The Best of SBS: Stephen A. Smith

The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz

Meadowlark Media

Sports

4.7 • 32.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2025

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Whether you love him or hate him, you've never heard Stephen A. Smith like this before. In this now infamous conversation with Dan Le Batard from March 20, 2023, Stephen shares with Dan how despite all the success, growing up in poverty will never leave him and the controversy that still haunts him today. Dan pushes Stephen to address his relationship with the black community, how he handles the haters and imitators flooding the landscape, if he's getting bored with "First Take", and where things stand with him, Skip Bayless and Max Kellerman. Stephen also tells Dan how his words of advice and a near-death bout with Covid, changed his life forever. Watch Stephen A. daily on ESPN’s "First Take" and his bestseller, "Straight Shooter: A Memoir of Second Chances and First Takes", is available wherever you get your books and audiobooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Draft Kings Network.
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1:01.2	Hello and welcome back to you, the listener, and to South Beach Sessions.
1:05.7	We've been off for a few months here, resting and recuperating from this furnace blast.
1:07.5	We're about to throw in your face right now.
1:11.5	The most loquacious of the talkers anywhere in the sports media business,
1:17.6	Stephen A. Smith is here to bring back South Beach sessions with a little bombast. Here he is the roots of Stephen A. Smith. The entire story, he's a best-selling author. You catch him on first take,
1:22.2	and he's got big plans beyond all of that. Let's talk to Stephen A. Smith.
1:27.3	Stephen A, I want to talk to Stephen A. Smith.
1:32.8	Stephen A, I want to talk to you about sort of the first formative years of your life when you're arriving, you know, before any of what's happened now, before you're arriving at 16
1:37.4	years old. What do you look at as the things that had the most to do with shaping you, the
1:42.9	details in your childhood, early teenage years
1:45.9	that are imprinted in the way that you're ambitious, in the way that you're boisterous, confident,
1:52.5	all the things that you are.
1:55.9	Getting left back in a fourth grade and being held back for the entire year because of a first grade
2:01.3	reading level. The humiliation that I felt at that particular moment in time definitely
2:09.7	impacted me. My relationship with my father, his lack of belief in me definitely resonated with me.
2:30.3	My mother and her unwavering devotion and commitment to me and my siblings, despite what level of negligence my father displayed that resonated with me and all of us but especially me from the
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