2017 Was The Year We Were Finally Able To Enjoy Stephen A. Smith For Who He Is

For over a decade, Stephen A. Smith has been a fixture of ESPN programming. Amazingly, it’s only been five years since he became a permanent host on First Take. I know, I can hardly believe it myself. But from 2012 until mid-2016, those were long, hard, cruel years, where for hours each morning, Smith and human bad opinions machine Skip Bayless would go around and around in circles, attempting to out-hot-take one another while Stephen A.’s “incredulous” voice reached wine-glass-shattering octaves.

Bayless parted ways with ESPN in April of 2016 and went to a whole new cesspool. Eventually First Take found a new guy to sit opposite Smith, as they tapped prodigal son Max Kellerman. It took some time for Stephen A. to adjust to having to fend off sane takes, but in the year 2017, he finally came into his own.

Divorced from Bayless — a man who has never once believed any of his own horrible opinions and crafts each kernel of sports take specifically to piss people off — this was the year we learned to love Stephen A. And that is a freeing, liberating brave new world.

Allow me to provide a caveat up top here: Smith is still perfectly capable of delivering an atrocious take every now and then. His recent brouhaha with J.R. Smith over the unprofessionalism of wearing hoodies on the bench is a real collar-tugger, and let’s try to forget his one-man war against the sticky icky. But by and large, we now know who Smith is, and can enjoy his one-of-a-kind, larger than life personality, rather than just cringing through him screaming at Bayless, who is a sort of human wailing wall, but for sh*t-talking LeBron James.

Even when Smith did something stupid in 2017, like attacking Kevin Durant for no good reason, there was usually a strong follow-up that made it tough to stay mad at the guy. In that case, for example, Smith invited Durant’s mother (the real MVP) on First Take less than a month later, after the Warriors won the NBA Finals, and apologized to her.

Hell, Smith has now become such an indispensable part of the sports landscape that they even got his uncanny valley ass in NBA Live.

And in perfect Stephen A. fashion, he helped break his own news.

But there were two things that really made us fall in love with Stephen A. this year. (And that’s not even counting him dancing with the Jabbawockeez for no discernible reason other than to prove that he’s a pretty decent dancer.) The first, and first in Smith’s heart, always, was the bottomless well of agita stirred up within him by the New York Knicks. He could often be found ranting about Phil Jackson tanking his favorite team, and it was never not entertaining.

When rumors began swirling that Jackson was listening to trade offers for Kristaps Porzingis, Smith absolutely lost his goddamned mind. He dropped a pitch-perfect and one-of-a-kind rant on the world, which gave us the now-indispensable line, “Who was on CRACK!”

It was a true landmark of pop culture, and even avowed Stephen A. haters couldn’t possibly be mad at the sheer entertainment value of the segment. When Jackson was fired by the Knicks shortly thereafter, Smith was so elated that he came in to talk about it, even though he was on vacation at the time.

The second moment that made us fall head over heels for Stephen A. in 2017 was, somewhat unexpectedly, the Conor McGregor-Floyd Mayweather superfight. The boxing match went about as expected, but for hours afterward, if a sports fan happened to turn on ESPN, they saw Smith and Teddy Atlas getting progressively more delirious and animated until they eventually had a heated argument about cheeseburgers.

It was a spectacular couple hours of television, and showed precisely how entertaining and hilarious Smith could be when he’s just being himself. Getting into arguments with people he respected and whose company he enjoyed, instead of being given the thankless and soul-crushing task of just reacting to a straw man every single day.

I would also like to point out that Smith acquitted himself extremely well when he appeared on Fox News, and when faced with a pair of über-Baylesses in Eric Bolling and Ted Nugent, he swung with aplomb, straining to pull the conversation onto its tracks while the spin-meisters tap-danced around him.

In past years, or in different venues, if he were faced with similar moving targets from Bayless or god knows who, maybe Smith would be right in there with them spiraling into oblivion. Maybe he just felt comfortable letting it all hang out because this wasn’t HIS house, so if he wanted to take a dump on the carpet, it’s not like he was the one who had to clean it up. But it’s refreshing to see him engaged, unrelenting … and actually acting like a respectable, upstanding journalist. This isn’t the Stephen A. who’s long been a punchline at times and a punching bag at others. This is someone we want to watch … and hey, maybe even get our sports news and opinions from.

At this point, Smith is still spouting hot takes from time to time, and can still come across as grating every now and then, but it’s clear that he is less burdened. Or maybe it’s just the context in which we can view him now. He’s not a bad guy, and he never has been. He’s just a sports radio personality, and an extremely entertaining one.

It’s great to finally be able to enjoy him on his own terms. Long live Stephen A. Smith.