The “E” in ESPN has been the operative letter of late, because the network has been making more errors than an outfielder who doesn’t pay attention to the game until the ball skitters past him. (Which accurately summarizes the entirety of my youth baseball career.)
The latest development relates to a story we’d resisted covering, mainly because it’s too idiotic to waste unlimited digital space on. But the end result is worth a mention.
On Wednesday afternoon, Michael McCarthy of FrontOfficeSports.com reported that ESPN has directed its on-air talent to stop promoting Papaya Games and its controversial solitaire-for-money app.
The whole thing started when the ubiquitous Stephen A. Smith was caught playing solitaire on his phone when he otherwise should have been, you know, paying attention to the NBA Finals game he was covering. Smith turned the bad look into a good payday, with Papaya hiring him earlier this month to be a “global ambassador” for its solitaire-based gambling app. Smith posted a tweet promoting the game (without calling it an #ad). Which seemed odd, but whatever. Stephen A. has leveraged his ratings success with First Take into the kind of contract that gives him the ability to do pretty much whatever he wants.
After that, it got weird. Other ESPN personalities (Kendrick Perkins, Dan Orlovsky, Mina Kimes, and Laura Rutledge) jumped in with their own tweets. Then came the blowback, with the disclosure that Papaya Gaming faces a federal lawsuit alleging that it has falsely marketed the app as a game of skill while using “tailored bots to control the outcomes of tournaments.” (Papaya denies the allegations, as companies facing civil litigation routinely do.)
As the criticism went viral, Kimes (to her credit) did a very public about-face. “The truth is,” Kimes tweeted, “I didn’t spend any time looking into the whole thing, and that’s 100% on me. Thought it was just typical marketing work, and I’m deeply embarrassed I didn’t vet it. A colossal fuck-up on my part.” McCarthy notes that Orlovsky and Rutledge have deleted their own tweets promoting the app, but that Smith and Perkins have not.
For Smith, whose superpowers include leveraging every controversy into engagement and more attention, the situation has given him an opportunity to continue to stir the pot via feuds with other media personalities (like Michelle Beadle) who criticized him for it. And that’s entirely his prerogative. He has established sufficient equity at ESPN to periodically step in shit, whether accidentally or deliberately, and emerge from the encounter with clean shoes and more things to talk about.
The deeper question is whether Smith and the others sought internal approval before pushing the product, or whether they decided it was better to seek forgiveness than to request permission. Regardless, and to use Kimes’s words, it was a “colossal fuck-up” at a time when ESPN is racking up an increasingly conspicuous stack of them.
