Sometimes it is better to take a day off than do something you might regret at your place of business.
Other times people take a day off to protest something they disagree with.
Sharpe has never explicitly said why he decided not to show up the day after Skip Bayless got heat from his Damar Hamlin tweets, but one person who disagreed with his decision was Stephen A. Smith.
Here is what Smith had to say via Awful Announcing.
“That’s your chair. You don’t give it up for nobody,” Smith said of Sharpe. “That’s yours. I don’t give a damn if you were in the chair and had nothing to say and you just wanted Skip to talk. You don’t miss sitting in that chair. Because there’s an audience out there that expected to see you. But I understood him, like every single NFL player present and former that I’ve spoken to, heart was in the right place, going through a lot.”
Stephen A. recalled Kenny Smith walking off the set of Inside the NBA to support the players protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Aug. 2020. The First Take host said he later called Smith and questioned his decision to walk off set, telling him the same thing he would tell Sharpe. “That chair matters, we need to see you.”
“When some real stuff hits, you turn on First Take, you expect to see Stephen A. And Stephen A. is going to show up,” Smith continued on The Draymond Green Show. “I’m gonna show up. And that’s what I would encourage Shannon, Kenny Smith, Shaq, Barkley, or anybody else. We fought for centuries to have our voice. You got it. You don’t give it up. That’s my point.”
I understand what Smith is saying, but everyone isn’t like Stephen A., who cares more about the chair than anything else.
Flip the page for more of Stephen A. speaking on the situation.