The feud between Aaron Rodgers and Jimmy Kimmel looks tame compared to the one between Stephen A. Smith and Jason Whitlock.
The ESPN “First Take” member went on a no-holds-barred 40-minute diatribe on the “Stephen A. Smith Show” on Wednesday to air his grievances with Whitlock after he recently called into question claims made in Smith’s memoir.
Whitlock called out Smith’s book “Straight Shooter: A Memoir of Second Chances and First Takes,” saying Smith wrote lies and exaggerations — including about his basketball career — and going as far as to call the ESPN personality Stephen A. Myth.
In response, Smith unleashed a fiery tirade with slew of expletives toward Whitlock.
He also told a number of behind-the-scenes stories and eviscerated Whitlock, who had two stints at ESPN and now works for Blaze Media, as someone who burns bridges everywhere he goes.
Smith prefaced the rant by saying he called his pastor and emailed his bosses at ESPN, asking them for forgiveness in advance.
Warning: explicit language
“I mean it from my soul when I say this is the worst human being I’ve ever known,” Smith said. “I don’t know of another human being worse than Jason Whitlock. He is a piece of s–t. He’s the dude that’s going to have a funeral and ain’t going to be no pallbearers.”
Smith called Whitlock a “fat bastard” on multiple occasions during the episode and claimed that Whitlock was taking aim at him because he was jealous of Smith’s accomplishments.
The longtime ESPN personality defended his high school and college basketball credentials mentioned in the book during the diatribe before recalling an 2015 Deadspin article by Greg Howard that covered Whitlock’s less-than-stellar time running The Undefeated at ESPN, which is now known as Andscape.
“While you were on Blaze TV spewing that bulls–t to people, did you tell them that? Did you tell them how you stood outside of ‘First Take’ begging me to talk to you?” Smith said. “Did you tell them that once this same article in Deadspin came out, weeks later you wrote a lengthy apology to me in an e-mail begging me to forgive you? Pointing out how you were betrayed by this particular writer so you know how I must feel that you betrayed me? Did you tell the folks that? You bitch. Did you tell them? You fat piece of s–t.”
Jemele Hill, a former ESPN colleague and current journalist at the Atlantic, said she agreed with what Smith had to say.
“Stephen A Smith told the truth,” she said on X. “Ole Boy tried to recruit a bunch of us to do some work for what was then the Undefeated and we did not want to work with him.”
But perhaps one of the more astonishing comments from Smith came when he called Whitlock a person who was “worse than white supremacist.”
“You see what he does is, he’s the one that puts himself in front of white folks. The white folks, not all white folks, not most white folks, but the white folks that dare we say may have a problem with black folks,” Smith said.
“He says ‘I’m your man.’ That’s what he does. You think I’m lying? Ask ESPN. Ask Fox. Ask the Kansas City Star. Ask them all. I could not imagine, as a black man, knowing our history, anything worse than a white supremacist. That is until Jason Whitlock came along. He’s worse than them. He is the worst, most despicable, lying, no-good, fat-ass human being I have ever known in my life.”
Smith also added that he has in his ESPN contract that he will never work with Whitlock.
Whitlock took to X after the rant went viral.
“I knew Stephen A was limited. I didn’t know he was this limited. I’m starting to feel sorry for him. I beat up a baby seal,” he wrote in one post.