Skip Bayless has made his living on his mouth – but former NBA player Matt Barnes said that it was those very words that has led some people to wanting to physically attack the pundit.
The former small forward filmed a video from his car speaking about Bayless and his words in the immediate aftermath of Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffering from cardiac arrest.
Bayless faced backlash for his tweet, which appeared to question why the NFL was postponing the game following Hamlin’s collapse during the first quarter.
FOX’s Skip Bayless said he wouldn’t delete a tweet about the injury to Damar Hamlin
‘No doubt the NFL is considering postponing the rest of this game – but how?,’ Bayless tweeted on Monday. ‘This late in the season, a game of this magnitude is crucial to the regular-season outcome … which suddenly seems so irrelevant.’
Bayless went on his show ‘Undisputed’ the next day without his co-host – NFL Hall-of-Famer Shannon Sharpe. When Sharpe returned on Wednesday, the show started off with a heated exchange between the two.
That led Barnes to make his response, claiming Bayless’s tweet was ‘blatant disrespect’ before mentioning that he had to stop two situations where physical violence was headed Bayless’s way.
‘Haven’t really spoke on this Skip Bayless situation, because I wanted to see if he had any remorse after what he said Monday,’ Barnes said in the video. ‘First of all, Skip is a professional in this realm – was very highly respected and has put in years of work.
‘So you know when people say “read the whole tweet he said the game was irrelevant”: he knew he had to put that at the end of the bulls**t he was saying, hoping that we didn’t see through the bulls**t. Because how he truly felt was his original first sentence.’
Barnes continued, saying: ‘Fast forward that, I just feel as of late he’s been very, very, very disrespectful and out of pocket and that’s normal. But he’s been that way to Shannon and you can see Shannon bite his tongue, you can see him do deep breaths for not jumping across the table and wringing that man’s neck.
Matt Barnes says he’s had to ‘personally’ stop two separate people from fighting Bayless
‘But I think Skip’s day is coming. and it may not be from a firing standpoint because we know white men in this profession can get away with and do anything… you know, what they want. And it makes good TV, you know controversy sells. So of course FOX are gonna want to keep those types of ratings.
‘But I know personally, personally that I’ve had to diffuse two situations one with a coach, and one with an NBA player. They wanted to f**k Skip up. Personally I’ve had to do it. One was this year, one was last year.
‘Personally I had to reach out to Unc [Sharpe] and set up a conversation for people who wanted to f**k Skip up. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed, but it’s just gone too far in my opinion.
‘And again Shannon had a lot of love – or does have a lot of love for dude – but you can see Shannon’s fed up and someone’s gonna end up hurting Skip because his ego, his arrogance, his disrespect, has kinda always been on this level. But now… I think its going to a new level and now he’s disrespecting his co-host.’
Sharpe (L) and Bayless got into a fiery exchange when the former returned to the show Weds.
On Wednesday, the two hosts returned to the table and Sharpe began addressing his absence from the show on Tuesday. That led to this exchange:
Just weeks ago, Bayless and Sharpe were going at each other when Bayless seemed to disrespect his co-host’s NFL career by saying that Tom Brady was ‘way better’ than Sharpe was.
‘You make it seem like I was a bum! I’m in the effin’ Hall of Fame. I got three Super Bowls!,’ Sharpe angrily replied.
‘You’re willing to take a personal shot at me, to say he’s better than me, because I say he’s playing bad this year?’
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Bayless responded by accusing Sharpe of disrespecting Brady which was beneath his co-host’s ‘dignity’.
Sharpe and Bayless got into a heated exchange just weeks ago over a perceived slight
Other fellow media members are chiming in on the co-hosts’ chemistry – with former ESPN and FOX Sports host Marcellus Wiley offering his thoughts the other day.
‘You hate to see it. Skip and Shannon breaking up on live TV every single day. When your partner can’t get through his monologue it’s all bad,’ Wiley said in a post to Instagram.
‘Reminds me of a “Wileyism” that in any relationship that ends, you spend half the time breaking up. And what we’re witnessing right now on live TV is them breaking up.
‘You can tell they don’t even speak outside the building, outside the show. Wanna know how I know? We all saw it. Felt like an ambush to Skip. “Well we weren’t supposed to talk about that. I didn’t see that in the notes. We didn’t discuss this. You don’t know what the bosses said.”‘
‘Man, stop playing with me. Y’all this is not about a tweet. This is not about Brady being better than Shannon. It ain’t about none of that. None of them arguments. You know what this is? This is primal. Yep.
‘This is two alphas fighting for territory. This is about power. Cuz that dynamic of power on that show has shifted, whether it’s real or imagined, and right now we’re all seeing that battle for it. Let’s see who comes out “Undisputed”.’
