Less than a minute into discussing his upcoming memoir, Stephen A. Smith set out the facts: no ghostwriter, no help, did it himself. The boisterous ESPN personality got his start at newspapers, so Straight Shooter, which will be published on Tuesday, marks a return to writing, as well as an occasion to revisit the sometimes-jagged path that led to his current status as one of the most prominent faces in sports media.
“What I want you to remember is the internships at the Winston-Salem Journal, at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, at the Greensboro News & Record,” Smith said, tracing his career arc in a recent interview at his New Jersey home. “From Temple basketball and football to a backup NBA writer, from a backup NBA writer to a beat writer…”
And so on, including being let go from ESPN in 2009 and returning in 2011 for what has been a lucrative second stint with the network. Over the last several years, Smith has become more than a TV fixture, as his monologues, arguments, and missteps often play out as sports stories unto themselves, especially on social media. We spoke in his home movie theater, just past the Lamborghini and Range Rover in the garage.
Nonetheless, Smith refuted any suggestion that he’s taking a victory lap with the book. He writes at length about his mother’s influence on him and what he learned about sports and talking during his childhood in Hollis, Queens. He recounts how he and his mother, when he was about 10 years old, learned that his father had another family a short walk away from his own. He tends to speak of his career in the same terms he applies to athletes—only as good as the last result.
The memoir is a distillation of that competitive ethos. He renders ESPN auditions and politics as game-seven material. He describes himself and his former sparring partner Skip Bayless as “unlikeable characters,” and recalls how the duo rose to new heights as they stoked each others’ provocations while cohosting First Take on ESPN from 2012 to 2016. Bayless then moved to Fox Sports 1, where he now cohosts a morning show with former NFL player Shannon Sharpe. Conflict is the baseline in this arena, but Sharpe’s objections to Bayless’s widely criticized tweet last week in the wake of Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin’s on-field collapse have seemed more serious, and Sharpe missed an episode during the immediate aftermath.
“To be candid,” Smith writes in Straight Shooter, “we capitalize on the kind of polarization people supposedly abhor.” Surrounded by a Sugar Ray Robinson poster and a popcorn machine, he reclined in one of his theater seats as he discussed the nature of that gift among other questions that his book raises. These are edited and condensed excerpts from the conversation.
Vanity Fair: You start the book, and you say that people have been asking you about doing a memoir for a while, but it wasn’t until your mother died in 2017 that you would consider doing it. Can you walk me through the series of events then?
Stephen A. Smith: I was so depressed. I was really, really going through it from the standpoint of, my mom and I were pretty close. And she’s the greatest woman that I’ve ever known. And for her to be gone. I had lost my brother in 1992 to a car accident and that was devastating enough, but I didn’t have any idea how I would feel. And when my mother passed away, it was just a pall, it was like a death sentence. I never felt as miserable as I felt. And I had to hide it every day. Because I was on TV. For at least the first year, I cried every day. I just really didn’t care that much. I would go through moments during the day where I didn’t care about life at all. The only thing that kept me going was my daughters, my family, my loved ones. After about a year in, I finally caved and I went to therapy. I was having to sit down, me of all people. Demonstrative, outspoken, talkative. And suddenly, I’m in a place where I’m mellow, and I’m just sad. The therapist had to get me to talk because I was just out of it. So it was almost like I had to be revived.
Dan Adler
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