Dan Le Batard sat down with Stephen A. Smith on Le Batard’s South Beach Sessions podcast, where he accused Smith of ruining sports television.
“You can say that all you want to,” said Smith. “I would say, ‘Who the hell are you? “To sit up there and say me and him. What about you? Where the hell were you? Living under a rock? Teaching at Miami U? You were part of it, too! You ain’t innocent!”
Smith also tweeted his frustrations to his fans.
“‘Obnoxious, loud, demonstrative, bombastic, not good for television’… I’ve been called it all. Hell, ESPN fired me for it!” Smith wrote on Twitter.
In a separate tweet, he added: “What were the shows before Skip Bayless brought me on First Take in 2012 doing? Whispering? Mumbling???”
In responses to the tweet, fans sided with Smith:
“Bias aside if we’re being honest, Stephen A paved the way for a lot of sports media personalities in the world today. What him and Skip did with First Take really inspired a lot of people to start their own thing. His takes might be trash but we cannot deny his impact,” one fan wrote.
