Stephen A. Smith spent part of his Mad Dog Sports Radio show on SiriusXM making a blunt case that golfers and NASCAR drivers do not belong in the athlete conversation, even as the discussion started with LeBron James and longevity. A listener brought up Richard Petty, and Smith swatted the suggestion away with a line that left little room for nuance: “Come on, man. That don’t count. You driving a car!”
Smith kept pressing the point as the two-hour show went on. “I’m being honest, it’s a great sport. But come on, bro. Getting behind the wheel of a car is not the same,” he said, before asking whether a NASCAR driver is an athlete. He was just as direct about golfers: “A golfer is not an athlete,” and later, “A NASCAR driver is not an athlete.”
He tied that view to the grind of golf, saying, “Just because you gotta walk the course for 18 holes for four days, that don’t make you an athlete.” Smith added that golfers are “skilled players” who are “elite at what they do,” but still said, “Athletes? Athletes? Are you kidding me?” He also said, “You’re skilled, you’re phenomenally skilled as a golfer…but that is not an athletic sport.”
The exchange began with a different question entirely: where LeBron James ranks among the greatest athletes ever in terms of longevity. From there, the conversation turned to Richard Petty, then widened to NASCAR drivers and golfers, with Smith repeatedly leaning into the same take throughout the broadcast. He stopped short of definitively saying Tiger Woods is not an athlete, and he acknowledged that some golfers can be athletes — just not because of what they do with a club.
Smith’s comments are built on a narrow definition of athleticism that dismisses the strength, stamina and mental demands people often associate with golf and motorsports. That is why the discussion keeps coming back to the same fault line: in his telling, skill does not automatically equal athleticism, even when the sport demands precision, endurance and composure under pressure.