You’d be hard-pressed to find a more unlikely pair of friends than Skip Bayless and Lil Wayne. The rapper of “Lollipop” fame and the current host of FS1’s Undisputed have a long-standing friendship that goes back years and years.
During the most recent episode of The Skip Bayless Show podcast, Bayless was sent in a question by a listener, who asked if he visits Wayne weekly. Bayless, detecting sarcasm in the question, estimated that he and his wife, Ernestine, drive out to visit “our man Wayne” maybe four or five times a year. The reason this subject was broached was that Bayless made one of those pilgrimages over to his close friend’s home over the weekend.
Ernestine and I just got back from spending a sun-blessed LA Saturday afternoon at Lil Wayne’s. 4 hours of the best conversation 3 humans could hope to have – on music, sports and life. Deep thoughts punctuated by big laughs. Love you, man. pic.twitter.com/CoCZlSS9kU
— Skip Bayless (@RealSkipBayless) June 25, 2023
But Bayless buried the lede.
He waited until he was done with his long-winded segment about Wayne to reveal that his rapper friend and his Young Money Entertainment record label will be involved more than ever in Undisputed going forward.
Given that Bayless reportedly has “final say” on who will be across from him at the Undisputed desk and indications that it may eventually be a rotating set of guests (as Stephen A. Smith has on First Take) it would make sense that Lil Wayne could be a regular on the program.
Who knows what that means? Perhaps Wayne could be a future debate partner of Bayless, as the connection and relationship are already certainly there. And so is the tendency between the two to talk sports. In any event, Bayless offered a closer look into what his “sessions” with Wayne entail.
“Ernestine and I always have a great time at Wayne’s,” Bayless said. “Not once have we eaten a single bite there. These visits are not about eating or drinking; they’re just about talking, about delving, about conversating, about feeding off each other’s psyches and streams of consciousness. Now there are bursts of sports talk between me and Wayne. Ernestine is not a huge sports fan, but she gets it. She can talk it when necessary. But there aren’t a lot of these bursts.
“The connection here is my wife, Ernestine, and I are endlessly fascinated by Wayne’s gift for recording and performing. Just as I believe he is unquenchably intrigued by behind-the-scenes at Undisputed. Other than Ernestine, I don’t know anybody, any human, that watches more Undisputed, for that matter, more FS1 than Dwayne Michael Carter Jr. does. I’m pretty sure he never misses an Undisputed.”
Bayless said that he’s seen Prince and Michael Jackson in concert and made the claim that Wayne’s energy would blow both of those performers off the stage. Bayless gushed about Wayne’s presence on stage, comparing it to a “nuclear force” and the force of a thousand dancers and a thousand hype men.
Seriously.
“This past Saturday’s session, for me, was the most memorable we’ve ever had at Wayne’s because the three of us went out onto the back porch…and we talked—and I’m not exaggerating, as God as my witness—we talked for four straight hours without one bathroom break for any of the three of us,” Bayless said. “Most compelling for me was when Wayne went deep about what a force he is on stage because we got to see him perform for the first time back a couple of months ago.”
Perhaps he’ll bring that energy to the set of Undisputed, but it remains to be seen if Bayless will ultimately cross that line in their friendship. We all know how his relationship with Shannon Sharpe turned out.
