this other place where he's like, I'm friends with Magic Johnson. It's personally inconvenient for me for Baxter's story to come out. So let's just pretend it doesn't exist. I'm like, Where's the guy who was working the back hallways trying to reach Aaron McKie in 2000? That guy worked his ass off.”
He adds, “The enemy of truth is power, right? He has a lot of power.”
Abbott has felt the sting of that power himself. “He was always mad at me, like when I wrote shit about Kobe.” When I ask Abbott if he felt like Stephen A. was bullying him by openly expressing displeasure with his work, he replies, “I felt he did, yeah.”
Not that Stephen A. will apologize. He will not apologize for his pal Magic. He will not apologize for his money or his fame or his finer hotel accommodations. He will not apologize for hogging all the lasagna like Garfield. He will not apologize for the system that he now prospers in, and he has no interest in upsetting it.
If you are feeling generous, you can say that some of Stephen A.’s opinions, the ones that have gotten him into trouble at ESPN in the past, could be characterized as old-fashioned. But if you aren't feeling generous, you could say that many of them are retrograde, ok boomer-type horseshit: the kind of tiresome stock takes that the anti-PC crowd often pride themselves in having. I ask Bomani Jones if Stephen A. is “conservative,” at least in the philosophical sense. “Stephen A. is definitely more of a moderate than I am,” says Jones. “You ain't gonna see me go on Hannity.”
Jones continues: “I take you to any barbershop in America, and there's going to be somebody that leans a bit conservative. That's not to say that Stephen A. is a full-on right-winger or anything like that, but he definitely has some views on things more in line with the conservative platform.”
“Stephen A. is a centrist, and I don’t mean that as an insult,” says Jemele Hill. “Behind the bombastic presentation is someone who is more conservative than people realize. He’s been in this business a long time and had to fight to get what he deserved, and I’m sure those experiences contributed to shaping his perspective. Besides, he’s not alone. A lot of sports fans feel the same way. I just don’t see it that way, and I never have.”
In keeping with the tone of that platform, Stephen A. will happily concede he’s wrong on occasion, but that doesn’t mean he likes it. He’s not necessarily grateful to be wrong, nor grateful to see things in a new light. When Stephen A. tells you something you don’t wanna hear, as he prides himself on doing, there’s a marked difference between it being a truth you’d rather not acknowledge and it just being generally unpleasant and wrong. On certain matters, Stephen A. believes he’s spewing the former when it’s often the latter. I ask him…
Do you do your best to not make the people at First Take feel expendable?
“I'm trying to win, why the hell shouldn't you have to?”
So you're all right with that being how it is?
“It's reality at GQ. Go ahead and write a shitty article. Show up late. Have people say you're not thorough, you're not committed to measuring up to what the GQ brand is supposed to be about, and watch what they do to you.”
What if I'm made to feel disposable even though I have not slacked off or been disrespectful?
“The boss is who determines whether your work is good enough! It has nothing to do with right! If you own a business or you're in charge of a business, you get to make the rules. You do not get to have your hand out for somebody else's money and define what the standards of success are. If anybody could go out there and define their own success, what kind of world we living in? You'll have a whole bunch of people who are mediocre that have jobs, and spending [the company’s] money. That's not how the real world works.”
I would argue that the “real world” could use some tweaks, but Stephen A. has little interest in hearing it. The man’s absolutism not only makes it difficult to have a relaxed, easy chat. But, more important, it’s also used as cover for when he fucks up. And make no mistake, he has. Take, for example, the time he had this to say about then NFL running back Ray Rice knocking his then fiancée out cold in a video that became public:
“I’ve tried to employ the female members of my family, some of who you all met and talked to and what have you, is that again, and this what, I’ve done this all my life, let’s make sure we don’t do anything to provoke wrong actions.”
That whole statement got Stephen A. suspended by Skipper for a week, a suspension Stephen A. still feels was unjust.
“Let me be very, very clear,” he says to me—a warning sign that he might not necessarily be clear. “I apologized because of how things were interpreted. I have never felt that I deserved to be suspended; that was the wrong damn decision. My words were very, very simple, and people tried to interpret it being different than what it is, because that's the world we're living in. I have never hit a woman in my life. I never would.”
He’s not finished.
“My point is this, and I would appreciate it, if I'm going to be quoted, to be quoted accurately: If you find yourself in a position where you're dealing with some no-good bastard, who’s a punk, who would put his hands on a woman. And he’s crazy enough to be doing something like that, the objective is to get out of that situation in that moment, so you can survive. Because somebody like that, you don't know what they would do to you. And then after that, deal with him.”
This verges on some Rambo shit. Read anything about the complexities of domestic violence—testimonies from both the abused and those close to them—and you quickly learn that there are myriad psychological and economic factors that compel victims to remain with their abusers, even when the danger is at its highest. When I ask John Skipper about Stephen A. feeling he was wronged about his suspension, he says, “I don't have any particular problem with him having that point of view. Nobody wants to be suspended. But I believe it was the right decision. I hope he will continue to be thoughtful about issues like that.”
Quite frankly, I am not convinced that he has been thoughtful about it. I ask Bomani Jones about the Ray Rice comments, and Jones tells me Stephen A. “sounded very much like an old man who did not realize that that's not what we're doing anymore.” I ask him if he thinks Stephen A.’s opinions have evolved since his suspension, and Jones replies: “I bet he wouldn't say that stuff on television again.”
Next, I ask Stephen A. about Floyd Mayweather.
You once tweeted, "I'm hard pressed to believe Floyd Mayweather Jr. Put his hands on a woman. Let's no discount [sic] the women out there who want someone like Mayweather strictly for the cash. Men ain't wrong ALWAYS.” Do you still believe that?
“I don't recall tweeting it, but I'll take your word for it. I didn’t believe that somebody would be in his position, at the time, would have been that stupid and cost themselves what he ultimately cost himself. And then come to find out, once you saw the evidence, or you heard about the evidence in court, you're like, ‘Well, damn. He was that stupid.’ ”
Later on, I ask one female ESPN employee about Stephen A. and she says, “I have nothing positive to say. Hahahahahaha.” Jemele Hill, who herself was suspended after suggesting fans could boycott the Dallas Cowboys’ advertisers after Cowboys owner Jerry Jones threatened to bench players who would not stand for the national anthem, tells me, “I do think there are some gender dynamics that he doesn't get.” Stephen A. may have built his brand on raw honesty, but since his suspension, it’s clear that he’s been strategically burying some of that honesty, lest all the snowflakes out there take it the wrong way. Ask him about any of it, and he reacts as if you’re forcing him to relitigate matters he deems long ago settled, and in his favor.
Do you think society has gotten too soft?
“I think our society has overcorrected in a lot of ways,” Stephen A. declares. “And I know that's not popular to say, but I don't give a damn. It's the absolute truth. Everybody is trying to get their way all the time. The secret to our success, as far as I'm concerned, as Americans, is not that we get our way all the time, it's our tolerance for not getting our way.”
What is your relationship with Jamie Horowitz like now?
“Jamie Horowitz and I have a very good relationship.”
What did you think when Fox Sports fired him for reported sexual harassment? Did you think that was fair?
“I don't have any position on that. Usually in situations like that, companies know more details.”
Have you spoken to him about his ouster from Fox?
“Yes.”
What did you guys talk about?
“None of your business. That is a trust that I will not violate.”
This is from you: "I am a proponent of most of the causes the gay community has fought for, and I think that it's wrong how they've been prejudiced against. But having said all of that, I think it's important to recognize that that doesn't mean [you] have a right to [people being] comfortable with you." Do you still feel that way?
“I don't care what you are, you're gay, you're transgender, you're whatever. I completely support you, in terms of the rights that you want to have. BUT the flip side to it is that, if you are a heterosexual and you don't want to hang out in a gay bar, you should not feel like you're doing something wrong because that's not what you choose to do. That's all I meant by that.”
I don’t challenge Stephen A. on this explanation and I end up deeply regretting it, because I don’t believe that’s anywhere close to what he meant. But as you can see, Stephen A. often tries to deflect from full accountability for his words by telling people that they were either too stupid or too mean to intuit the supposedly noble intentions of them, and that he has been unfairly victimized as a result. He’ll admit a small bit of culpability for his transgressions, but not enough to fully accept the consequences of them.
This is a shame because, oftentimes, when Stephen A. really does own what he says, he can be singularly brilliant. And deeply, deeply funny.
Did Carmelo Anthony contact you after you said, in a now-legendary clip, he was bad?
“I don't recall saying he was bad. I said he's playing bad.”
I was going to show you the video. Not to be a dick, but because you say, "Carmelo Anthony…[long pause] is bad."
“But he was looking bad at the moment. I'm surely not going to deny some of the bad moments he's had.”
Fair enough. Did you ever talk to Lamar Odom after your joke about him being on crack?
“I have not. I'm sure if I saw him, we'd have a conversation. He knows where to find me. Lamar Odom has had my number for years.”
I reached out to Lamar Odom’s people for this story but did not get a response. I also ask Bomani Jones if the joke—which was definitely funny—was fair to Odom. “I could make the argument that if I were Lamar Odom, it is not something that I would want to hear,” says Jones. “But it is not unfair to Lamar Odom as it appears that he was, in fact, on crack.”
Torre mostly agrees. “It's fucking hilarious,” says Torre. “I do have some element of guilt about that. However, when it comes to what made that funny, it was the fact that Stephen A. was somehow [the] one person to point out what was obvious, which was this guy had an addiction to the most conventionally comical substance. Stephen A.'s delivery of it made me forget that I was an empathetic person. That's his power.”
That power worked on me as well. The joke still kills. On to other pressing issues.
A while ago, it sounded like someone farted on First Take. Who was the farter?
“I said nobody passed gas on the set, which was true. Now if it happened a day that I wasn't there, I'm not aware of that. I neither heard it nor smelled it.”
And if you did not smell it, no one could have dealt it.
“Well, what do you want me to say? I suppose it's humanly possible for somebody to pass gas without there being a sound, okay? But I didn't hear it and I didn't smell it.”
What was the mysterious image link that you tweeted a while back? I can't believe I'm going to ask you this, but you sent a tweet that said, "TAke a look, y'all!" with a link that was dead.
“I think if I remember correctly, it was from a few weeks ago. And it was basically giving an indication that none of us knew what the hell was going on. So in other words, ‘Take a look, and what are we looking at? Nothing. Because nobody knows.’ So it was something along those lines, if I remember correctly. But I haven't looked at it in a few weeks.”
I double-check my phone for the timestamp.
Actually, it was from May of 2015.
“Well then, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm shocked that you expect me to remember some of these things.”
You told me you feel sorry for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Why?
“You've got eighteen-hundred-plus players in the NFL. It's a far tougher task for Goodell to manage the relationship between the owners and the players than it is for an NBA commissioner to do it.”
I'm not sure Goodell feels all that obligated to please the players.
“I think he likes the check that the owners give him. He's the bad guy because the owners use him to be the bad guy, so they don't have to be the bad guys.”
I don't think he minds that role.
“I don't get the impression that he wants the headaches that he's invited.”
Do you think there is a point where in order to make X amount of money or to amass X amount of power, you have to piss off people that you'd rather not piss off?
“If you're a businessman and you have a bottom-line agenda, you're not going to care too much about pissing people off.”
Is it good that the system is set up that way, though?
“I would like to see NFL players compensated a bit more fairly. But I also understand and appreciate the fact that you know what you signed up for coming in. Every workplace—that includes ESPN—has rules and regulations, and you have to capitulate to them if you want to work. And if you don't want to capitulate to those rules, then go find another job.”
Funny he says that, because months after we speak, myself and the rest of the staff of Deadspin will walk away from our jobs because we have no interest in capitulating to rules and regulations imposed by our management: new editorial constraints that we find to be both immoral and idiotic. I’m certain that Stephen A. shook his head in disapproval at our actions. Back to the debate...
What if there is no job that has decent rules?
“Well, that's the problem that you have. You don't own a business. We got to work and be big boys and big girls about this kind of stuff. Those who make the golden rules are those who have the gold. I wake up every day understanding that I don't represent just myself. I represent my mom. I represent my family. I represent ESPN. I walk out the door every day understanding that reality and operating accordingly.”
Is that good, though? To be in thrall to ESPN like that?
“Doesn't bother me.”
But can’t that make you feel like a replaceable cog in a machine at all times?
And this is where Stephen A. lands one square on my jaw.
“I'm sorry if it makes you uncomfortable, but I'm a black man. I always feel replaceable. One of the many definitions of stupidity is a black man who feels he is not expendable. There's not a black man alive that I know that feels he's untouchable, and that life doesn't go on without him. I've never met that man, ever. It's just the world we live in. No matter what I've done, no matter how much I've produced, there has always, always, always been folks who are waiting for me to make a mistake, so they can justify not marrying me. And I'm fine with that.”
He goes on: “You grow up, and then you watch professional sports, and you see some of the greatest athletes that we've ever seen in our lifetime treated as expendable commodities. And if they're exploited, or if they're treated as if they're expendable, who the hell am I or anybody else that think that that's not applicable to us? Do you know why First Take is held to a different standard? Because we've been winning. We're no longer in the basement. One could argue we're in the penthouse.”
Now, I’m a white guy. I always feel important and irreplaceable. I have not had to build my career burdened by his professional fears, nor those of other minorities. So it’s hard for me to argue against his broader view that employees should just do as they’re told.
His words can stick in your craw for a good long time. It’s why he’s good at what he does. Now I’m starting to doubt myself. And my life. Am I getting the most out of MY ability? Am I too soft on MY kids?
Alas, I must swallow that self-doubt and continue to embrace debate. Stephen A. has made an exception this once to debate me for free, and I’d best not waste it.
Do you feel now, or have you felt in the recent past, that you have not been treated as intellectually as you merit?
“I wouldn’t say that. That’s not the overwhelming feeling. When you're a black man, you're going to encounter people questioning your qualifications all the time. I could care two cents about that. Actually, that inspires me. That makes me smile. I don't worry about that at all.”
There was a rumor that you liked printing hate mail and tacking it up in your cubicle at the Inquirer.
“That is a lie.”
Did you ever read hate mail?
“Yes.”
Did you like it?
“No. Not amusing. I wanted to see what people were saying and whether or not they had a point. If they had a point, I learned from it. If they didn't have a point, I dismissed it. I'll tell you what really rakes my nerves: how people try to forget my résumé. That's where we have deeper conversations as to what your motivation is behind that.”
And what do you think those motivations are?
“I think in some instances it's jealousy, and I think in some other instances it's racist. There is no doubt what I have done. Why are you trying to act like I didn't? And then you talk about comparing me to bloggers. Bloggers don't have anybody to answer to. I did. Throughout my career.”
Hey, I'm a blogger.
“Whatever.”
You said of Adam “Pacman” Jones after he got arrested, “White players are not finding themselves in these situations. We've got to start taking a look at ourselves." Is that a fair generalization?
“First of all, what are you talking about? And when did I say that? See, you're asking questions, Drew, but you're not, with all due respect, you're not giving me context. I haven't thought about Pacman Jones in about three or four years.”
I double-check my phone again. This was January 2017.
“What I was saying was simple. When you're black and you're in a position of prominence, understand that you're an anomaly. You're an aberration. And when those kinds of things happen, unfortunately an abundance of young black men out here get stereotyped. And I get very upset about that, because I see a lot of African-American men out here conducting themselves in a very upstanding fashion. But it doesn't stop us from getting stereotyped and stigmatized because of the actions of a few.”
But then is it really the actions of the few that are to blame, or is it a greater societal problem?
“It's a combination of both, but society as a whole is only going to accept what it wants to.”
In turn, Stephen A. Smith has accepted the limits of what that society can offer him. After all, he now has eight million reasons to do so. He’s the one who has the gold. He abides by the edicts of his superiors and speaks of them in rapturous tones. He will challenge those suits, but he will still do what they ask of him so long as they are not threatening to, in his words, compromise his integrity. For example:
“No boss is going to come and tell me to put on a dress and I'm going to do it. Ain't going to happen. I don't do anything that I think will impugn my integrity as a man. But as a subordinate, I'm very, very, very big on authority.”
In my time with Stephen A., he offers unprompted praise upon bosses new, old, and spiritual: Norby Williamson, David Roberts, Connor Schell, Horowitz, Walt Disney (he refers to Walt Disney by his first and last name more than a few times in our conversations), Skipper, Mark Shapiro, and Bob Iger, whom he gleefully invited onto his radio show. All men, you might notice. Sometimes he drops so many boss names, it sounds like he’s accepting an Oscar. I’m sure Stephen A. likes all these guys, but fawning over them also acts as a shrewd way of downplaying the power that he himself has both amassed and wielded. He still insists he will never be more important than the four letters ESPN, nor will he be bigger than a mandatory company-wide parade to shill Disney+ on its launch day. He’s a front-of-the-jersey guy like that. Shapiro is now Stephen A.’s agent, and when I jokingly note that Shapiro now works for him, Stephen A. is legitimately offended by the idea.
“Mark Shapiro does not work for me. We work together. I do not employ Mark Shapiro, Mark Shapiro is big-time. You understand? I'm happy and honored to have him, and I shouldn't even say he's an agent.”
Stephen A. offers similar praise for new ESPN head Jimmy Pitaro, who banned on-air talent from expressing purely political viewpoints at ESPN or on any other platform. Pitaro’s policy was a clear aftereffect of the network banishing Hill for her viewpoints, and Stephen A. seemingly had little problem with them suspending Hill (the two still get along, but Hill does note, “Even if he thought the company was correct in suspending me, I really honestly wouldn't give a shit”), or with Pitaro instituting his little mandate. Maybe it’s because that policy helps protect Stephen A. from his own worst opinions. Or maybe it’s because the closer you get to power, the more you begin to sympathize and align with it.
Either way, he certainly seems to have a distaste for sports media personalities stepping out of what he perceives to be their proper lane. To him, they are failing to produce. To me, that’s what makes his story, while inspiring in many ways, somewhat tragic. His former mentor, Howard, says that Stephen A. “has reached back and helped hundreds of people of color who had issues trying to get into this industry,” but he has neither the desire nor the will to alter the framework of that industry. He has as big a platform as anyone on television right now, but he has little interest in using that platform to advance causes that might displease either himself or the c-suite.
“I don't think it can be denied that at a particular point in time, as a company, we got away from what the expectation of us was from people who patronized our brand,” Stephen A. explains to me. “I'm paid to talk sports.”
This is disappointing to hear, given that Stephen A. was one of the first people at ESPN to use sports as a way in to talking about larger social issues. But lately he exists mostly as a solemn defender of authority and of the capital that both they and he himself now possess. Check out his reaction to the NBA’s China fiasco if you don’t believe me, when he said of Rockets general manager and Hong Kong protest supporter Daryl Morey, “You have an obligation to adopt and embrace the interest of those you collect a paycheck from.” Or read him light into safety Eric Reid and NFL outcast Colin Kaepernick, demeaning the latter for daring to have his “hand out” (there’s that phrase again) for the NFL’s money and not being 100 percent deferential to them in the process. This is a pattern where Stephen A. lives now to respect moneyed interests and to be one.
As with many other powerful men, Stephen A. can point to his own career successes to validate his own worldview. He is baffled that others lack his work ethic and believes they shouldn’t be surprised when they find themselves in a rut because they failed to work eighteen hours a day. If he takes a day off, he tells me, “it’s almost like a catastrophe.” He has said many times that he feels as if he’s never arrived. I ask him why he feels that way.
“If I'm asleep, somebody else is awake. If I'm off, somebody else is working,” he says. “And if those things are happening, they think they can take me, which means that at some point in time they're going to confront me to test and see if I'm ready. And at that point I will annihilate them to show them that they were never ready at all.”
And so Stephen A. Smith cannot have outside concerns get in the way of that potential annihilation. The Mack truck is always revving, and it is always fully loaded. He is not at the top of his profession yet, because there is no top for him to reach; there is only the relentless work of continuing his ascent. He is a network executive’s dream in this regard. TV people have been searching for the New Cosell for decades now, when a more-than-worthy successor has been on your TV all this time.
Stephen A. is better than Cosell, in fact. Stephen A. was never a boozehound like Cosell, nor does he hold the system in which he operates in open contempt, nor does he lament the “jockocracy” of sports media that Cosell so thoroughly despised. Stephen A. is a perfected Cosell—an appealingly verbose man for whom every exchange is a transaction of some kind. He’s all business, all networking, all “winning,” all the time. I can take his relentless need to see things exclusively through a dog-eat-dog lens as the product of hard-fought wisdom—and he has most certainly earned his fair share of that—but I can also ascribe it to him being an evangelist for an unfair world that has now turned in his favor. When Stephen A. tells you that’s just how things used to be, it can come across as him saying that’s better than how things are, or how they can be. People who do not accept the status quo are children, and he doesn’t really care if you feel otherwise. That’s his secret sauce. Not caring what other people think makes for great television. In real life, maybe not so much.
There’s the real heart of this debate. Stephen A. is sui generis: a singularly talented man who has achieved what he has achieved thanks to an iron will. But this is the danger of self-made men who embody the American Dream: After a while, they come to believe that if others cannot make their own success, then they don’t deserve any. They don’t stop to contemplate what achieving the dream, though seemingly a wonderful personal development, actually does to you.
Given his career path, and given how our present world operates, you can excuse Stephen A. for diligently carving out a luxe space for himself within it, and then using his pulpit to elevate worthy people and worthy causes, which he has done with admirable zeal. He has had little choice but to become a team player at ESPN in order to do what he wants to do. But when you become a powerful apparatchik of that company, you risk looking an awful lot like the old boss.
“I'm very, very big on having dominion and control over me,” Stephen A. tells me. “How I want to live, my schedule. Things of that nature.”
It’s finally time for Game 3. When Stephen A. walks around the arena, he is met with endless fist bumps from strangers, including one overly tan guy in a velvet blazer and Hush Puppies. The Raps dispatch the Warriors with casual ease, and Stephen A. watches it all from a back media room—replete with Warriors-colored M&M’s as part of the spread—in furtive silence. If he’s still ailing, there’s little sign of it.
Meanwhile, after one day of this, I’m fucking exhausted. I can’t even keep up with the man when he’s not 100 percent. If you can’t catch his hustle, that’s your loss. I spend the entire second half of the game in press row, just happy to no longer be on my feet. After the game, Stephen A. is still working, taping a SportsCenter segment while a cadre of assorted fans remains in the stands, chanting “Stephen A.!” over and over again.
It’s time for me to go home. I walk out of Oracle Arena toward an Uber pickup zone that looks like the starting line of the Daytona 500. Through the loudspeakers outside, the last voice I hear coming from the Oracle is, naturally, that of Stephen A. doing his SportsCenter hit. We can hear him, but he can’t hear us. Just how he likes it. His job is not yet done, nor will it ever be. How would he be happy if it was ever finished? He is his takes, for better and worse, and so are we. This is the 2019 sports media icon America deserves.
I get in my Uber, longing for a warm hotel bed, and I can still hear the man’s voice in my head. He might be able to tune everyone else out easily, but the opposite dynamic can be a challenge. I keep hearing him tell me something he told me earlier in the day, with the same bravado he uses to both entertain people and to protect himself:
“Let me tell you the number one reason why folks should hate me,” he said.
“Because I am loved.”
Drew Magary is a columnist for @GENmag and the author of four books.
