For Stephen A. Smith to go on national TV and lie about never saying anything personal about Kwame Brown was wrong.
For 20 years Stephen A. refuses to call Kwame Brown by his given name, just that right there is the ultimate disrespect. Imagine someone talking about you for 20 years and calling you out of your name. The name your mother gave you because she wanted you to be great?
Stephen A. doesn’t think he is doing anything wrong because he does it to everyone. It is his character and the thing that has made his millions, so it was pretty naive of me to think he would take a step back and really think how his words have meaning and could potentially be damaging to a person.
You can always critique an athlete’s performance, but when you continually and systematically do it in a way that can only be considered media bullying that is a personal attack. Skip Bayless doesn’t talk about LeBron’s family, but the way he has used LeBron and heap negativity on him whenever he can has made him a millionaire.
I have been trying to stress this to people over the last two weeks, but don’t take my word for it, just listen to what Kwame’s teammate Etan Thomas had to say about it.
Kwame didn’t exaggerate one bit about how he was treated in DC. In fact, we also recalled a few horror stories that Kwame left out.
One of the biggest culprits was Stephen A. Smith. There are countless videos — and I will include a compilation so nobody thinks I’m exaggerating — of Stephen A. Smith bashing Kwame. He said, “He’s a scrub, he can’t play the game of basketball, he has small hands, he can’t catch the ball, he’s got bad feet, he can’t really move… he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, he doesn’t have a post move that he can commit to memory, he has no game whatsoever, he plays no defense, he doesn’t have the heart, the passion, or anything that comes with it.” He called him a “bust” and constantly called out Kwame’s work ethic; for example, he said, “He didn’t work hard in 10 years,” and, “[He] never worked and put forth his due diligence.” Stephen A. refused to pronounce Kwame’s name correctly. He called Kwame “nothing” and actively campaigned for the Knicks not to sign him.
At the end of this compilation, you’ll see that there’s actual footage of Stephen A. Smith going on a speaking tour to colleges, high schools, and middle schools to continue his public degradation of Kwame. He exploited every opportunity to further these false narratives. He shouted fabrications that were simply baseless. The footage shows him telling college students that Kwame was immature and not ready mentally, emotionally or psychologically.
It gets worse.
The media controls the narrative about players if they want you to believe a player is dumb they can do it.
Kwame was an extreme case of that.
I remember seeing articles about Kwame not knowing how to order food in a restaurant, which I knew was a lie because me and Kwame went out to eat on the road and he ordered food just fine. There were stories about how he didn’t know how to use dry cleaners. People wrote that he was depressed. Not to mention the pieces about how he was garbage and a bust and shouldn’t be in the NBA. They used words like “worthless” and a “waste.” None of that was true or accurate, but that’s the narrative that was constantly repeated over and over and over again until everyone just believed it.
When you repeat something a million times, there will be people who believe it and act accordingly. It shifts their opinion. It’s like brainwashing. And that’s exactly what the media did with Kwame. Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless, in particular, did this and there are many others who joined in (and I’m sure Kwame has them on his list).
There is even more.
Because of Stephen A. and Skip, David Stern was used Kwame as a negotiation tool to institute an age limit in the NBA.
All the things Kwame said were true.
I remember Stern using Kwame Brown and that same narrative that was broadcasted by Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless and others as a justification as to why we needed to create an age-limit rule. They said that teenagers aren’t mature enough and that Kwame didn’t even know how to order from a restaurant and how much of a “disaster” it was to have young high-school players thrown into the throes of the NBA. He actually quoted the same narrative Stephen A. and others were constantly repeating, and I heard that with my own ears.
Kwame has a right to be upset.
Stephen A. and Skip Bayless should be ashamed of themselves, but they aren’t.
Flip the page for the videos Thomas was referencing about Stephen A. and Skip degrading a black man and costing him millions.