Forget about his commitment to the NBA; it’s Stephen A. Smith’s commitment to solitaire that earned Pat McAfee’s respect.
After ESPN tried and failed to broadcast what was on Stephen A. Smith’s personal phone last Friday, a fan successfully spied on the First Take host while he watched, or attended, Game 4 of the NBA Finals in Indiana. And the entire world now knows Smith plays solitaire while sitting at an NBA Finals game he’s supposed to be analyzing.
It was a bit of a “gotcha” moment, but Smith was justly criticized for the distraction. If you’re getting paid $100 million to be one of the faces of ESPN’s NBA coverage, you should pretend to be all-in on the job. But hey, everyone needs a little distraction now and then. We can’t all be as locked in and engaged on one thing as A.J. Hawk is all the time.
Pat McAfee, however, stopped short of reaching for the low-hanging fruit Monday afternoon.
“I think a lot of this generation maybe had no idea that game still exists,” McAfee said of solitaire shortly before signing off the ESPN portion of his Monday show. “But the fact that he’s still committed to the game, I respect it…I appreciate it, Stephen A. I called him out. There was no anger, he was like, ‘Yeah, this is how it is.’ A guy dresses as Dumb and Dumber with Kendrick Perkins and Stephen A. They just rolled with the punches. I respect that. I like that. These are good things, not bad things.”
McAfee is kind of right. In the world of Candy Crush, Subway Surfer, Angry Birds, and other cell phone games, people still play solitaire?
The Pat McAfee Show then flashed a picture of two Pacers fans wearing Dumb and Dumber suits with attached face cutouts of Stephen A. Smith and Kendrick Perkins while sitting courtside.
“This was genius,” McAfee said of the getup. “And Perk and Stephen A, to their credit, kept rolling. Kept rolling with the punches. I enjoy that.”
That’s it? Maybe there is some synergy between McAfee and his ESPN colleagues, after all. Last week, McAfee called Smith out for his coverage of Tyrese Haliburton, urging the First Take host to “relax.” Perkins then somewhat lightheartedly called McAfee out for cutting WWE-style promos to hype Pacers fans.
Considering those exchanges, McAfee could have easily been tempted to mock Perkins and Smith on Monday afternoon. But McAfee, to his credit, avoided turning the solitaire or Dumb and Dumber headlines into something bigger, which ESPN probably appreciated.