ESPN’s ambitious star broadcaster Stephen A. Smith subverted his own presidential ambitions this week with his perverse take on the emerging NBA betting scandal. Having once spent an afternoon with Smith, I was not surprised by his take, nor by his ambitions. What did surprise me during our afternoon together was a personality disorder so unfixable it will forever doom his presidential ambitions.
But first the NBA betting scandal. On Thursday, the FBI announced a series of arrests that involved both “Italian” mobsters and at least a few NBA players and coaches of unspecified race. The more serious charge is that the accused used inside information to rig bets.
The FBI investigation dates back to at least 2019 and continued through Biden’s years in the White House. Ignoring the obvious, Smith attributed the gambling bust to President Trump. “In his eyes, folks tried to throw him in jail. In his eyes, he’s innocent and ‘they’re trying to put me behind bars. I’m getting everybody.’ He’s not playing,” said Smith.
On air, Smith warned former WNBA player Monica McNutt, “Don’t be surprised if the WNBA is next on his list, because when you’ve got all of these protests that have been going out there and people have been protesting against him and what have you, this man is coming,” In response, FBI Director Kash Patel called Smith’s remarks, “The single dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Yes, the comment was dumb, but it was strategically dumb. As Fearless podcaster Jason Whitlock has documented, racial pandering on ESPN is not a bug but a feature. Smith has been positioning himself as a moderate, common sense Democrat, but he used this unhinged rant to remind his leftist allies that “this brother” can go as low as need be to scare black men away from the GOP. And no matter how low Smith goes, ESPN will always oblige him.
Dumbness is not Smith’s greatest liability. Nor is hypocrisy. It is hard to identify a Democrat not guilty of both. Smith’s greatest liability is that he lacks the one virtue essential to any successful politician, and that is charm. I do not exaggerate to say that Smith is the most charmless human being with whom I have ever spent time.
The year was 2006, the occasion was the taping of his ESPN show Quite Frankly. Looking down the roster of previous featured guests—Mike Tyson, Joe Namath, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Joe Montana—I may well have been the least famous person to have occupied the chair of honor next to Smith’s. Smith made sure I understood that.
For the hour or two I sat next to him during the set up, he extended not a single courtesy or question, no “how you doing,” no “can we get you something,” no “thanks for coming.” Nothing.
The subject for the show was “The Political Legacy of Muhammad Ali.” The largely favorable New York Times review of my then current book, Sucker Punch, lent me enough cachet to attract the producer’s attention. Reviewer Gerald Early, a black author and critic, described my book accurately “as the most thorough-going conservative revisionist view of Ali or, as Cashill puts it, the Ali myth, largely constructed by a white, liberal left cultural elite.”
After listing my various critiques of Ali—his betrayal of Malcolm X; his passive-aggressive role in the murder of his press secretary Leon 4X Ameer; his failure to quit the Nation of Islam after its “soldiers” slaughtered seven people, five of them children, at a DC house owned by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; his relentless degradation of Joe Frazier along crude racial lines; his unapologetic sexism; his unabashed racism; his call for an American apartheid and the lynching of interracial couples as late as 1975—Early shocked me by concluding, “Cashill is right on virtually every point.”
The other guests included black conservative Armstrong Williams, football legend Jim Brown, and Thomas Hauser, author of the definitive Ali oral history, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times. Lacking a review copy of the show, here is what I remember: the “conservative” Williams stabbed me in the back at every opportunity; Brown said something so untrue, I replied, “With all due respect, Mr. Brown, you’ve got it completely wrong”; and Hauser graciously agreed with me that the affluent young left had no interest in Ali or boxing until he rejected the draft.
Let me add one qualifier here. Brown was zoomed in. Had he been in studio I suspect I would have been a tad less confrontational. Even at 70, even on remote, he was intimidating. At to Smith, so overwhelmed was I by his charmlessness I was never quite sure whether he was being hostile to my view point or just indifferent to my presence.
Over time I have witnessed only one other would-be candidate with a charm deficiency as acute as Smith’s. That, of course, would be the ever supercilious Hillary Clinton. Clinton made the mistake of expressing her contempt for the ordinary American with the memorable word “deplorables,” and it cost her the 2016 election.
So far Smith has held his tongue. But having seen him up close, I can affirm that he thinks the way Hillary does. Sooner or later, he will slip, and the Javits Center balloon stash will have to be put back in storage once again.
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I very much enjoy your critiques, Jack. Thank you for being concise, informative and easily understood. I think Smith's total lack of self awareness and latent racism is the center section of a freight train load of problems he would carry into any major election. His willingness to back down from virulent race baiting to a less provocative stance on more egregious situations (ie - the WNBA's repeated attempt at maiming the one girl that has brought money and fame to an anonymous league) only partially hides Smith's dislike of the light skinned. ESPN is the perfect vehicle in our time for his brand of soft bigotry.
For me there’s only one redeeming quality for Stephen A.: his disdain for the Dallas Cowboy’s and Cowboy ownership. SA Smith & Ryan Clark are both ESPN’s in-house race baiters.