The undisputed “Face of ESPN” sat down for a discussion with First Take newcomer JJ Redick and talked for over an hour. The conversation was partifuclarly interesting when Redick asked Stephen A. Smith about his television past. Specifically, the television past that included his former First Take co-host Skip Bayless.
Smith was asked pretty early into The Old Man and The Three, Redick’s podcast, about the origins of First Take. That’s when Smith painted an intriguing beginning of the show and how he become involved.
Skip Bayless was on First Take‘s precursor, Cold Pizza and to hear Smith tell it, it was regular sports show stuff until the arrival of a key executive.
“A guy by the name of Jamie Horowitz, who was an executive here, he took over First Take for a short period of time, said Smith. “He did a focus group and the focus groups say, ‘we don’t want all that other stuff, we want debate’. And so he made he took First Take from a conventional show and changed it into an all debate format featuring Skip Bayless. And that’s when it really took off.”
The early days of First Take were littered with a mixture of talent sitting across from Bayless attempting to work out this new format. The show, according to Smith, wasn’t as successful as the network would have liked. That’s when Bayless approached Smith.
“Skip Bayless comes to me in a parking lot on the campus of ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut, and he says, ‘I know you got your plans. You love the NBA. You love being out on the road, you love being in the locker room, but I need you.'” He said, ‘I’ve done all that I could to take this as far as I could go. I just need three years.”
Smith agreed partly because he felt like he lacked options.
“One month later, we were number one. And we’ve been number one ever since.”
That chemistry that launched a debating empire had been around for a long time. Yeah, we always had a chemistry. Smith and Bayless worked at Fox and in fact, did a pilot with essentially the same format as what First Take would become.
“It was called Sports in Black and White. And they were they were basically trying to create it to go up against PTI. They loved it. We were in contract talks, the whole bit. And at the 11th hour, 59th minute, the head of Fox, David Hill, pulled the plug and said, this is not what we want to do.
Redick probed Smith on the end of the show’s pairing and the potential of a relationship “fracture”. Smith was quick with his response.
“Never. The only time anything came close to that was when I knew he was leaving before he told me. And I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ You know? And so I confronted him. And then when he confessed to me what had transpired between his negotiations with the company, I understood why he couldn’t tell me in the immediate moment. But that’s literally the only thing that we’ve ever had any kind of issue about. And that lasted for like six hours.”
