Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [364]
STEPHEN A. SMITH:
I have no animosity. This is an industry that is about big-boy rules. You cannot get caught up in people, and they have an obligation to do what they feel is best. If they didn’t feel that I was best, I have to respect their decision. I don’t agree with that—they knew that—especially as it pertains to the NBA. Because I’m not going to lie, I feel I’m the best. I truly believe that: when it comes to covering the NBA, I feel I’m the best. But if they don’t feel that way, what am I supposed to do? If they feel I’m too controversial, what am I supposed to do? There’s nothing I can do.
KEITH CLINKSCALES, Senior Vice President, Content Development:
I do not believe Stuart Scott was the first African American on ESPN, but he certainly was influential because on SportsCenter, early on, he used hip-hop vernacular; he said things on the air that I knew when I heard them that the white producers who had approved it didn’t know what he was talking about. So it was like our own little codified thing. It was almost like, “If he’s cool enough to say that on the air, and no one’s stopping him, then this network is cool enough to watch.”
I don’t want to commit hyperbole here, but Stuart’s delivery on SportsCenter—his willingness to stick with it despite getting complaints, and the producers letting him stick with it—is one of the great cultural moments that African American culture has ever had. It made us relevant in sports.
Sports journalism’s record on hiring minorities is abysmal, and network television’s record is abysmal. If you look at some of the greatest sports media institutions we have before you even get to ESPN, they didn’t hire a lot of people of color, especially black men. And black women.
GARY BELSKY:
When we did the first body issue of the magazine, the reason we were so concerned about how we portrayed African American men with their shirts off was because early in the magazine’s history we received a lot of criticism, unfounded, that we seemed to always take off black men’s shirts but not white guys’ shirts. Of course, it was mostly photographers on sets who were making these choices. They were just out there on the shoots deciding how to photograph an athlete; it wasn’t any kind of conspiratorial plan. But we’ve always been sensitive to, or aware of, that criticism—which we should be, by the way, because fundamentally there’s a reality that has to have us thinking about how we represent women versus men, thinking about how we represent men and women of different ethnicities. We have to think about these things because our readers will be thinking about them once we put an image out there.
KEITH CLINKSCALES:
Let’s make no mistake—the urban audience is African American, Latino, and those men spend an awful lot of time watching ESPN. ESPN is the number-one station in the country for black men twenty-five to fifty-four. Not BET. Not TV One. It’s ESPN. And ESPN is number two among black men eighteen to twenty-four. ESPN never leaves the top three for ratings with black men. So for the demo, it makes business sense that you have more ways to talk and things like that.
I run a show-development lab, working with black filmmakers, Latino filmmakers, and we’ve been able to bring folks in that might not ordinarily get a chance to swing at the plate because they don’t have the journalistic pedigree, they don’t have the sports pedigree. We already know that very few African Americans have a sports pedigree that would be worthy of an ESPN, because history has not hired us. If you go to the