By Rustin Dodd, Jayson Jenks and Stephen J. Nesbitt
In June 2012, in the middle of the NBA Finals, Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless locked into another disagreement. This one sounded nothing like their battles on ESPN’s “First Take,” the controversial morning debate show that was changing sports television. It was much quieter and more aimless than a back-and-forth about LeBron James or Tim Tebow.
It was about blueberry muffins.
It all started one morning in Miami. The show was just taking off — Smith had joined Bayless as a full-time sparring partner only months before — and road shows were still a novelty, so the producers laid out a breakfast spread. The selections included a limited number of blueberry muffins, which Smith very passionately (and very respectfully, according to staffers) declared as awful.
When a second and then apparently a third muffin did not meet Smith’s approval, the situation reached an impasse. While Smith complained about the blueberry muffins, Bayless complained about Smith complaining about the blueberry muffins, a Seinfeldian moment that, according to multiple staffers, symbolized the pair’s off-screen dynamic:
They argued about everything and nothing — and occasionally about whether they argued in the first place. “I have no recollection of it,” Smith told The Athletic recently when asked about the muffin episode. “And, to be quite honest with you, it’s an idiotic story.”
One was a reserved former sports writer from Oklahoma who watched games in his hotel room all night, woke up at dawn to run for an hour and memorized a daily packet of notes to prepare for debates. The other was a magnetic former newspaperman from New York who hated jogging, spent his nights in noisy arenas and sometimes rolled into the pre-show meeting with minutes to spare.
They rarely hung out, rarely went to dinner and rarely agreed. But they created a saying to sum up their mutual respect: “We always love each other. We rarely seem to like each other.”
The duo of Bayless and Smith — the television equivalent of baking soda and vinegar — lasted fewer than four years. Yet it changed the face of ESPN, the most powerful entity in sports media; led to a host of imitators; and inspired countless arguments about the role of television and cable news itself.
For some, it was a ridiculous and obnoxious spectacle that seemed to force debates and drum up controversy to juice ratings. For others, it was pure entertainment, a platform for two of sports media’s biggest personalities and a show that welcomed more diverse voices and viewers.
“I’ve had people ask me: Was this the best thing to happen to sports TV or the worst thing to happen?” says Jay Crawford, one of the show’s original hosts. “And my answer is yes.”
It all started with a polarizing idea: What if “First Take” gave audiences exactly what they wanted?
In 2011, TV producer Jamie Horowitz was put in charge of “First Take,” the fledgling, two-hour morning show on ESPN2. Horowitz wanted to learn more about “First Take” and its audience, but first he had a problem.
At the time, ESPN provided ratings information in 15-minute increments and the topics on “First Take” changed too often for those ratings to offer any meaningful insight into audience habits. So Horowitz enlisted the help of Barry Blyn, a bookish researcher who had come to ESPN from Comedy Central. Horowitz asked Blyn for minute-by-minute ratings of every show for a month. He didn’t know what he was looking for; he just wanted to lift the hood and poke around.
“First Take” had a long history before Horowitz. Originally called “Cold Pizza,” the show launched in 2003 and was more in line with “Good Morning America” or “Today” than traditional ESPN programming. The show featured news, guests and a short, recurring debate segment called “1st and 10,” where Bayless squared off against a rotating cast of pundits like Woody Paige, Jemele Hill and Rob Parker. After four years and middling ratings, ESPN rebranded the show in 2007 as “First Take,” but not much else changed.
What the show lacked, thought Marcia Keegan, an ESPN VP who oversaw daytime content on ESPN2, was an identity.
“I remember asking some of the people who were working on it: ‘What is ‘First Take’?’” Keegan said. “And they said, well, it’s not ‘SportsCenter.’ I thought, ‘That’s not really a good way to define a show.’”
Keegan and Bayless had long discussed infusing “First Take” with more debate, but they always met resistance. With that in mind, when Keegan turned “First Take” over to Horowitz in 2011, she offered broad vision to pursue: “This can’t stay the way it is. It needs more debate.”
Still, when Horowitz received the initial minute-by-minute audience ratings from Blyn, they were hard to decipher. Each episode occupied one page in a binder, with a series of rising and falling lines like an EKG. As Horowitz flipped through the binder, however, he noticed spikes in viewership during every show. It wasn’t that audiences were tuning in then; they just weren’t leaving. He needed to know why.
Richelle Markazene, a producer, put the topics and segments from each show on the X axis, then cross-referenced that information with ratings on the Y axis. In almost every instance, whenever a spike occurred, there was one reason:
Skip Bayless.
A former newspaper reporter and columnist, Bayless seemed created in a lab to argue about sports on TV. He cut his teeth in the golden days of print journalism, when local columnists were king. He wrote a series of controversial books about the Dallas Cowboys, dipped his toe into radio in the 1990s and wound up at ESPN, where his abrasive persona on TV belied his off-screen vibe. Bayless was the kind of guy who bought a Camaro for the horsepower but said he only accelerated to the speed limit.
“Skip is a church mouse,” said Parker. “That’s his personality.”
Bayless was obsessively committed to his work. On his first date with his now-wife, Ernestine, he told her: “You will never be more important than my job for me.” Once, before debating Woody Paige on “1st and 10,” Bayless asked staffer Gabe Goodwin for research help. But first, Bayless sized up Goodwin and asked, “Can I trust you?” Goodwin was confused. “Can I trust you’re not going to tell Woody what I’m asking you to look up?” Bayless said.
Sunday through Friday, Bayless lived at a Residence Inn in Connecticut. He watched sports day and night and took copious notes in small handwriting that looked, Parker said, “like a doctor’s prescription.” He maintained a strict diet of chicken and broccoli, a shock of blonde hair and a morning exercise routine that he believed was essential for the job.
“There’s not a single person that prepares more for their job than Skip Bayless,” said Kevin Reeder, longtime “First Take” producer.
Above all, he formed arguments that forced people — whether out of agreement or anger — to react.
Horowitz knew the show needed to center on Bayless, but he asked Blyn if they could conduct qualitative research to back up the quantitative. So in 2011, they embarked on a multi-city tour with focus groups. At each stop, Blyn and Horowitz played episodes of “First Take” to hardcore sports fans while Horowitz sat on the other side of the glass with pen and paper.
The focus groups expressed strong opinions about Bayless when he appeared on the screen. Many said they disliked him and his opinions, but they all seemed to know — and care — about what he said.
There was something else: No one in the focus groups ever talked about Bayless’ debate partners on the show.
Armed with his trove of research, Horowitz transformed “First Take” into all debate, all the time. It wasn’t as if debate shows were new. CNN’s “Crossfire” aired for decades, while ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption” was a descendant of the network’s original take-fest, “The Sports Reporters.” But those shows ran for 30 minutes; “First Take” was two full hours.
“I thought it was a little too much,” Crawford said.
“I was pleasantly stunned,” Bayless said.
Horowitz and the producers used the minute-by-minute studies to inform topics for the show. What caused a jump on this day? What led to an increase here? “That became the Bible, or the gospel, of the show,” Parker said. “Anything that made it spike, you couldn’t get enough of it.”
In 2011, time and again the cause of the spike was Tebow, the polarizing quarterback then in his second season with the Denver Broncos. While most pundits questioned Tebow’s ability to start in the NFL, Bayless extolled Tebow’s virtues and winning mentality.
Backed by Blyn’s research that showed the average viewer watched “First Take” for only 30 minutes, Horowitz nixed standard topics that didn’t rate — baseball or Wimbledon — and pushed Bayless to talk more about Tebow or the Dallas Cowboys. The way Horowitz saw it, the person watching Bayless talk about Tebow at 10:15 a.m. wasn’t the same person at 11 a.m. He likened “First Take” to a coffee shop that pumped out lattes all morning. Starbucks would never worry about selling too many lattes; each customer was new and different.
The ratings jumped again.
One Sunday in November 2011, the “First Take” crew was on the road in San Antonio, gathered inside a meeting room at Fort Sam Houston. Bayless sat beside Ernestine, but he was agitated. The Broncos were losing. Bayless tried different seats, but nothing helped to jumpstart Tebow and Denver’s offense. Eventually, Bayless found a spot in the far corner of the room that felt right. The Broncos came alive. As Bayless fixated on the game, Ernestine rubbed his shoulders and the rest of the crew hovered nearby. Tebow completed the comeback, and the room exploded with delight. Everyone knew what the game would mean for ratings.
“It was the real feeling of a team,” Reeder said.
Five weeks and five Tebow wins later, the Monday after a Broncos overtime win, “First Take” had its highest-rated show ever. Horowitz brought in champagne and cake to celebrate.
Still, there was one problem. The research from the focus groups had made it clear that audiences wanted a worthy full-time foil to Bayless. One day Horowitz approached Bayless and asked if he knew anyone who might be a good match. Bayless told him he had someone in mind right away:
Stephen A. Smith.
Sixteen years younger, Smith had grown up in Hollis, Queens, attended Winston-Salem State (where he spent time on the basketball team) and embarked on a career in newspapers.
While a cub reporter in North Carolina, he called Parker, then a baseball writer in Cincinnati, and told him he was quitting the business and going to apply for a job with Wachovia. They had met years earlier at a National Association of Black Journalists convention (“He was Steve Smith back in the day,” Parker says). Parker saw Smith’s natural talent and told him to rip up the Wachovia application so loudly that he could hear it over the phone. Parker understood what others would learn: Smith was young, hungry and unapologetically himself.
“Probably the hardest working individual I’ve had the pleasure of working with,” said current ESPN executive Dave Roberts.
Smith landed at the New York Daily News before moving to the Philly Inquirer, where he covered the NBA, became a general columnist and began eyeing television. In 2000, according to his memoir, Smith was offered more than a million dollars to co-host “The Best Damn Sports Show Period” on Fox Sports Net, but he turned it down, worried that working alongside comedian Tom Arnold would hurt his credibility. Smith finally moved to ESPN in the mid-2000s, where his bombastic style became the foundation for an interview talk show — “Quite Frankly” — that ran for three years before it was canceled.
By 2012, Smith was back doing local radio at ESPN New York when Horowitz called, and in their first conversation, Smith told Horowitz he “loved” Bayless. They had debated on various shows over the years, and had once shot a pilot together for a Fox Sports Net show called “Sports in Black and White.”
“We were naturally opposed on so many topics that we just had an instant sort of combative alliance,” Bayless said.
“We’re just allergic to agreeing with each other in most instances,” Smith said.
“First Take” rolled out Smith on a trial basis on Wednesdays. Reeder, the show’s lead producer, saw the ratings climb with Smith opposite Bayless on Wednesdays, but he still had doubts. “These numbers justify more Stephen A.,” Reeder told Horowitz, “but will this work for five days?”
“We’re sure as hell going to give it a shot,” Horowitz said.
Soon Bayless and Smith were sitting opposite each other on a set in Bristol, flanking Jay Crawford, who wanted to give the new “First Take” a chance.
“Guys,” Crawford said, “it’s time to embrace debate.”
In the control room, Horowitz’s ears perked up.
“That’s it! That’s the show!”
Those two words became the (oft ridiculed) catchphrase of the show and of a larger shift inside ESPN. Before long, the tactics began to ruffle feathers in Bristol.
(Christopher Capozziello/ The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“First Take” had the feel of a pirate ship. Ratings were up, but inside ESPN, skepticism and outright criticism were rampant. Especially at the top.
“I felt people in the company rooting against our show,” Reeder said.
Top ESPN executive John Walsh once brought up the fact that the U.S. Open was going on in New York. Horowitz, according to a person present, responded that his research showed the audience didn’t care about tennis. Walsh countered that ESPN didn’t ask its readers for input on what to put on the front page.
It was a central point of conflict: Was “First Take” obligated to operate within the limits of journalism, or was it just entertainment?
Then-ESPN president John Skipper happened to be in attendance in San Francisco when Giants pitcher Matt Cain threw a perfect game in June 2012. When “First Take” ignored the feat, it caused hand-wringing back in Bristol. Walsh, a veteran journalist who had come up in the world of newspapers, went as far as tracking how many times the show mentioned America’s pastime. ESPN did pay to televise baseball, after all.
“I still have a belief that a perfect game or a grand slam tennis event or whatever it is should, in the course of a couple hours, get some attention, somewhere, somehow,” said Walsh, who retired in 2015. “But that might be my age. Remember, I was the old guy.”
Horowitz and his crew kept countering with the minute-by-minute data that showed what audiences did or didn’t care about. Play the hits.
Skipper was also an early critic. He didn’t like that the show’s conflict sometimes felt forced or the “artifice” of picking a side. “And it was an artifice,” he said. He didn’t like that Horowitz seemed to make every decision based on the data and what audiences wanted. “Just make it good,” he said he often told him. But in time, his feelings began to soften.
“I think it’s true that on ‘SportsCenter’ you should not survey what should go first,” Skipper said. “You have to put whatever the news of the day is first. On an entertainment show — and indeed ‘First Take’ was entertainment — I think Jamie’s approach turned out to be more fruitful. I probably didn’t think that at the time.”
“First Take” became a flashpoint for criticism. In 2012 alone, Jalen Rose confronted Bayless about his underwhelming basketball credentials (“Did you average 1.4 points as a senior in high school? So all that Pistol Pete Stuff? Water Pistol Pete Jr.”); Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban blasted Bayless for never using “facts” or “substance”; and Charles Barkley said he hated Bayless “more than any person in the world.”
The next year Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman appeared on the show and ripped Bayless, which caused another firestorm, including a critical tweet from ESPN’s Bill Simmons that led to Simmons’ suspension.
“It caused more controversy within the company: See, this is why we shouldn’t have ‘First Take,’” Keegan said.
Over the years Keegan came to see some criticism of the show as racially coded, a sentiment that coordinating producer Antoine Lewis and others shared. “First Take” had the largest Black audience — and the most diverse audience in general — of any ESPN show.
“That, to me, said it appealed to a Black audience,” Keegan said. “The criticisms I got about the show were only from White men. That’s not scientific in any way, shape or form, but both inside and outside the company, it was White men criticizing the show. They are hot takes. They aren’t smart enough. Not well thought out. Just to get attention.”
When the numbers revealed that around 50 percent of the “First Take” audience was Black, another executive asked Parker why the show was so popular with Black viewers. “It’s probably the first show where Black people would be invited to the table and finally able to voice their opinions,” Parker said.
Among the most common critiques was that Bayless and Smith were faking their arguments — or at least embellishing them for the sake of conflict. Every day Bayless and Smith seemed to be yelling about the Cowboys or battling over LeBron James.
“But nothing in that show was canned,” said Lewis, who was part of a recent round of ESPN layoffs. “It was what they really believed.”
And sometimes that was the problem.
Behind the scenes, Smith occasionally grumbled that Bayless’ opinions were just too far out there. Smith knew Bayless was sincere with his arguments; it was one of the things he respected about him. So he and producers came up with a gimmick that allowed him to ignore Bayless’ more eccentric points while still making for good TV: He’d pick up a newspaper and pretend to read it while Bayless talked.
Bayless sometimes grumbled about what he perceived as Smith’s lack of preparation. Unlike Bayless, Smith did not take notes or read the morning packet of news prepared by producers. He went to games, spoke with people and held his thoughts in his head. He kept adding roles — NBA shows, podcasts, boxing. “Whether games are on or not,” he says, “I’m still up until one or two in the morning.” Sometimes, just 30 seconds before he was about to go on air, he would ask producers to confirm what they were about to debate. Then the cameras would roll and he would turn on his charisma and force of personality.
“They call themselves brothers,” Keegan said. “Just like brothers, they had a real sibling rivalry and arguments. It wasn’t all roses.”
The show continued to grow. It out-rated “SportsCenter” in the same time slot — despite airing on ESPN2. It weathered Horowitz’s departure to NBC’s “Today” in 2014 and another controversy that year, when Smith was suspended for a week for comments he made about Ravens running back Ray Rice after Rice assaulted his then-fiancé.
At some point in 2016, Keegan reached out to Skipper with an urgent message: ESPN was about to lose Bayless. Horowitz, who had been ousted at NBC, had resurfaced at Fox Sports and was bringing the “First Take” playbook with him. He also wanted to bring along Bayless.
Smith had renewed his contract with ESPN for more than $3 million annually the year before, but Bayless’ deal was about to expire. Skipper entered the fray late and said ESPN made a “considerable” offer to keep Bayless. But in the end, he left for Fox in April 2016.
“We waited too long,” Skipper said. “We valued Stephen A. more than we valued Skip. … We just felt that Skip was the foil and the star of the show was Stephen A.”
Just like that, the Bayless-Smith duo was done.
More than a decade after ESPN unleashed Bayless and Smith full-time, the “embrace debate” experiment has moved from pirate ship to the establishment. In 2017, The New York Times Magazine reported that then-CNN president Jeff Zucker emphasized in meetings that the network should borrow from the ESPN debate playbook. Horowitz would be forced out at Fox amid a misconduct probe that year before reconnecting with Skipper at streaming service DAZN in 2019 and eventually joining World Wrestling Entertainment as an executive vice president in 2021.
Bayless and Smith are now direct competitors every weekday. Smith is ESPN’s biggest star, and “First Take” ratings are still growing. Bayless’ Fox show, “Undisputed,” had strong ratings this spring but went dark last month after the departure of co-host Shannon Sharpe and won’t return until Aug. 28.
“My definition of winning back in the day was beating Skip,” Smith said. “My definition of winning since he’s been gone is making sure that our ratings are up.”
“That’s a beautiful way to put it,” Bayless said. “And I agree.”
Smith and Bayless still occasionally argue. About everything and nothing. Last year, the sparring partners got into a spat over the origins of their partnership and who was more responsible for the success of the show. It was a bizarre episode, full of statements released on podcasts and solemn rebuttals.
The next weekend, Smith was in Los Angeles. He called Bayless and asked to talk. They sat beside the pool at Bayless’ condo complex and once again hashed out their differences.
(Illustration: Sam Richardson: The Athletic; photo: Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images)
