Will Smith’s Memoir Explains Why He Slapped Chris Rock

Does the 20-year-old self ever fully grow up?

Will Smith was a 20-year-old rap star.

He had just come back home to Philadephia from a two-week run of concerts along the Pacific Northwest with his music partner DJ Jazzy Jeff.

He went by Fresh Prince back then as a pioneer of hip hop, singing his Grammy-winning song “Parents Just Don’t Understand” to sold-out arenas.

He was different than most rappers with his clean image, and he had a policy of having no girls backstage since he was planning to marry his girlfriend.

After a concert tour, Smith would run right off the stage, drive to the airport, fly back home, and then go straight to see his high school sweetheart.

On this night, he went to his girlfriend’s aunt’s house. They ate dinner and watched a movie. Later, he planned to walk his girlfriend to the mansion he bought for them.

It was going to be a special moment. A memory they’d never forget.

My Will Smith-like moment

When I watched the video of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, I felt the same shock that Rock must have felt after being slapped by Smith.

But then after my shock settled down I remembered the scene in Will’s book. The scene reminded me of how hard it is for all of us to deal with moments in our lives that involve strong emotions, especially those in relationships.

I thought of one moment that reminded me of how easy it is for our amygdala, the part of our brain responsible for emotions, to get activated on short notice.

I don’t remember what my wife and I were arguing about at the time. We were newly married, and I just remember getting so upset my hand became a fist.

I realized hitting my wife was not the answer. But what do I do with the anger raging inside of me? My first instinct was to hit the wall, but I thought I’d either break my hand or put a hole in the wall that would cost money to fix.

I was so out of control of my emotions. I couldn’t calm myself down. I needed some kind of release and found it in a wicker laundry basket in our bedroom.

I shredded that thing to pieces and felt a release of all the anger inside me. I was practically foaming at the mouth and laughing as it turned into scraps.

So I can relate to Will Smith losing it in a moment. I am generally an easy-going person, but I can think of other moments when I’ve lost it like Will.

Back to Will’s memoir

Will wrote in his book that his girlfriend was always excited when he came home. Even on weekend gigs, she made him feel like he’d been gone a month.

But something felt different that night as his girlfriend and aunt cooked dinner and as they watched the movie Trading Places.

He sensed something wasn’t right.

When the aunt went to bed, he and his girlfriend started kissing. But then he stood up and yelled, “You think I’m STUPID!” He had no proof. But he just knew she had cheated.

He was right.

He scanned the room and saw the iron fireplace tool. Then he walked over calmly and smashed the glass windows in an atrium by the front door.

It was like my wicker basket except there was one minor difference.

Will says he was responding how he felt a guy was supposed to act when their girlfriend cheats. The hurt and pain of his feelings hadn’t broken through yet.

Finally, he broke down

As he got closer to his childhood home, he saw his mom waiting for him. His girlfriend’s aunt had called his mom and told her what had just happened.

And he let everything out he’d been keeping bottled up and bawled. His mom threw her arms around her son like the father in the story of the prodigal son.

“How could she do this, Mommy? Why did God let this happen?”

The connection I saw between Will learning his girlfriend cheated on him and slapping Rock at the Oscars is the difficulty Smith has with painful emotions.

And the way Will responds is the way I and many people tend to respond. We avoid our painful emotions rather than feeling and working through them.

I developed an addiction after arguments in my marriage became too intense. My wife felt our son displayed autistic traits, and she felt that I was in denial.

The argument became intense. I didn’t know how to respond, and so I coped by finding an outlet because I just didn't know how to deal with my emotions.

Finally, I learned to identify and work out my emotions in a 12-step program.

Back to Will Smith

After he finds out his girlfriend cheated on him, Smith deals with his emotions in two ways: going on shopping binges and having sex with plenty of women.

“Whatever y’all want, I got it,” he tells ten of his friends at a Gucci store.

The shopping binges and sex became outlets for how he coped with his hurts.

He bought a Benz 300, a Corvette, and candy-apple-red IROC. He bought a Suzuki Katana 600 motorcycle and crashed it, so he bought another one.

He gambles over games of pool where $150,000 can be lost in a single night.

He invites his dad over to his new home to show off his collection of cars.

“Boy, why you need three cars?” he said. “You only got one ass.”

The funny thing, no one realized it was how he was coping with his hurts.

Not dealing with emotions

Besides buying cars and having lots of sex, Will talks in his book about the other ways he sought to cope with his pain over his girlfriend’s cheating.

He began to get into fights every weekend. He’d sucker punch guys if they looked at him in the wrong way, knowing he had a bodyguard to back him.

Sound familiar? Okay, that was a low blow. I’m just saying that if we don’t learn to deal with our emotions we can be fifty but emotionally be like 20.

In the chapter on Pain in his book Will, it was clear that he was doing everything but dealing with his emotions over his girlfriend’s cheating, the thing that caused him the pain in the first place.

And the Oscar slap made me wonder if Will still has the same problem: Avoiding dealing with emotions by coping with his hurts in other ways.

Final thought

Will Smith said in his Oscar speech after winning Best Actor in a leading role that Denzel Washington told him, “At your highest moment be careful — that’s when the devil comes for you.”

The truth is, Will’s own demons got to him that night. Just like they can get any one of us at a moment’s notice.

I definitely don’t condone Will’s violence, and it should have never happened. But we’ve been at moments where we’ve felt anger like Will and it reminds me we all have our own inner demons that can rise up throughout our lives.

Will was twenty years old when that episode with the girlfriend happened. It makes me wonder, does the twenty-year-old self ever fully grow up?

You can be fifty but still twenty emotionally when you don’t learn how to handle your emotions. That’s my take-away from the Will Smith Oscar slap.

And, yeah, I recommend Will’s book. It’s co-written by Mark Manson, the author of “The Subtle Art of Not Give a F*uck,” and he creates narrative scenes of Will’s life and Will does a dive deep into sharing his life with readers.

Thanks for reading my story.

Tagging my guy buddies on Medium: Michael L Butler, Gerald Sturgill, J.R. Spiers, Sreese, Kennardo James, MarkfromBoston 🌻Ukraine, Art Bram, Andy Spears, Paul Walker, Frank Priegue, Harold Zeitung, Patrick OConnell, JF Danskin, Sam Ochstein, Jonson Craig, Hayden Moore, Sahil Patel, Rodrigo S-C, Anthony Dale, Ning Choi, Ryan Barnes, Jameson Steward, Scott Younkin.

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