May 25th, 2012
The Czabe links to Saturday Night Live’s take-down of Stephen A. Smith. It’s funny and cutting, but I suspect that the only way this will be read, anywhere that matters (read: in media executive suites in Manhattan and Bristol) as anything but a total confirmation that Smith is a cross-over cultural figure who transcends sports and carries with him enormous cache. It basically makes him un-fireable. You know who SNL parodies? Famous people. You know what the most precious commodity is for a TV “personality”? Fame.
However!
I’d argue that the media-executive love affair with Smith is probably misguided. I could be wrong, but my guess is that Smith keeps leaping from failure to failure, with a new job always waiting, because executives see him as a guy who “moves the needle.” Sure, people may mock him (and not just on SNL) but he’s a personality they love to hate. He’s like J.R. Ewing. Or Roddy Piper. Heel heat is a good in all walks of show-biz, not just wrestling.
But I wonder if Smith isn’t really an example of X-Pac heat—which is when the crowd doesn’t enjoying “hating” a character so much as they’re just annoyed by him, and wish he would go away.
Because wrestling writers are pretty clear-eyed about their business, they can typically smell the difference between genuine heel heat and X-Pac heat. The guys who make the HR decisions in sports-entertainment “journalism” may not be so sophisticated.
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I think I am an outlier, but I make a point of ignoring the people I hate.
Haven’t heard Dickie V in months – perhaps years – because I refuse to pay attention to ESPN when it comes to college basketball. Haven’t heard Stephen Smith in forever for the same reason. Lord, how I wish the mass of others had my discipline.
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I’ve never watched/heard him once other than the 30-second promo spots they ran (“Plain Speaking with Stephen Smith” or something like that) which admittedly were not compelling. Is he more obnoxious than John Salley?
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He’s the perfect NBA analyst.
Benedict May 25, 2012 at 8:04 pm
Before this last season, JVL, I would have agreed with you completely, but I happened to catch a fair amount of Stephen A. on my evening drives home, almost always expounding on the Knicks. I must say, he was far more right than wrong in his analysis of the team’s issues. Others have probably made this point, but is Stephen A. the Cosell of the 21st century? Pompous, hated, and comically self-important, but not always wrong in his point of view. There’s probably a Ph.D. thesis in communications in there somewhere.