TNT’s Steve Smith connects with viewers on Turner Sports’s NBA TV, a color commentator on TNT’s Thursday night basketball games and is a broadcaster during CBS’s NCAA basketball tournament.
A retired NBA vet, he’d have a successful career on and off the floor. Smith would win the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship would go on to win a championship with the San Antonio Spurs in 2003.
Smith is also philanthropic. He donated 2.5 million to his alma mater, Michigan State in 1997 to fund the Clara Bell Smith Student Athlete Academic Center. The academic center, named after his mother, is the largest single donation by a professional athlete to his former school in history. Part of his $2.5 million was dedicated to create the Steve Smith Scholarship for Academic Achievement. In 2001, Smith donated another $600,000 to fully endow the scholarship, which provides a four-year academic scholarship to one student per year from Smith’s former high school, Pershing High School in Detroit, Michigan.
In a throwback interview on the Scoop B Radio Podcast, Smith chatted with host, Brandon ‘Scoop B’ Robinson about the joys of athletes becoming college grads and his mentors during his NBA playing days. Check it out by clicking here.
