Stephen A. Smith has had some questionable rants over the years, but his latest one was just simply weird and not needed.
In the latest episode of the “Black on the Air” podcast, a conversation between host Larry Wilmore and the ESPN personality shifted to women and sports. Wilmore touched on women breaking barriers as he cited the MLB’s first female general manager and Becky Hammon being the first woman to act as an NBA head coach.
Wilmore:
“Are we going to see more of this? This is interesting to me. This is kind of all happening kind of at the same time. What is your take on that?”
That’s when Stephen A. Smith came in and shifted the conversation on what he doesn’t like about women in the UFC.
Smith:
“First of all, I love it. I think that there’s an awful lot of women that are incredibly qualified to do the jobs that they’re doing. Where I jump off the bandwagon is when they try to engage physically. For example, I don’t ever want to see a woman boxing a man. I don’t want to see that. I don’t want to see a woman in the UFC fighting a man even though there are some women out there that’ll kick a dude’s butt. We get all that. When I think about pugilistic sports, I don’t like seeing women involved in that at all.
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I just don’t like it. I wouldn’t promote legislating laws to prohibit them from doing so, but I don’t want to see women punching each other in the face. I don’t want to see women fighting in the octagon and stuff like that, but that’s just me. What I would adamantly be against is them fighting men. I don’t think that’s cool. Plus, you don’t ever want to give men license to believe that it’s all right to be physical with a woman, to be quite honest with you. You don’t want to do that.
“And so, outside of that, when you think about them in executive positions, first of all they’re smarter than (men) a lot of times, they’re more composed than us a lot of times, they’re incredibly knowledgeable about these respective sports. They’ve had to go through trials and tribulations one couldn’t even imagine most of the time.
For them to get to that point, they deserve the opportunity to showcase their skill sets. Just like we have women in corporate America doing an incredible job leading companies, being executives, pushing businesses forward, etc., etc. There’s no reason on earth why they can’t do the same in the sports world. I support it, I’m a fan of it, and I hope we see more of it.”
Um, okay!
Clearly this has been something on his mind for quite sometime, because there was no reason for him to even speak about what he did not like with women in the combat sport when the conversation was trying to uplift them and shine a light on accomplishments.
H/T – MMAJunkie
