IF STEPHEN A. SMITH IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT, AMERICA WILL SHRIVEL AND DIE
He’s seriously considering a bid, which officially would destroy ESPN, while the rest of us know he’ll squirm while taking lumps from China and Russia — remember him with LeBron James at courtside?
The biggest lie told about me in 2025 — something about moving my “operations base” overseas, when I think bonjour is Bon Jovi — actually might turn true in 2028. If Stephen A. Smith runs for President of the United States, Madagascar is an island nation in the Indian Ocean that could cure me, nurture me and bury me thousands of miles from the South Street Seaport.
I just want this man to get a fact straight. I want him to know more about sports than half his audience. I want him to approach the same TV ratings we generated on “Around The Horn” for eight years. Yet, people very sinister seem to be in his ear. Might one be Ari Emanuel, CEO of Endeavor, whose agency has linked Stephen A. with ESPN for five years at $100 million? Wasn’t it enough to be ridiculed on “Entourage” — and turn the UFC and WWE into global trash — when Ari has a client who would ravage America with one half-minute of unadulterated, deep-dyed podium crap?
“I can’t stand lying. I can’t stand liars,” Smith says.
Then how does he wake up? Or shave? Or think?
“You can criticize me. You can crucify me. You can love me. You can hate me,” Smith says. “Just don't make the mistake of calling me inauthentic.”
Inauthentic bastard. He thinks he would shout down China and Russia, but in truth, they would bombard him and make him squirm as LeBron James did on the sideline. Madagascar might not be far enough.
He says “people” are urging him to politicize and make an announcement. I prefer he know the difference between Detroit Pistons star Cade Cunningham and someone named “Wade Cunningham,” as he tweeted last week. Better, I prefer Smith quit his job as “First Take” host and blame his killer mistake, when he wrongly claimed James didn’t attend Kobe Bryant’s memorial service. Posts of the funeral confirm LeBron was there, while Smith has a gadfly reporter named Pablo Torre insisting two “high-level” sources claiming LeBron wasn’t there. Of course, Torre didn’t name the sources.
“I have no choice, because I've had elected officials, and I'm not going to give their names, elected officials coming up to me,” Smith told ABC News. “I’ve had folks who are pundits come up to me. I've had folks that got a lot of money, billionaires and others that have talked to me about exploratory committees and things of that nature. I'm not a politician. I've never had a desire to be a politician.”
Elected officials, pundits and billionaires? Stephen A. didn’t name them, either.
“Here's the reality: People, literally people, have walked up to me, including my own pastor, for crying out loud, who has said to me, ‘You don't know what God has planned for you. At least show the respect to the people who believe in you, who respect you, who believe that you can make a difference in this country, to leave the door open for any possibilities three years down the line,’ ’’ he said. “And that's what I've decided to do.”
Stephen A.’s self-driven primacy has ruined what we thought of ESPN. The network is entirely about an out-of-control host and lesser-paid hosts who bet on events and lose. Remember when we watched to hear about sports? Now Smith goes after President Trump and Scott Van Pelt moans like a sicko. Meanwhile, “Around The Horn” is going off the air, with departing host Tony Reali telling a website that he’s tried to reach me for years. What, does he need a job?
Same email address. Same phone number. An “X” site. A Substack site. Hey, I have Woody Paige’s email.
Smith on Trump: “I don't like what I'm seeing, but I'm not surprised. I mean, this whole tariff war situation is utterly ridiculous. I mean, my attitude was, is that he should have immediately targeted China and not every nation on the planet, for crying out loud, just throwing tariffs at everybody. Ultimately, he dialed that back, as we saw over the last few days, and folks on the right are up in arms. Basically, I should say — I mean positively, essentially saying that that was the plan all along. There doesn't appear to be a plan. Let's be, let's be very, very clear about that. It seems to be a bit very haphazard, and you know it's just thrown against the wall to see what will stick. But in the end, you know, what you have to applaud them for is for trying something.”
You saw the Masters scoreboard fluctuate for Rory McIlroy. Smith is worse than a ballpark Bobblehead drunk on third-hand beers.
Smith on Democrats: “They talk and they talk and they talk. But what can they do? They position themselves to do absolutely nothing. I didn't hear anything about tariffs from the Democrats before the election, Trump had been preaching about this for the longest time. The way people decry his strategy, he's been bloviating about that. They said nothing about it. Instead, they talked about everything from woke culture, the cancel culture, to abortion rights and all of this other stuff. So that wasn't going to win the election, and that's what we have to look at. What is it? What is it going to take to get the job done? That's why somebody who's a sports analyst, for crying out loud, is in the daggone on polls. Yeah, it's not, it's not somebody big upping in me. It's an indictment against a Democratic Party that doesn't have leadership. It doesn't have a vision.”
If ESPN has a future, chairman Jimmy Pitaro will redirect Smith and Pat McAfee from overmaxed egos to, oh, the industry of sports. Pitaro has no balls. Stephen A. knows it.
“If something touches on the world of sports, ESPN has never told me that I cannot discuss a sports-related matter,” he said.
And critics such as me? “You have haters from all walks of life — I could care less who wants me to fail,” he said. “They inspire me.”
Let me inspire him.
He is destroying a network. And he wants to destroy a country.
Madagascar does not have U.S. cable. I checked with a phone call, something Stephen A. has yet to figure out.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.