Stuart was kind of put on the shelf. It was like, oh man, what is going on here? I have no idea. So many people want to be a part of the Stuart Scott legacy and claim to have been supporters of Stu when they were never that.
Scott was born in Chicago in and spent his early life on the South Side. In , he and his family moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, shortly after the city started a school busing program. As a kid, Scott was called racist names but said he never felt much in the way of insecurity, thanks to his parents, Ray and Jackie.
Susan Scott, sister: When I was two and a half, my parents gave me the greatest gift in the world: my sister Synthia.
Another year and a half later, Stephen came along and I dropped Synthia like a hot potato. Then, oh my God, Stuart came along. He was my person. I could tell him things I never told another living soul. We moved into an all-white neighborhood. Our mom was an educator, so we had proper diction. Fred Tindal, friend and college roommate: I thought Stuart would either play football in the NFL or become a movie star. He loved musicals. He used to make me sit and watch all kinds of musicals. And I hated musicals.
Jersey Boys? He loved all that stuff. Andrew Copeland, guitarist from Sister Hazel: He was a music fan, period. There were multiple times at multiple venues that Stu would get up and sing songs with us. She worked with Stuart. They would be walking through an airport or mall and he would fall down. He was a complete nut. We get in and the trailers are already playing. Tindal: Stuart had a lisp when he was in high school.
He worked day and night on different therapies. Synthia Kearney, sister: My mother at one point took him to a speech therapist. As a high school wide receiver in Winston-Salem, Scott was good enough to get scholarship offers. Only two cornea transplants—the first of several eye surgeries Scott had during his lifetime—prevented him from trying to walk on at the University of North Carolina. But even as a SportsCenter anchor, Scott carried himself like a wide receiver—and believed he still might become one.
Van Pelt: He would tell me he could run a 4. Wrist bands. I thought we were going to come out and throw the ball around a little bit. What the hell is wrong with you? Rich Eisen, NFL Network anchor: He was going on assignment to Jets minicamp for a story on what it was like to try out to be a wide receiver. He told me he was going to make the Jets.
Drew, I want you to throw to me. LT, I want you to cover me. A football went through his hands and hit him in the eye. The Scott who beamed out of the TV in the wee hours—and, crucially, on repeats that ran all morning—was way bigger than boo-yah.
He anticipated in-game tweeting by a decade. He sounded like himself. Eisen: We were never told we were a team.
In breaks, he was always cranking himself up. He would sing. Eisen: He would see the reverence I had for Dan and Keith. Pidto: The tradeoff for doing the overnight was that you were on all morning. When a young kid got up and ate his breakfast back in that era, he saw Stu Scott every day. Bryant: It was a ritual. Normally with highlights, the action itself was entertaining, but what the commentators were saying was some really boring shit. I was 12, 13 years old. I just loved it. Hoge: I started to pick his brain one day.
When that camera comes on to me, it is my show. Eisen: He would jump into my highlights. I was going through that mental exercise and at times being consumed by it. He was just being Stuart. Davis: He and I did the Olympic bombing. We were on from a. I really believe that that night changed the way Stuart was perceived. Before then, he was perceived as a really good showman. After that, he was perceived as a great showman who could also handle things that carry a certain gravitas.
Laura Okmin, Fox reporter and friend: I love the catchphrases. Sage Steele, ESPN anchor: In the business, you know if someone is reading a highlight shot sheet or doing their thing and telling their own story with it. It was obvious to me long before I met him. He could do a second lead-in perfectly. That happened one time. He never fumbled his words. Harris: I did one show with Stuart. It was like watching a master class.
First of all, the preparation. I watched that up close and it was mesmerizing because it was poetry. Smith: This dude did spoken word on SportsCenter. Come on, now. Spoken word. Ramsey: He did a Warriors highlight as a poetry jam. For him to take a game that ended maybe two to three hours prior and write a poem to execute a game highlight is ridiculous.
Hill: Stuart had certain phrases that became part of the lexicon. Tindal: Mr. Gilbert—or Mr. G, as we called him—lived down the street [in Winston-Salem]. He was blind. One time, Mr. Did you hear that thunderstorm last night? It was awful. It went crack crack crack crack crack crack … boo-yow! Davis: Everybody in that era of SportsCenter was looking for the next great catchphrase, and sometimes you would pull a groin trying to do it.
The thing that always stood out to be about Stuart is that was always within his personality. Levy: The only disagreement we had came in a public setting, and I was a little embarrassed. We did a big media run-up to the first show on the new SportsCenter set. There was no risk. There was no approach. There was no trying to be different. My style is who I am. Scott Organ, friend: What helped him be successful was he was just himself.
Speak the way you would normally speak. Smith: African Americans throughout the history of this country have been told that we needed to conform, to assimilate. That we needed to be less street, be less hip-hop, be less hood. Just be less. We had to be less of ourselves in order to make the majority feel comfortable. For Stuart to come along and be every bit as good and professional, as sharp, as polished as any broadcaster doing it, but yet still be able to be as authentic and connected and representative of the culture as he was—it was just incredible.
Eisen: Some people thought he was fake on the air, that he would be doing a persona. To this day, if anybody thinks that, that makes me irate. Because he was just genuine. When guys do highlights, sometimes I want to jump in and do color. I never felt the need, the desire, to jump in with Stu. This is awesome. Scott got pushback from everywhere.
When an institution like ESPN changed its house voice, even slightly, a certain segment of the population lost its mind. Scott got picked on by sportswriters. Viewers left voice mails calling him the N-word. What confused Scott was the pushback he got from a handful of coworkers. Sometimes I would say something and sometimes I would just put it in the back pocket. Eisen: I made a Seinfeld reference. We go to commercial break.
Bell: Now, the lines are blurred. Then, some of the lines were still very much clearly defined. You keep that hip-hop talk over there, you know? Susan Scott: Norby [Williamson] wrote him up. He challenged his scripts. Like millions of sports fans, I miss him. This is just a different way. What am I doing that is so wrong that people speak unwell of me—even folks that are working with me?
Susan Scott: I literally sent [phone] scripts to my friends throughout media all over the country. The system had to be made to work for him. Scott kept the suits at bay, won over the audience, and rendered his skeptics irrelevant. But, meanwhile, Scott came up with an ingenious strategy.
He kept track of how many stats other SportsCenter anchors used in their highlights. Scott made sure he used at least one more. In his highlights, his stats became as gaudy as his catchphrases. Van Pelt: It was the terror of Stuart. Mayne: I think he sometimes did it almost like—as they call it these days—trolling.
Kolber: Somewhere along the way, it clicked. Everybody got it. Look it up. By , Scott had won a near-total victory. Campbell: It was like, I discovered some shit here. I got to get this dude in a video. Barkley: We looked at him as one of us. Kearney: All these other broadcasters started almost emulating him, trying to be more like him. You might even get into an argument on the Berman thing.
Hill: He was bringing in an entirely new audience too. It was Elvis entering the building. I love you! The white guy. He fucking loved it. If Scott was part jock, he also had a disarming ability to access his emotions.
That side of him came out when he talked about his daughters, Taelor and Sydni. Kolber: It was like a running joke. Taelor Scott: He was really into having daughters. Sydni Scott: He used to talk about how excited he was for the time, hypothetically in the future, when we first brought a boy home.
He said he would wear a wife-beater to answer the door. Taelor Scott: We both had glasses and braces. Scott was a champion for cancer research and was driven to improve the fight for African Americans. So while we miss him, and it feels awful that we lost him, I think looking back and realizing we got seven extra years is something that again I want for other people.
And I think that that should be an availability and something that everyone gets to kind of participate in and benefit from. Black men are diagnosed with cancer and die two times more than men of other races or ethnicity.
And those only scratch the surface. African Americans are also less likely to participate in clinical trial studies, mainly due to the history of systematic racial distrust embarked upon Black people since slavery and the lack of lay information dissipated into communities of color. Kelley Evans is a general editor at The Undefeated. She is a food passionista, helicopter mom and an unapologetic southerner who spends every night with the cast of The Young and the Restless by way of her couch.
Up Next. Up Next From The Uplift. By Kelley D. Evans kelleysthrngrl. Twitter Facebook Email. They couldn't see him suffer through a chemotherapy session at, say, 10 a. That scenario, or something like it, played out way too often during the last seven years of Stuart's He'd close his eyes during the commercial breaks at times.
There were trips to the bathroom that we knew included violent illness. There's not a person in the Bristol studios who didn't say at some point, "Stuart, seriously, you shouldn't work tonight," and his response pretty damn frequently was: "Bro, I'm good. We were from the same place, the South Side of Chicago, but approached what we did in radically different ways, which is why I didn't know exactly what to make of Stuart when I first saw him on-camera in the early s.
I was as intimately familiar with Pookie and Ray Ray as he was, but didn't think they belonged in a delivery of the day's sports news. Stuart, very deliberately and without much fear, was in the process of taking us to a new world of sports coverage, one where you let your emotion come pouring out much of the time, where personality would infuse the coverage. It wasn't just that a Scott-delivered story sounded "blacker" -- and it did, it sounded younger, and hipper, had greater edge and connected with an entire population of viewers who had been ignored.
More than anybody working then or now, Stuart Scott changed the very language used to discuss sports every day. He updated it, freshened it, made it more inclusive. And he took hell for it. How nerdy is it, looking back, to have felt that Stuart was some kind of pioneer for simply wanting to be himself on television? But he was exactly that, and because that evolution took the better part of 20 years, there is now an entire generation of young media folks, black and white, male and female, who don't feel the need to conform, and that is an enormous and admirable part of his professional legacy.
They were the faces on the front line who took the network from fledgling to global entertainment giant. And what I loved is that Stuart, who was no shrinking violet, was fine with his role in all of it, being the transitional figure he was and taking the mood from buttoned-up to cool. He was also smart enough, particularly the last five years, to ignore the morons and bigots on Twitter, the noise and intolerance of it all. One of the things Stuart shared with St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bryan Burwell, besides death from cancer in the primes of their lives, was the ability to be so upbeat and good-natured in the face of withering criticism from people who didn't want their morning newspaper or evening news to move one inch from what it had been in whiter times.
Our business, not that I'm particularly proud of this, is full of cynics, smart-asses, know-it-alls who don't actually know all that much. Everybody has become Simon Cowell, turning most every conversation into an intolerant rant. Not Stuart. He was up, upbeat, full of energy, always had something good to say. Always was good to the young production assistants in Bristol or on location. At 2 o'clock in the morning, most of us are irritable as hell and want to kill the producer for having us tape another "SportsCenter" segment; Stuart was perpetually ready to roll.
Jon Barry and I would snarl. Magic and Stuart were always good to go. Though we were all acutely aware that the cancer had returned, I couldn't see Stuart dying young until recently, when the signs were too overwhelming. He was all over me about changing my eating habits after I suffered a heart attack in January Health concerns were at the center of texts and phone calls for longer than I want to admit.
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