Personality on ESPN In a recent interview, Stephen A. Smith talked freely about his mother. He thanked her for having a big effect on his life and spoke about how her death in 2017 affected him.
Smith told Clay Travis of OutKick that hearing about how hard things were for his family taught him how to stay alive and how much a dollar is worth. He said he respected his mother more after learning that he made more working at a newspaper than she did raising him and his brothers.
“It was tough,” Smith said. “It wasn’t necessary for us. We knew what to do to stay alive, but we were poor… There is no doubt that our situation kept us from having a lot of things. Everyone in our group respected and admired her even more because she had to be so selfless to take care of us—it wasn’t about her at all.
If my two girls are hungry, it’s because I’m starving. That’s why I always used that saying. I’m not at ease until they’re at ease. Without knowing they’re eating, I don’t eat. They can’t make me feel good until I know they’re okay. Their turn comes first. That’s how I got it from my mom; she was that way and ensured her kids were too. Also, all four of my older sisters are the same way. And it’s her fault.”
“Because she’s gone,” Smith said, the holidays are hard for him. He also said that working on Mother’s Day is one of the worst times for him.
In 2017 and the years right after she died, Smith said going to therapy helped him get through a rough time.
“Therapy helped with that,” he told Travis. “That’s true, even though many of us, like me as a Black man, don’t like to say it. When my mother died, I went to treatment for a while because it was the worst feeling I’ve ever had. I’ve never felt that much pain before. That amount of emotional chaos is something I’ve never seen before.
“I would sit on the air, Travis, and sometimes—and I have to be honest about this—I would sit next to someone and not hear or see them because it was dark.” And all I saw was the coffin of my mom being lowered into the ground. It was the worst feeling in the world.
“That’s when I knew I needed to go to therapy because I felt like I was saying things, my tongue was getting rough, and I wasn’t showing the compassion I know I feel in my heart.” It comes with a lot of different things. That’s not good enough for me. But I just couldn’t keep it together because I was mentally unstable.
When Smith went back to work, he said it was hard. He talked about it with his sisters, and they asked, “What would mommy say?” They all agreed that their mom would tell them to “finish the job.”
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He told them that he almost broke down crying on the court in Cleveland, but they were able to get help from their teammates and the rest of the NBA during that tough time.
