I, Corbin Smith, Should Host ESPN's "First Take"

On ESPN2, a popular cable television network, there is a morning program called First Take. It's about two guys: Skip Bayless, who is unnervingly angular and anger-lar, and Stephen A. Smith, a bald Van Dyke man who likes to cape for serial abusers. The two get in a room together—it's a television studio, though I suspect they could do the show in a large cardboard box and get essentially the same results—and fight about contemporary sports topics.

Each man is distasteful in his own way, but they combine to form a perfect spectrum of ignorant sportstakesmanship, Bayless's exaltations of grit and leadership and other white-boy shit lines up perfectly with Smith's open disregard for anything that could be construed as not masculine; each elegantly fills in the other's ignorant shit-headed blind spots. Both are relentlessly self-important, and prone to recording unnervingly sincere ten-minute-long wrestling-style promos over mild public disputes.

Bayless and Smith are not unlike Agnes's sisters from Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers, a pair of troubling people who are made horrifying in the precise ways that their deep flaws abrade against each other, creating an explosive flame of troglodyte ignorance that attracts frustratingly good ratings for their employer. They also perform in front of a red background fairly frequently.

These two men have made a significant corner of the sports talk world—four hours a day, or the same two-hour show, twice a day—utterly uninhabitable. Would that the major media conglomerate controlling ESPN could wave a wand and move on. Would that they could find a man who could entertain and inform, live and love, serve and protect.

Would that they could find and hire me, Corbin Smith, sports media professional.

For those not familiar with my work, I am a professional writer who has made literally thousands of dollars writing about sports. I also host a podcast in which I talk about sports. Furthermore, I have opinions about sports I don't share with the public; they are left bubbling hotly inside my body, just waiting to be poured at scalding temperatures onto a national TV audience. My mind and my voice: rich and deep, with enough dissonance to sear the viewer's mind. Each was custom-built to deliver daily sports takes on national television.

As any reader can plainly see, I am very handsome, which is a must for people on television nowadays. People like to watch TV so they can be swept away to a fantasy world. Persons with classic good looks, such as myself, more readily become disassociated in our own minds, and so more easily can assume this symbolic role for others. Put Corbin Smith, a classic beauty by any conceivable aesthetic standard, in the chair, and a weary nation of tired middle-aged men slaving away at desks and sweating futilely on their recumbent bikes will be able to place themselves in my handsome shoes, and so become the Takesmith of Destiny in their own minds. Stephen and Skip, on the other hand, look like dudes from a Herblock cartoon.

I am also very tall, standing a robust 6'2''. No one knows how tall Skip and Stephen A. are, as it is a closely guarded ESPN secret, but it is obvious to anyone watching that Skip is maybe 5'6" and Stephen something like 5'8" but only because he wears lifts in his shoes, making him actually closer to 5'5". Their relatively diminutive stature is one of the things that fuels their aggression and makes First Take so potent, aggrieved, and toxic.

Under my administration and care, First Take will take the wide ocean-liner turn into modernity. Over the past two decades, Sabermetrics—which is the objective study of sports, and whose methods are outlined in the Bible—has proved but one thing: no one really knows why anything happens in sports, which suggests that the narrative lines on which First Take are built issue primarily from a collective subconscious.

We—that's me and the good people who make First Take, because I can't do this alone—will go away from "ARE THE COWBOYS DONE" or "IS CARMELO ANTHONY DEMANDING A TRADE" or "WAS PAPELBON RIGHT TO CHOKE BRYCE HARPER" and more in the direction of "Hey, the Cowboys lost a tight game, but it's best to keep it in perspective and remember: there is a lot of randomness in these things" or "Carmelo probably isn't demanding a trade. That doesn't happen very often, and he resigned in New York after the team was bad, so he seems pretty on board for being a part of a rebuild" or "Hey, whoa, choking other people is pretty unacceptable by pretty much any measure. Perhaps if you are an MMA fighter, that's OK, because it's an approved type of violence, but even then it makes me a little uncomfortable as a viewer and a sports consumer." That sort of thing.

I can hear you, the reader. "Corbin, please," you are saying. "You are an idiot"—hurtful!—"who doesn't understand the sports talking business. A show like First Take is inherently corruptive: there is simply no way to build something not horrible in this format. These guys are not sitting in front of this camera and making a good faith effort at finding truth and beauty in sports; they are performers, clown men, Lenny and Squiggy, Lloyd and Harry, the Two Stooges. They are actors in a daily play of their own blighted male anger, with the sporting events of the day providing a thin pretense. Also, even if your opinions are strident and horrifying, there is no way you have the performance chops of Skip and Stephen A."

Although it is rational to assume that I, a sportswriter of the highest caliber, am a master of but one craft, it is also a fact that I am a longtime veteran of the stage, having studied theatre at the Evergreen State College, during which course of study I appeared in several plays, including one by well-known English theatre pervert William Shakespeare. I am trained in the use of my voice, as one can plainly see in this video of me reading Psalm 13 (New American Standard translation) with perfect diction, posture, and pacing:

Listen to those consonants roll out of my mouth. Marvel at my posture, a masterpiece made from my unbreaking concentration. These are the marks of a professional performer. Contrast this to Skip Bayless, in this video where he is mad about a list:

Look at those shoulders, all slumped over. His arms, flapping around like a bird tragically missing bones in its wings. His protruding neck denying much needed air to his lungs and brain. F. Matthias Alexander turns in his grave! Skip is loud, certainly, but this posture puts undue strain on his vocal cords; he is burning his body out, day after day, until sometime in the near future, his vocal cords will snap, and ESPN will be left paying a mute guy who can't speak at all, much less deliver shovel-sharp morning-time takes.

What I will really bring to First Take—and all sports media, eventually—is a new approach that will save the parent company millions. I was doing research on taxes in this country: property taxes, personal taxes, sales taxes, capital gains taxes. They struck me as being insane and obscene. Why should I have to pay out to the government when I die? It's ridiculous.

But then I found a loophole: the sea.

Yes, with one of these bad boy boats—easily available to purchase, used, on the internet or at your local ocean liner dealership—plus a mid-level HD satellite hookup and a small power generator, we can take the entire First Take operation offshore, and into the world's second-greatest tax haven: the Atlantic Ocean.

We will need two dedicated crews, one for the actual show and another for the boat. While all of those team members will have to take a pay cut, that should be an easy enough burden to bear, given that they won't have to pay any taxes. We might have to establish a small bank on board the studio ship to get us 100 percent sovereign. I haven't sorted out all of those nitty-gritty financial details yet. I suspect ESPN's spectacular accountants can get it done, though. If they ever justified hiring Jason Whitlock, making First Take with Corbin Smith a sovereign state should be a snap.

Technically, it's already well within our grasp. With a handsome, articulate guy espousing reasoned opinions right into Camera 1, we're bound to see some STUNNING success. Sooner or later, every sports program will be broadcast from an offshore studio. Sports owners will see the success, and move their stadiums into the sea, where they can also avoid taxes and the nitter-nattering of nerds who complain about "public funding" and similar libbish nonsense. Reporters will follow, then bloggers, and then fans, who will live in little boats bobbing alongside the larger stadium boats. Providers of goods and services will follow. It will be an aquatic community of athletics, the greatest the world has ever seen.

Also, if given Stephen A. Smith's job, I will not openly and shamelessly operate as Floyd Mayweather's television bagboy.

Taken together, all of this suggests—to me, and to everyone—that I could clearly handle the workload of being the guy at the tip of the First Take spear. Please hire me soon. Love, Corbin.