Stephen A. Smith believes the criticism toward Angel Reese’s national championship taunts is primarily based on the fact that she’s a Black woman.
Reese, the LSU women’s basketball team’s star player, mimicked a taunt that Iowa star Caitlin Clark did against Louisville earlier in the tournament. The backlash to the act was immediate and harsh, with Barstool’s Dave Portnoy calling her a “classless piece of shit” and commentator Keith Olbermann calling her a “fucking idiot” before apologizing the next day.
Those in support of Reese have questioned why there wasn’t similar criticism when Clark did it just a few games ago.
“We all know that there’s a white-black issue here,” Smith said on Monday’s episode of First Take, “because the fact of the matter is when Caitlin did it, people were celebrating it and they were talking about nothing but her greatness. But then the second a sister stepped up and threw it back at her face, now you got half the basketball world saying, ‘Well you know what, that’s not the classiest thing to do.’ It was the exact same thing.”
Smith also said LSU’s intensity should have been expected because the team made their feelings for Clark apparent beforehand.
“LSU told you before the game, ‘We didn’t like how she was acting toward South Carolina. She ain’t gonna do that against us,’” he said. “Going into the game, they let the basketball world know, ‘Y’all think that this is gonna be some storybook ending for her. Y’all must’ve got it twisted. We’re coming and we’re gonna get at her.’”
Smith commended Clark for the way she handled everything LSU threw at her during the game, but he was still troubled by her role in the incident being mostly ignored.
“(She said), ‘They were getting the better of me. I was focused on the moment and the fact that I was with my teammates,’” he said. “But that’s all she could say because she kind of instigated this, and the fact that that hasn’t been brought up tells us a lot about our society as a whole.”
