Stephen A. Smith is a man who enjoys life even when he is yelling at the top of his lungs
Despite him being one of the biggest Dallas Cowboys haters on Earth, the ESPN personality had something real to state when discussing the struggles of Dak Prescott.
On Wednesday, Smith opened The Stephen A. Smith Show by addressing the Cowboys quarterback’s recent on-field struggles which were put on full display in Dallas’s 42-10 loss to the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday night.
Smith said he had a friend who isn’t even a Cowboys fan beg him to show compassion due to the 30-year-old signal-caller’s history of anxiety and depression.
“I felt compelled to adopt that position,” Smith said. “That’s not going to stop me from doing my job. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it ain’t a damn mongoose. If you played like garbage, I gotta say you played bad. But there’s a glee and a joyfulness that I take from the Dallas Cowboys stinking up the joint because Dallas Cowboys fans get on my last damn nerves. But I say that in all seriousness out of fun. It’s oxymoronic to use those two words in the same sentence but it’s applicable. As serious as I am, I’m just having fun. It’s sports.”
Smith went on to discuss Prescott’s mental health struggles and related them to his own struggles, which he said came as the result of his mother’s death in 2017.
“You know the scary part, that really really hit me? It was when [Prescott] said it was a couple of days before his brother passed [that he began experiencing depression],” Smith said. “He talked about how when he lost his mom seven years earlier, his brother was having trouble then. If I’m being totally honest, I know the feeling.
“Anybody who knows me know that on June 1, 2017, to be exact, Game 1 of the NBA Finals between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers, anybody who knows me knows what that day is. That was the day I lost the greatest woman I’ve ever known. I lost the greatest human being I’ve ever known. And that was Janet Smith, my mother.
“I never thought about killing myself. But for two years, every single day at some moment in time, I wished I was dead. That is how bad my life was without my mother.”
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Smith added he was hit especially hard by his mother’s passing because he was single at the time and felt he no longer had someone to care for him.
“That is when it was over and I felt it was over,” Smith said. “And I wanted to die. Because she meant that much to me.”
He further revealed that he went to therapy to address his issues and called attention to the fact that mental health struggles can still carry a stigma, especially in the Black community with men.
His message is a brave one and very important as not many people ever see this side of him.
