For the past five years, Will Cain has made regular appearances on ESPN’s First Take. His debates with Stephen A. Smith and Max Kellerman have brought entertainment and laughs on non-serious issues as well as important conversations from two different viewpoints on the intersections of various sports and social issues.
Cain was back on First Take Wednesday morning in response to his tweet Tuesday about the FBI’s finding that there was no hate crime that took place at Talladega Superspeedway Sunday. It was reported that a noose was found in Bubba Wallace’s garage. An investigation later determined that it was a knotted rope used as a garage door pull. This was the statement given by NASCAR:
About 30 minutes after the NASCAR statement, Cain sent this chain of tweets on the situation:
That chain of tweets received plenty of reaction from Cain’s colleagues and soon to be former colleagues at ESPN, including Jason Fitz and Mike Golic Jr. Fitz brought up the role of the media is to report as the story changes and Golic Jr. addressed the point of where the line of fairness should be:
Here is some of what Cain said in his opening statement Wednesday after Molly Qerim Rose asked him if this will bring further backlash to Bubba Wallace and NASCAR:
“Unfortunately, I do,” said Cain. “I think that’s a real cost to this. We in the media and I think NASCAR really were ignorant as to the cost of when you do not pursue the truth. In the media at large, We are not prioritizing our simple job to absolutely seek and hopefully successfully find the truth. NASCAR immediately rushed to judgement and the beautiful moments that came out of unity with the NASCAR drivers are true, but unfortunately they were built upon a falsehood.
“I believe we undercut improvement in racial relations. We are going to take a step back because we have sowed distrust, sowed division, and it will come back as a backlash on NASCAR and unfortunately on Bubba Wallace as well.”
Smith added his thoughts to the conversation and how the incident still helped NASCAR as it tries to push racism out of the sport.
“When you look at what transpired under the stewardship of Steve Phelps overseeing NASCAR, we’ve seen guys like Marty Smith and others who are covering the sport, this is the direction they want to go in. This is a new day…Whatever culture that has existed surrounding this sport that condones that, we are no longer accepting it.”
Kellerman brought up an old saying that caused Smith to make a face on camera that involved two different types of animals:
“The old saying is if you hear hoofbeats in North America, don’t rule out zebras, but think horses first. It turns out this time it was zebras. The fact that many people assumed horses based on the history of this country and that region and that sport is reasonable. It is a happy day that it turned out not to be true.
Cain added to that old saying by this:
“The fact that it turned out to be zebras is going to make it hard to convince people it was horses next time.”
As the conversation ended, First Take made it a point to wish Cain well as he heads to FOX News after the end of this month.
When these three men got together to talk about any given topic, it’s clear they embraced the motto of the show, which is to embrace debate, and tried to see both sides despite the conflicting viewpoints at times.
