For years, ESPN pitted a parade of attention-starved, mostly black stooges against Skip Bayless to legitimize and sanitize Skip’s over-the-top attacks on Terrell Owens, Chad Johnson, LeBron James and all the other low-hanging black fruit Skip could reach from his debate chair. The parade of stooges failed to properly protect Bayless. You could still see he was an insecure, disingenuous version of Glenn Beck.
Enter Stephen A. Smith, desperate to re-emerge as a high-six-figures TV celebrity, desperate for his next hit from the TV crack pipe. Smith campaigned for the role of Skip’s beard.
Recognizing that its black viewers couldn’t resist Skip’s bait, ESPN doubled down, making Smith an equal partner in the show and re-imagining First Take as the black barbershop of sports talk. The rap-music bumpers, the black, eye-candy female host, the guest appearances by rappers and Smith are all an attempt to make Skip’s negro-baiting palatable, marketable and justifiable.
The show has been dumbed down and ghetto-ized. An environment has been created that entices Smith and others to bojangle and stoop to Bayless’ level of discourse. Terrell Suggs was celebrated for coming on the show and calling Bayless a “douchebag.”
