Stephen A. Smith has made a living out of talking his mind about everything that revolves around the NBA. Needless to say, that means he had to talk about Kyrie Irving’s situation with the Brooklyn Nets for quite a while.
Irving obviously didn’t care for Smith’s comments about him. The ESPN pundit praised Kyrie’s game, but attacked his character and lack of availability over and over.
A lot has transpired ever since, but Smith has made it loud and clear that he’ll never have a relationship with the former Cleveland Cavaliers star, and a lot of that has to do with his father.
Stephen A. Smith Explains His Beef With Kyrie Irving
“His father and I are fine,” Smith said on Paul George’s Podcast P. “But it got to that point because where it wasn’t, unbeknownst to the public, the father loving his son was coming to his defense by sending me text messages I didn’t really appreciate. We were at the STAPLES Center. Kyrie rolls up on me, he taps me on the back, and says, ‘You’ve got that same energy face-to-face?’ I said, ‘I’m standing here, ain’t I?’ Then he said, ‘It’s really not about me anymore.’ And I said, ‘You’re right’. It had become about me and his dad and how we elected to communicate with each other.”
“The shame of it is that I’m 55 and obviously, his father is around my age,” continued Smith. “The younger son was the one that had to educate us. That’s what men do, Kyrie Irving was right, and I called his father and we met face to face, there was no problem. I said to him, ‘I’m still gonna judge your son by what I see. But this notion that there’s gonna be personal animus or whatever, I was just doing my job. If it looked different, that’s on me.'”
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Fortunately, things didn’t escalate, and props to Kyrie for trying to settle the beef between two grown men. That’s why the media needs to be quite careful when talking about players, making sure things doesn’t turn personal.
