Tribune News Service ESPN Anchor
Jacob Jardel
Assistant Managing Editor
@JJardel_Writing
With the New Year barely registered, the world of journalism lost a legend far too soon.
ESPN figurehead and voice of a generation Stuart Scott passed away on Jan. 4, 2015, after a seven-year-long battle with cancer. He was 49 years old.
Raised in North Carolina, Scott was a proud graduate of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. After years in the local television circuit, he joined ESPN in 1993 doing assignments for “SportsSmash” on ESPN2’s “SportsNight.” Scott eventually took over the anchor’s chair on “SportsNight” after Keith Olbermann’s departure before becoming a regular anchor on ESPN’s flagship show “SportsCenter.”
His 20-plus years with ESPN and parent company ABC also featured numerous hosting gigs and memorable interviews with prominent figures within and outside of the realm of sports.
More importantly, though, what he brought Worldwide Leader in Sports was a style and persona unlike any others before and surely unlike any others presently – and in the future.
While there were other successful African-American sportscasters on the scene at the time, Scott took a different angle to sports journalism than his colleagues. He brought hip-hop culture into the broadcasts in ways unprecedented. He roped pop culture into the highlight room.
Basically, Scott was unabashedly, unrelentingly, undeniably himself on the air.
This hip-hop, down-home style received both praise and criticism. One USA Today survey in 2003 showed that people wanted him off “SportsCenter” just as much as people wanted him to stay on.
Thankfully for the world of sports, he stayed on.
In his years with the company, Scott continued the tradition of fellow anchors Dan Patrick and Olbermann with the use of catchphrases. However, Scott’s enthusiasm and blend of hip-hop and sermon vernacular took the phrase game to the next level into pop culture relevance.
His hallmark phrase “Boo-Yah” became a well-known and oft-used interjection in the world outside of the ESPN campus in Bristol, Conn. After an athlete made remarkable play, Scott would encourage us to “holla at a playa when you see him in the street.”
With the use of all these phrases, you could say he was butter, ‘cause he was on a roll.
Scott was also a fighter. A blow to the face with a football in 2002 did not stop him from filming the special he was there to film, and the ptosis (drooping of the eyelid) that followed did not hinder his sportscasting career.
In 2007, after an appendectomy, Scott had his first of three brushes with cancer. He fought back, working out to combat atrophy from chemotherapy and hosting ESPN and ABC’s NBA studio shows to combat the disease from taking over his life.
Though the cancer would go into remission, it would come back in 2011 and again in 2013. Even after his third battle with the disease, Scott would do P90X workout regimens and mixed martial arts until his body could no longer do so.
In his last few months, he would make fewer appearances, most notably at the 2014 ESPY Awards, the awards show for sports excellence. He accepted the Jimmy V Award, an honor given to those in the sports world who persevere through what many would consider insurmountable odds.
While accepting this award, Scott shared the stories of the liver complications and kidney failures he encountered in the weeks prior to the ceremony. Even still, he stood on the stage and gave a moving speech about the daily fight he had with the disease.
“When you die,” he said, “it does not mean that you lose to cancer. You beat cancer by how you live, why you live and in the manner in which you live.”
Scott, above all else, lived his life in a way that made him a trailblazer.
He blazed the trail for black sportscasters not only to come into the journalism circuit but also to embrace their culture as they did it.
“He did not shy away from the fact that he was a black man,” ESPN anchor Stan Verrett said to ESPN.com, “and that allowed the rest of us who came along to just be ourselves.”
Scott changed the way many looked at sports journalism and broadcasting in general. His demeanor, his enthusiasm and his style all reminded us that sports journalists were more than just the words on a page or the broadcasts on the screen.
“We lost a football game, but we lost more this morning,” Arizona Cardinals coach Bruce Arians said in a press conference the day of Scott’s passing. “You guys [the media] lost a great ally and a friend. We [the sports world] lost one, too.”
As was implied in that quotation, Scott, above all else, inspired. He humanized the athletes, coaches, front offices and staff just as much as he humanized the media bringing them to the audience. He encouraged budding young journalists to be themselves on-page and on-screen. He reminded people that what they do in life is not nearly as important as how they do it.
In a statement, President Barack Obama said of Scott, “Over the years, he entertained us, and in the end, he inspired us – with courage and love.”
Stuart Scott was a sports broadcaster, a father, a husband, a son, a brother, a fighter, a trailblazer, a friend and an inspiration to everyone who encountered him in person or through the television screen.
Most of all, he was, is and will always be “as cool as the other side of the pillow.”