Stephen A. Smith apologized on air to Kyrie Irving on Friday, saying he owed him one after watching Dr. Anthony Fauci on Capitol Hill and thinking back to the sports fight over COVID-19 vaccines. Smith said Irving deserved an apology for the criticism he faced after refusing to comply with vaccination rules, and he put himself at the front of that list.
“There’s several people that we all owe apologies to, and I’ll put myself at the front of the list, but none more so than the apology that I owe to Kyrie Irving,” Smith said. He added that Irving “may have been more right than we have given him credit for” and “was more vilified than he deserved,” while saying, “And ladies and gentleman, it starts with me.”
The apology landed because Irving was not arguing in the abstract. During the 2021-22 NBA season, he sat out 35 games, including every game at Barclays Center, because of New York state's vaccine mandate. He was on a $34.9 million contract that season, and the missed games cost him just over 1% of his salary, or roughly $381,000 a game. Over the full stretch, that came to about $13 million in lost pay.
Smith said he understood the issue differently after his own brush with COVID landed him in the hospital on New Year’s Eve in 2022. He also said the apology did not mean Fauci was beyond criticism. “Doesn’t mean that Dr. Fauci was totally wrong just because he pleaded the Fifth 111 times,” Smith said, drawing a line between skepticism over the testimony and a complete rejection of Fauci’s public-health role.
That split matters because the vaccine debate in sports was never just about one player or one commentator. It became a test of how far leagues, public figures and fans were willing to go in defending mandates, and Irving ended up carrying much of the backlash. Smith widened his apology beyond Irving, but he made clear who he thought had been hit hardest.
What remains unanswered is whether Irving will answer the apology at all. For now, Smith has publicly revised his view, and the man who was once treated as the cautionary example in the fight over COVID vaccine news is the one being singled out as having been ahead of the crowd.
