Stephen A. Smith spent years hammering Kyrie Irving over his refusal to get immunized.
Now, after watching Dr. Anthony Fauci invoke the Fifth Amendment 111 times on Capitol Hill, the ESPN and SiriusXM host is putting himself at the front of the apology line.
The reversal came last Friday on Smith’s eponymous talk show, where the outspoken commentator said Fauci’s Senate appearance made him think first of the NBA star he once accused of sabotaging the Brooklyn Nets.
“I watched Dr. Fauci on Capitol Hill yesterday and the person I thought about most was Kyrie Irving,” Smith said.
Irving, now with the Dallas Mavericks, was playing for Brooklyn when COVID vaccines hit the market nearly five years ago.
With the NBA deferring to local laws and regulations as deaths climbed nationwide, Irving was barred from Nets home games and, for a time, kept out of road games by the team.
By the end of the standoff, Irving had missed 35 games and lost roughly $13 million in pay.
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Smith now says the punishment and public scorn look different in hindsight.
“There’s several people that we all owe apologies to, and I’ll put myself at the front of the list, but none more so than the apology that I owe to Kyrie Irving,” Smith said.
He widened the point to other prominent vaccine skeptics, including then-Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers and tennis legend Novak Djokovic, saying the critics may not have been as wrong as they were made out to be.
“The reality is, is that Kyrie Irving, no matter what we think, may have been more right than we have given him credit for and unquestionably was more vilified than he deserved,” he said. “And ladies and gentleman, it starts with me.”
Smith described a period of mandates, booster requirements, distancing rules and masking demands, then contrasted that climate with the athletes who refused to go along.
“There were a select few individuals in the world of sports especially that stood up and said, “Nah, I’m not down for this,”” Smith added.
On SiriusXM, Smith put an even cleaner label on Irving’s refusal.
“[H]indsight-wise it didn’t make him stubborn or selfish,” Smith said last week. “It made him brave for his willingness to stand up and say “Nah, I’m not doing that.””
That was a long way from where Smith stood in October 2021.
At the time, Smith unloaded after The Athletic reported that a source close to Irving described the guard as wanting to be a “voice for the voiceless.”
Smith mocked the idea that Irving would risk Brooklyn’s title hopes over that stance, especially after signing with the team and helping bring Kevin Durant and James Harden into the organization.
“So you don’t have a problem with taking the vaccine?” Smith attacked then.
He asked why Irving would “compromise the championship aspirations” of the team and challenged what kind of platform he expected to have if he was no longer playing.
“How is that going to work out for you, Kyrie Irving?” Smith asked.
“You’re going to disappear from the game of basketball, who the hell is going to be interested in what you have to say when you have proven that you can’t even be trusted enough to do your damn job?”
Smith insisted in that 2021 criticism that he was not calling Irving unintelligent, even while accusing him of sliding into self-righteousness.
“I am not calling Kyrie Irving stupid,” Smith remarked then. “Kyrie Irving, I happen to believe is an intelligent brother whose heart is in the right place.”
But he said Irving had regressed to a level that made him look hypocritical, untrustworthy and “flat-out stupid.”
Smith’s own health fight with COVID came later, in January 2022, when he has said the illness nearly killed him.
His new view of Irving arrived after Fauci’s hostile Senate hearing, which Smith said left the public without answers from the man who had served as the face of the nation’s COVID response.
During a separate appearance Thursday on NewsNation’s “Chris Cuomo,” Smith argued that Fauci should not have remained silent before lawmakers.
“As it strictly pertains to the coronavirus pandemic, my attitude is, with you being the face that you have been, you can’t show up on Capitol Hill and plead the Fifth 111 times,” Smith told Cuomo.
“You just can’t do that. That’s not right. You’ve got to answer some questions.”
Smith acknowledged that Fauci may have had a legitimate legal reason to avoid answering.
The former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director received a pardon from former President Biden on his final day in office for potential offenses between Jan. 1, 2014, and Jan. 19, 2025.
Smith said anything Fauci said under questioning could have exposed him to future legal jeopardy, while also making clear he did not want the 85-year-old former official jailed.
“Anything that he said clearly could potentially incriminate him and could give them fodder to come after him for future potential transgressions, and they can go after him that way, and I certainly don’t want an 85-year-old man thrown in jail, particularly with his exemplary service,” Smith told Cuomo.
The Fauci and Irving comments were not Smith’s only headline-grabbing swings.
On his show, he also tore into President Trump for suggesting LeBron James might be a “racist,” calling the remark “disgusting.”
Trump made the comment in the Oval Office in July after a reporter asked him to weigh in on the basketball careers of Michael Jordan and James. The reporter mentioned that James would sign with the Philadelphia 76ers.
“Michael Jordan is a guy that’s a friend of mine. I play golf with him. He’s a really good guy,” Trump commented.
“I think LeBron is — maybe he’s a racist, but maybe he doesn’t like Trump. I don’t know. I only like people that like me, so I would say Michael Jordan all the way.”
Smith answered by accusing Trump of divisive rhetoric.
“Our president is trifling,” Smith said in his commentary. “When you’re calling LeBron James a racist … it’s getting ridiculous.”
“The divisiveness, the way this man acts, the things that he says, it’s really, really disgusting,” he added.
Smith said public figures still need to be confronted when they cross lines.
“We gotta call stuff out,” Smith said. “We gotta call it out for what we see. We gotta call it out for what it is.”
He added that Trump’s comment about James was “the latest salvo that he’s thrown in somebody’s direction ultimately to distract from the job that he’s doing. And we got to call him out on it. We just have to.”