Stephen A. Playing Solitaire During NBA Finals Underscores Bigger Problem In Sports Media

The optics of Stephen A. Smith playing Solitaire on his phone during the NBA Finals, which ESPN pays him tens of millions of dollars to cover, aren't great.

While him playing on his phone is hardly worth a scandal, it underscores a grander issue with the current era of sports media. The people paid to talk about the games make it seem like a chore.

Covering sports in America is work, by definition. But it's not really.

No one in sports media works that hard. Cutting meat is a far more challenging job than predicting who is going to win a game or who sits on the unofficial Mount Rushmore of all-time NBA players.

The average person would trade places without hesitation to cover sports for a decent living, let alone the millions of dollars most on television make doing so.

So, seeing sports commentators look and sound disinterested is incredibly off-putting to the average sports fan. And far too many of them do. Just read some of their tweets. Most of them are bitter, miserable, and begging for an excuse to talk about something else.

In fact, one of the reasons ESPN mainstay "Around the Horn" lost its way toward the end was because its panelists considered themselves too important to stick to sports. Hence, the conversations about genocide in China, religion, and the Trump administration on the show before its (long awaited) cancellation last month.

Between 2014 and 2017, former ESPN president John Skipper staffed an entire roster of pundits who liked but never loved sports, including Bomani Jones, Sarah Spain, Kate Fagan, Jemele Hill, Michael Smith, and Dan Le Batard. Not a single one of them remains at ESPN. Sports fans rejected each of them.

Employers force fast food workers to pretend they are having a good time taking your order. The least a sports host can do is pretend they enjoy talking about sports. 

Apparently, that's too much to ask.

Look, as important as Elle Duncan thinks she is, she isn't. We reckon not a single person in the nation wondered about her thoughts on abortion or sex education. Nonetheless, she told everyone watching ESPN what she thought about both topics.

We understand sports talk is, fundamentally, goofy. It's supposed to be. There's a reason people like Chris "Mad Dog" Russo, Pat McAfee, and Charles Barkley are so much more successful than Bomani Jones or Sarah Spain.

Stephen A., for the most part, does a fine job pretending. However, he is just pretending. Sources tell OutKick that Smith used to leave the New York studio during the first half of NBA games for dinner and rush back for halftime, having not watched a single dribble.

He's a paid actor whose character bloviates about sports. If he could make more money discussing his fake backstory that he devised in his memoir, he would never mention sports again. 

And fans are starting to see through that, such as when he fails to do enough research to know for which teams certain players play. 

So, yes, we understand why seeing Stephen A. playing a game of Solitaire during the NBA Finals after signing a five-year, $100 million deal made sports fans cringe.

Imagine the average working American grinding all day in a shop for $50,000 a year, coming home to watch the NBA Finals, and seeing the highest paid personality in the sports media too bored with his job to even watch the game in front of him.

Networks shouldn't have to pay someone to be a sports fan. There are plenty out there who would gleefully pay attention to the game and speak from a place of knowledge.

It shouldn't be this hard for other networks to find those people.

Maybe, just maybe, ESPN should stop recruiting employees based on their skin color, what college they attended, and their politics. DEI doesn't take fandom into consideration. But to work in sports media, it should be a requirement.