A Stephen A. Smith meme on Snoop Dogg "giving up smoke." A Stephen A. Smith meme on Snoop Dogg “giving up smoke.” (Stephen A. Smith on Twitter.)
ESPNPop CultureTwitterBy Andrew Bucholtz on

There are many running bits with ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith. And Smith’s social media accounts have embraced some of those, including the infamous “TAke a look, y’all: IMG_4346.jpeg” tweet from 2015. But it’s quite particularly unusual and funny to see Smith’s Twitter account chime in on marijuana, something he’s been famous for opposing in professional sports. And his account did so in response to a tweet from famed pot aficionado Snoop Dogg:

The original meme Smith’s account is referencing here is of Nintendo character Wario, first seen on Tumblr in 2014:

The original "I've won, but at what cost?" image with Wario.
The original “I’ve won, but at what cost?” image with Wario.

This is interesting considering all of the times that Smith has yelled about “Stay off the weeeeeeddddd!” Here are a few of those:

https://twitter.com/D1Chosen2/status/1586865647660814337

As seen there and beyond, there’s quite the history of Stephen A. ranting about weed. So it’s interesting to see his Twitter account posting a meme that’s seemingly perhaps showing less objection to it. However, there are a couple of important caveats to that.

For one, not every tweet posted to Smith’s social media account is necessarily expressing his personal views. Many prominent personalities hire others to run their social media accounts, and that seems to be the case with Smith given the tweets that get posted while he’s actually on-air. Now, granted, those tweets are still seen as representing him, so anything he would strongly disagree with likely isn’t going up there. But this wasn’t necessarily his own thought to chime in in this particular way.

Beyond that, Snoop Dogg’s comment here is notably not about giving up marijuana altogether. Indeed, the man has several notable lines of edible products containing THC. So this isn’t necessarily him drastically changing course either.

Even with those caveats, though, this was still amusing to see. Especially given all Smith’s past “Stay off the weed!” lines.

[Stephen A. Smith on Twitter]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

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