Everyone already knows that Stephen A. Smith is one of the most obnoxious people in sports media.
He’s constantly screaming at anybody who offers a different viewpoint from his and ultimately it has translated to the “First Take” co-host about to be paid the most money of any of the talking head personalities on the network.
And recently, Stephen A. Smith opened up about some advice President Trump gave him once.
ESPN is a breeding ground for liberal propaganda. Almost all of the ESPN talking heads are liberal and it’s painfully annoying. The only one who falls outside of that purview is conservative host of “The Will Cain Show,” Will Cain.
Just recently, Dan Le Batard made a lot of noise and reached national headlines when he criticized President Trump’s latest rally where he brought up Freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and the crowd chanted “Send her back.”
Le Batard decided to defy the ESPN rule that on-air talent is not allowed to talk politics unless it is a part of a sports story.
The controversial host of “The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz” recently said “This felt un-American what happened last night … It’s not the America that my parents aimed to get for us, for exiles, for brown people. There’s a racial division in this country that’s being instigated by the president and we here at ESPN haven’t had the stomach for that fight because Jemele [Hill] did some things on Twitter and you saw what happened after that and then here, all of a sudden, nobody talks politics on anything unless they use one of these sports figures as a meat shield in the most cowardly possible way to discuss these subjects.”
The reverberation of this comment rippled throughout the sports world and it escalated to the point where ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro stuck to his guns after Le Batard pleaded with him to discuss things of this nature on-air.
Le Batard didn’t even show up for his next show and his future at the network is uncertain.
But then you have Stephen A. Smith.
Although he’s in a sea of liberals on a daily basis, Smith is actually pretty anti-politics. His political affiliation is unclear but if it’s any consolation, Smith is a good friend of Fox News star Sean Hannity. That should give you a pretty good idea of where he stands on the issues.
Even if he doesn’t agree with Hannity’s politics, that doesn’t mean he’s some outraged liberal who refuses to be friends with someone for that reason.
Smith was on an episode of YES Network program “CenterStage” and detailed some advice Trump gave him once about his contract demands at ESPN.
Smith recalls that Trump told him, “We’re in the green room (of the former ESPN2 showQuiteFrankly), we were talking. And he said, ‘Stephen A…you’re doing good, you’re doing good…but there’s more things for you to accomplish.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ And he said, ‘Take my advice…when you go to a bank and you borrow $3 million and you can’t pay it back, you got a problem…but when you go to a bank and you borrow $300 million and you can’t pay it back, we’ve got a problem…the moral of the story is, the more someone invests in you, the more they must work to ensure your success.’ And when he said that to me, I held onto that for the rest of my career, because so many times, I was big about well you know what, this is what I do. And as long as I’m in the public eye, I’m a bit ubiquitous, I’m gonna be relevant. But guess what? If you come cheap, you’re also expendable. But when you cost more, they have to work more diligently to ensure your success.”
That clearly resonated with Smith because he just recently inked a deal for $10 million per year, which is $3.5 million more than the former highest paid ESPN personality, Mike Greenberg.