ESPN's Stephen A. Smith Turns NFL Player's Bizarre Food Habit Into a Racial Issue: 'I Knew He Had to Be White'
Tennessee Titans rookie QB Will Levis may be the grossest coffee drinker ever. That’s still no excuse to turn it into a racial issue.
But, of course, it’s the offseason, and with not much is going on, Stephen A. Smith needs him some attention and something to yell about — so of course it turned racial. Why not?
For the unfamiliar — and let me emphasize from the get-go that I deeply envy you — Stephen A. Smith is an ESPN on-air talent and one of the pioneers in turning cable sports opinion programming into a parade of bellowing festivals that make “The View” seem like “Firing Line.” He used to seem tolerable by comparison because his co-host on “First Take” was semi-sentient carbon-waster Skip Bayless — but Bayless left for Fox Sports, so now Smith is basically alone in making America reflexively turn down the volume on their TV every time they tune in to ESPN, no matter if he’s on screen or not.
I’ll concede this: While Smith’s act is a bit much in anything but small doses, the man admittedly knows his sports. When he wades into cultural issues, however — particularly things that shouldn’t even be cultural issues — things tend to get dodgy in a right hurry. Such was the case Wednesday, when Smith decided to make Levis’ coffee habits a racial matter.
Before this week, Levis — who starred behind center at the University of Kentucky — was best known for dropping like a stone during this year’s NFL draft. Originally projected to go early in the first round, the quarterback ended up getting selected early in the second round by the Titans, who have an aging (and perpetually iffy) starter in Ryan Tannehill, whose designated successor, former Liberty University standout Malik Willis, underperformed already low expectations in his rookie year and may already be on the trading block.
Needless to say, this isn’t the kind of auspicious start to an NFL career that garners one a massive contract with Nike or Under Armor, but Levis does have one major sponsorship deal already: Hellman’s Mayonnaise, which — steel yourself for the gag reflex to kick in in three, two, one — Levis puts in his coffee.
“It was a Friday before a game, me and my girlfriend were at breakfast, we got our coffees and there was no cream, no sugar on the table, just a bottle of mayo,” Levis said during an interview at the NFL Scouting Combine this past spring.
“She made the kind of funny joke, ‘Do you think people are supposed to put this in their coffee?’ And I was like, ‘Maybe, let’s try it out.’”
Mayo in coffee? @will_levis, you have some explaining to do.
📺: #NFLCombine continues at 1pm ET on @nflnetwork
📱: Stream on NFL+ pic.twitter.com/Yt80D1n3a8— NFL (@NFL) March 4, 2023
Turns out, the guy loves it — and, according to Fox News, he signed a lifetime endorsement deal with Hellman’s on Tuesday.
“I think my palette maybe developed a little earlier than most, and so I was definitely dipping all my nuggets and everything in ketchup. But I started putting mayonnaise on my sandwich like when I was pretty young, all my deli sandwiches, like turkey, cheese, mayo,” he said.
“I think it’s obviously because of just going viral for putting it in coffee and trying it that way,” Levis told Fox News.
“People have brought that up to me and then said like, ‘How could you?’ and things like that. I’ve made an effort from time to time to try to sway people’s opinions on mayonnaise if they have a strong negative one. And I’ve succeeded in that, I think, a few times.”
Yeah, don’t count me as one of those success stories, Will. But I digress, because Smith decided to pull a culture-war Leeroy Jenkins and barge in with a thoroughly unneeded racial hot-take on Levis’ java proclivities.
“Do y’all know he got a lifetime deal with Hellmann’s? That’s worse than that UFC fighter who had a lifetime contract with Popeye’s Chicken. That’s just nasty,” Smith said on his radio show, according to Fox News.
“And, by the way, I’m going to say something that ain’t popular, but it needs to be said … when I saw this I knew he had to be white. Ain’t no brothers or sisters doing that. Ain’t no brothers or sisters putting mayonnaise in their coffee. That had to be somebody white. It’s all love.”
Only a white person would put mayonnaise in their coffee 😃 pic.twitter.com/4V2SOJSM5v
— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) August 24, 2023
Yeah, we melanin-deprived folks are all so gross that we’re the only ones putting mayo in coffee. But it’s all love. Nothing but love.
Look, I hate this wearied thought exercise as much as the next conservative, but sometimes it needs to get dragged out of storage because it’s the only thing that fits: Imagine if a minority player had expressed his or her love for a bizarre food choice and, say, the very white Bayless attributed the aberrance in taste to that player’s ethnic background.
You don’t even need to ask what would happen. Bayless — a man who has inexplicably kept gainful employment in the sports entertainment world despite a profoundly grating personality and a litany of legitimate controversies, including impatiently live-tweeting about when the NFL was going to restart the gosh-darned game as the Buffalo Bills’ Damar Hamlin was receiving CPR on the field after going into cardiac arrest during a January contest against the Cincinnati Bengals — would be summarily dismissed.
Nobody would care how he qualified the statement. He could legitimately have thought it was “all love,” but he’d still be “all unemployed.” Turn it the other way around, though, and I guarantee this blows over for Smith by Monday morning.
Oh, and by the by, Stephen A. — caucasians think this is gross, too. Trust me on this one.
In these troubled times, this should be one of the things that unites us all: Will Levis has retch-inducing coffee-drinking habits, and Hellman’s marketing executives are apparently as clueless as Bud Light’s. Thus, not only is your hot take offensive, it’s also stupid. And if you happen to know a significant cohort of white people who you think might conceivably put mayo in their coffee, here’s my advice to you: Meet some white people with taste buds. Please.
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