If you’ve watched enough of Fox Sports 1’s weekday debate show, “Undisputed,” you know it’s pretty much unwatchable.
Professional troll Skip Bayless and his TV nemesis Shannon Sharpe take a topic — usually the state of the Dallas Cowboys or the play of LeBron James — and beat it into the ground day after day after day.
But just when you think you can ignore the show, one of the co-hosts says or does something that goes outside the lines of good taste or decent behavior. For example, Bayless recently chose to tweet about how the Cincinnati Bengals and Buffalo Bills were going to make up their game while we still didn’t know the condition of Bills safety Damar Hamlin, who had a cardiac arrest on the field and needed CPR.
Not to be outdone, Sharpe crossed his own line Friday night when he nearly got in a physical altercation while sitting in the front row of an NBA game in Los Angeles. It gets worse. He was arguing with a player in the game.
Sharpe, who is 54 and a Pro Football Hall of Famer, was talking trash to a member of the Memphis Grizzlies, and it ended up with an unsettling scene of Sharpe and Memphis players being separated. (Here’s the video.) Here’s another video of Sharpe getting into a heated exchange with the father of one of the Memphis players. (The two eventually hugged it out.)
But Sharpe bragged about it all to ESPN’s Dave McMenamin, saying, “They didn’t want this smoke, Dave.”
This is totally unacceptable. The NBA shouldn’t have it and Fox Sports 1 definitely shouldn’t have it. If this were any non-famous spectator, if this were you or me, they would be ejected from the game and, possibly, banned for life. Imagine if a brawl had broken out in the crowd, and the damage that could have been done. How is Fox Sports 1 not embarrassed by one of their so-called “stars” acting this way?
Veteran sportswriter Jeff Pearlman tweeted, “Watching this is beyond mortifying. Again, you’re @ShannonSharpe. You're FIFTY FOUR. At a basketball game. Challenging the players to fight? Seriously? It’s pathetic.”
Sadly, LeBron James backed Sharpe. James said, “That’s my guy. I’ll always have his back, and he’s got mine. He can talk with the best of them, that’s for sure.”
For James to take the side of a spectator in a dustup with another NBA player is troubling.
But how’s this for irony? It was November 2021 when James had two fans ejected from a game in Indianapolis because of their trash-talking and guess who came to his defense and criticized the fans?
Yep, Sharpe, who said on “Undisputed”:
“You know what these seats cost, Skip, Sitting courtside. … They know right from wrong. But somehow, and it’s been like this for a very long time, people think because they pay money — and we see this in restaurants, you think you can talk to your server any kind of way. You think because you’re paying an enormous amount of money, and the athletes are there to entertain you, you can say, you can do whatever you want. ‘It is well within my rights because I paid $5,000 or I paid an exorbitant amount of money for this ticket.’
“And I agree with LeBron. Skip, boo me. It’s a badge of honor if I’m in a visiting arena and I get booed. But you cannot say certain things like what they be saying and think that it’s OK. What has transpired is that America has become more comfortable with saying things to people. They using the term ‘snowflake.’ ‘Oh, you soft.’ Nah, brah. Give me my respect. That’s all I ask.
“I’m a firm believer, you don’t have to respect me but I’ll be damned if I’ll let you disrespect me. I’m glad LeBron handled it that way. Get them out of the arena. They crossed the line.”
What would 2021 Sharpe say about the Sharpe who attended Friday night’s Lakers game?
Sharpe has not commented further on the incident since it happened. No doubt he is saving it for this morning’s “Undisputed.” It might be the only reason to ever watch the show.
