Southpaw 43: The Age of the Apology
Stephen A. Smith’s meandering apologies are ESPN's newest branding exercise
Dear readers,
When we started the newsletter, we promised you that we wouldn’t indulge in too much navel gaze-y media commentary. We are now 43 editions deep into this thing, and by our count, we have yet to devote an entire newsletter to criticizing a member of the sports media. The point is, we think we’ve earned it (and it was kind of a slow news week), so we hope you’ll indulge us this once. We promise we won’t do it again until at least edition #86.
If we’ve already lost you, might we suggest tuning into Formula 1’s British Grand Prix or the final stage of the Tour de France, both of which are happening right now?
Cheers, as always,
-Calder & Ian
Stephen A. Smith proves the Iron Law of sports media: Where you see an asshole, ESPN sees an opportunity.
Even for commentator Stephen A. Smith—who, if you are at all familiar with ESPN’s productions, is everywhere—this week has been particularly attention-filled. On Monday, he hit an exacta of offensive comments, first when he argued that it’s bad for baseball that Los Angeles Angels star Shohei Ohtani doesn’t speak English, and then when he refused to learn how to pronounce the name of the Nigerian Mens’ Basketball team (many of whom play in the NBA, by the way) after they defeated the USA Mens’ team in an exhibition game.
Smith received a virtual tongue-lashing for both sets of comments, but his remarks about Ohtani’s English drew particular ire from all corners of the internet. (Even Barstool got in on the fun.) Within 24 hours of making the comments, Smith started issuing his apologies via every medium he had access to—on air, via the notes app, and through a bizarre selfie video released on Twitter, hitting (if you’ll allow us to use betting parlance one more time) the trifecta.
Smith’s antics are so blustery and inane that we considered not writing about them at all. After all, we can handle only many news cycles dominated by unthinking screw-ups and trite apologies. But the whole saga got us thinking about the purpose of Smith’s tasteless ramblings—and, more specifically, about the purpose of the apologies that follow them.
The first thing to understand about Stephen A. Smith is that his schtick is basically as old as ESPN itself. Stephen A. began his television career in 1999 at a now-defunct network called CNN/SI, an early 24-hour network where Time Warner attempted to merge CNN and Sports Illustrated. (Ironically, it was much more of a straight sports news network than the current version of ESPN is.) In 2005, he scored a daily, hour-long show on ESPN, and since then he’s been climbing the ladder at the network.
The law of averages suggests that at a certain point, any incurious dolt who discharges his stream-of-consciousness musings live on air for 10 hours a week will eventually stumble his way into saying something insensitive, and Stephen A. has proven to be no exception to this rule. Within the past decade, he’s apologized for, among other incidents, suggesting women might provoke domestic abuse and making insensitive comments about female soccer players. (ESPN suspended him for his comments about domestic abuse, and he issued something like an apology for both sets of comments.)
Yet Smith’s missteps are not even mistakes. At this point, they are the foundation of his personal brand. No one who is even glancingly familiar with Smith can be genuinely surprised by his latest fuckup. As one of our favorite sportswriters, David Roth, wrote in Defector this week, “The low thrill of watching Smith comes mostly from the way he will begin a sentence without any real sense of how he’s going to finish it and then add switchbacks of blustering stagey distress and various tire-screeching caveats as needed until he figures out how to wrap things up.”
What was especially notable about this round of Smith’s antics was not the incident itself, or even his halting apology, but what happened after—specifically, the way that ESPN managed to convert the ensuing dialectic of offense and apology into another branding exercise.
Here’s how it went down. Shortly after Smith’s comments, Jeff Passan, ESPN’s in-house MLB insider, tweeted this out:
As promised, Passan then appeared on Smith’s show, where he delivered the following rebuke:
“Shohei Ohtani came to this country at 23-years old, he left behind his family, he left behind his culture, he left behind his country, he left behind everything he knows to pursue the American Dream. He wanted to come here and be great. And he is the sort of person who this show, and who this network, and who this country should embrace. We are not the ones who should be trafficking in ignorance, we are not the ones who should be perpetuating false ideas that, unfortunately, far too many people out there believe. We should look at Shohei Ohtani as a bastion of what this country and this sports world is about.”
At first blush, Passan’s appearance might seem encouraging, a sign that ESPN, notorious for its efforts to keep anything even resembling political commentary out of its sports coverage, is beginning to relent. But that’s not what’s happening here. Like every 24-hour news channel, ESPN knows that the offense-apology-reaction cycle is an integral—and very popular—part of 24-hour news coverage. Controversy drives clicks: if the network can manufacture a controversy about itself, and then carefully choreograph a sanitized and feel-goody showdown between its stars, then all the better. And that’s exactly what happened between Passan and Smith. To no one’s surprise, Passan later tweeted the clip of his interaction with Smith, and he got over 400,000 views. Other versions of the clip have racked up millions of hits.
Passan is, of course, a lesser offender than Smith himself, but it’s hard not to hear something hollow and shortsighted in his extremely earnest finger-wagging. Ohtani is the type of star that the sports media should embrace, but Passan’s employer has demonstrated time and time again that it is either unwilling or unable to embrace figures like Ohtani. Whatever he might think he is doing, Passan is not giving voice to the better angels of ESPN’s nature. Instead, he is providing them with moral cover for their worst offenses while at the same time generating eyeball-grabbing clickbait to pad out the network’s numbers. At best, he’s getting seriously played. At worst, he’s willingly serving as the network’s good cop.
At the end of the day, though, ESPN’s fidelity to Stephen A. Smith is extremely uncomplicated. If the network executives wanted to do the decent thing, they would have asked him to do some research on the topics he covers years ago—and if that’s impossible for Smith, they would have gotten him off the air. If they wanted to keep him around to spur outrage and drive traffic, they would do exactly what they did this week. Maybe, in all of his doubling back and “stagey distress,” Smith finished his sentences on Ohtani and the Nigerian Mens’ Basketball team just how his employer hoped he would.
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