Stephen A. Smith is more than happy to talk tough now that he is several weeks removed from his confrontation with LeBron James.
The Los Angeles Lakers star James appeared Wednesday on “The Pat McAfee Show” and offered his side of his incident with the ESPN personality Smith earlier this month. In part, James joked that Smith was on “a Taylor Swift tour run” thanks to the publicity from the spat and added that Smith completely missed the point about why James was upset in the first place. You can see James’ full comments here.
That led to a fiery response from Smith on his self-titled podcast later in the day Wednesday. During the podcast, Smith made the laughable claim that he was ready to throw a punch at James during their confrontation.
“If that man would’ve put his hands on me. I would’ve immediately swung on him,” said Smith. “Immediately.”
Smith also called out James in his response for supposedly being “two-faced” and a “liar” as well as for doing “shady stuff.” Here is the clip of Smith’s comments (but watch out for the bad language).
It is clear that things are extremely personal between James and Smith. But it is completely absurd for Smith to now somehow claim that he was ready to swing at James. Smith is nearly 60 years old and is obviously far smaller than the 6-foot-9, 250-pound superstar professional athlete James. Additionally, Smith would have had a whole lot to lose by punching James, especially as someone who recently got a new nine-figure deal from ESPN and has (seriously or unseriously) spoken about potentially running for president of the United States one day.
The video of the incident also showed that Smith was in a pretty defensive position when James confronted him. But that is certainly not stopping Smith from making the entertaining (and entirely ludicrous) claim that he was ready to go Mike Tyson on James.
