There rarely seems to be a topic of conversation that Philadelphia Inquirer general sports columnist Stephen A. Smith doesn't get fired up about, and the issue of race and the sports industry is no exception.
Yesterday, Smith was a guest of "Poor, Young, Black and Male: The Case for National Action," a two-day event hosted by the Penn Institute for Urban Research and the Center for Africana Studies.
The program is designed to tackle topics such as job discrimination and other social issues associated with racism.
Joining Smith in the discussion was Kenneth Shropshire, director of the Wharton in Business Sports Initiative, in a dialogue entitled "Sports Dreams and the Young Black Male."
Smith has been writing for the Inquirer since 1994 and is also a regular contributor to ESPN as an NBA analyst.
In his most recent sports-entertainment endeavor, Smith took on the challenge of hosting his own show on ESPN2, Quite Frankly with Stephen A. Smith, which features discussions on current sports issues with prominent figures in the industry.
The discussion last night ranged from topics such as the portrayal of athletes by media to discrimination in media themselves.
"I think racism is an extremely important issue in sports," Smith said after pointing out that only 20 out of 4,500 general sports columnists are of African American descent.
Smith cited this statistic as evidence of a continuing plight that blacks face in journalism, saying that "there is a large amount of Americans that want to suppress the opinions of African Americans, period."
Shropshire and Smith went on to debate the behavior of specific athletes such as Terrell Owens and Allen Iverson and how the popular hip-hop culture embraced by these stars can influence young fans.
Smith was quick to point out that these athletes should not be judged too harshly when compared to seemingly more clean-cut stars such as Michael Jordan, given the current state of the professional-sports culture.
According to Smith, when Jordan first entered the league, he "came in with the gold chains, the fade, the sweatshirts," until legendary manager David Faulk advised Jordan to change his image.
"All a sudden, before all of these exorbitant contracts, Michael Jordan was making $20, 30, 40 million a year by being marketed to white America," Smith said. "Today, with hip-hop having ingratiated itself in the NBA and vice versa, you don't have to change to make those kind of dollars."
Although a certain image often comes along with the lifestyle that so many players engage in, Smith cautions that one athlete's misdeeds are not indicative of the actions of his peers and must not be generalized as the behavior of professional athletes or of an entire race.
"Because of all the things that have become attached to it, the world of sports is no longer a distraction -- it's people's focal point. It's people's outlet that they use to stereotype and stigmatize," Smith explained. "When [Terrell Owens] elects to act in a certain way, you have a segment of the population that wants to say, 'That's y'all.' And I'm the kind of person that's going to say, 'No, that's him. That doesn't have anything to do with me.'"
Smith considers this range of issues relating race and sports to be of utmost importance, especially in light of the recent efforts of associations such as MLB and the NBA to spread their respective sports to international audiences.
He says he takes his role as a black journalist very seriously and considers it his responsibility to tackle these issues that are usually avoided by others.
"I think when it comes to these issues, especially with general sports columnists, people just want to give their opinions and step away, and I don't think that's our responsibility," Smith said after the discussion. "I think people have a right to know what the character is of a person giving those opinions.
"They need to look at you and be able to visualize the passion that I personally know is inside of me, and I take that very, very seriously. So I felt almost obligated to be here to speak on these issues, and that's why I'm here."
But even though some do not care for his methods of conveying that passion, Smith doesn't seem to mind a bit.
"A lot of people don't like me," Smith said. "And what I can say in response to that is that nothing pleases me more than to be disliked by those people."
And even though his rhetoric was as fiery as ever last night, nobody seemed to mind -- most were thoroughly amused.
