ESPN Personality Stephen A. Smith Speaks Against Women Fighting in MMA

ESPN Personality Stephen A. Smith Speaks Against Women Fighting in MMA It’s well-known that ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith is not the most well-versed analyst when it comes to mixed martial arts.

Nonetheless, he is one of the biggest names in sports media, so when he says something controversial about MMA, it tends to draw a reaction. Such was the case for Smith during an appearance with Larry Willmore on the "Black on Air" podcast, when he was asked about women taking more prominent positions in sports management or coaching, such as the Miami Marlins hiring Kim Ng as the first female general manager in Major League Baseball or San Antonio Spurs assistant Becky Hammon stepping up to head coach duties when Greg Popovich was ejected from a recent game.

In those cases, Smith is on board with the progress.

“First of all, I love it,” he said. “I think there’s an awful lot of women who are incredibly qualified to do the jobs they’re doing.”

While Willmore’s question was only regarding women in positions of leadership in sports, Smith quickly transitioned to give his unsolicited take on women competing in MMA and combat sports.

“Where I jump off the bandwagon is where they try to engage physically. For example, I don’t ever want to see a woman boxing a man. I don’t want to see that. I don’t want to see a woman in the UFC fighting a man—even though there are some women out there that will kick the dude’s butt,” Smith said. “When I think about pugilistic sports, I don’t like to see women involved in that at all. I just don’t like it. I wouldn’t pass, I wouldn’t promote legislating laws to prohibit them from doing so, but I don’t want to see women punching each other in the face. I don’t want to see women fighting in the Octagon and stuff like that. That’s just me.

“I certainly, what I adamantly would be against is them fighting men. I don’t think that’s cool. I’m not a proponent of that. Plus you don’t ever want to give men a license to believe that it’s all right to be physical with a woman, to be quite honest with you. You don’t want to do that.”

Smith’s views on intergender competition in combat sports is understandable, but his stance on women in MMA in general is sure to generate some controversy. In 2020 alone, the UFC strawweight title clash between Weili Zhang and Joanna Jedrzejczyk wound up on top of many “Fight of the Year” lists, including Sherdog.com's. Outside of that, women such as Amanda Nunes and Valentina Shevchenko are regarded among the UFC's top champions, and most of the promotion's events feature multiple female fights -- plenty of which are entertaining and high quality.

Smith previously drew the ire of the MMA community for his analysis at UFC 246 last year, when he said he was “disgusted” with Donald Cerrone’s performance in a 40-second knockout loss to Conor McGregor. To Smith’s credit, he did go on to voice more support for women in authority roles in sports on the podcast.

“And so, outside of that, when you think about them in executive positions, first of all they’re smarter than [men] a lot of times, they’re more composed than us a lot of times, they’re incredibly knowledgeable about these respective sports. They’ve had to go through trials and tribulations one couldn’t even imagine most of the time. For them to get to that point, they deserve the opportunity to showcase their skill sets. Just like we have women in corporate America doing an incredible job leading companies, being executives, pushing businesses forward, etc., etc. There’s no reason on earth why they can’t do the same in the sports world. I support it, I’m a fan of it, and I hope we see more of it.”