Stuart Scott: Chowder and Champions Remembers An Icon
Stuart Scott’s passing at age 49 was actually the first thing that yours truly heard this morning. (“This morning” is used in a loose sense, since it was actually 11:30am central time due to a late night where many drinks were drank, and “heard” really means “there’s a blinking red ESPN alert on my phone’s home screen”.) It wasn’t a shock, out of the blue, or due to some freakish accident like the passing of so many people in the prime of their lives so often is. But as the day went on, and football was played (as long as Andy Dalton’s around, Peyton Manning never has to fear the “worst QB in the playoffs” label being slapped on him), the fact that Stuart Scott wasn’t on this Earth with us any longer kept twisting in my gut. Watching guys like Rich Eisen, who co-anchored SportsCenter with Stuart Scott from 1996 to 2003, damn near lose their composure on national television, kept making me wonder “Why does this hurt? Sure, cancer’s a horrific disease and all, but I never knew the guy. It’s not like he was associated with the teams I root for. He’s a sports news anchor.”
And it’s because Stuart Scott grew up with us.
Not in age, or maturity, or professionalism, or sports trivia knowledge, but in the way that your older brother takes pride in your accomplishments, all the while knowing that being true to yourself is just as important as winning.
“He sounds like the announcer from NBA Jam!”
Or maybe it was the other way around (meaning “The NBA Jam announcer sounds like him!”), as a white kid who grew up in a white town without any substantial ethnic diversity to speak of. The easiest way to explain the concept of “cool” to a little kid is to say something like “You won’t know it till you see it, but when you do, you’ll know.” To put it another way, ask a kid in elementary school what they want to be when they grow up. You’ll get astronauts, lawyers, presidents, and carpenters, but what’s most common? NBA guard. NFL quarterback. MLB shortstop. NHL forward. World Cup superstar. And, when that happens, did you want Keith Olbermann (no offense, Keith) calling your finals-winning touchdown/homerun/goal on SportsCenter? Nope. You wanted the replay, in super-slow-motion, paired like a cheeseburger and bacon with “Cooler than the other side of the pillow!” as you smashed into the paint for the backboard-breaking jam with 0.02 seconds left to go in the NBA Finals.
And then, we got older.
College is a place that can knock down the best of us, whether you’re doing it a few minutes from your folks’ house (though I doubt after watching “American Pie”, any of us really wanted anything like that to happen), or, literally, across the country, but like our POTUS Barack Obama said earlier today, “…Wherever I went, I could flip on the TV and Stu and his colleagues on SportsCenter were there. Over the years, he entertained us, and in the end, he inspired us – with courage and love.” For me, that meant moving over 1,000 miles away from a town with one stoplight (I hear they’ve since acquired another one) in northeast Connecticut, to Nashville, Tennessee – but still being able to hear, in a dorm room lobby, at 2:00am CST, Stu calling the highlights from the Boston Red Sox somehow finishing a mathematically impossible comeback against the Evil Empire New York Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series. Calling a wet-behind-the-ears David Ortiz’s hitting. Showing Curt Schilling’s bleeding ankle soaking through his sock. And then there was Johnny Damon at the plate, and, well, you know the rest. Watching those players, with Stu throwing down all of his by-then-patented signature lingo, was hearing the hot dawg reveling in the exploits of the hot dawgs, the guys that weren’t supposed to be there, the guys that were supposed to be playing golf at that point in the season, not baseball. You know the rest of that story.
And then we got older.
Your mid and late 20s will reveal how awesome life can be, and also how life is as fragile as a wine glass balanced on a drunk sorority girl’s head. Some people are lucky enough to have all four of their grandparents at their college graduations. Some people have to trust that those same grandparents can see it from somewhere else, whether that means another state, another country, or another life. Some people won’t graduate college at all, but still live and die with their squads. Stuart Scott was, simultaneously, somehow, the guy at the bar watching SportsCenter highlights with you, smashing your high-five so hard it stung, and the guy who was so established in sports journalism that he couldn’t possibly, EVER, go anywhere besides SportsCenter. Even Rich Eisen moved on! No offense, Rich, but us basic cable folks could still revel in Stu’s everyman’s amazement when Kobe drilled a 3 from beyond the arc, or Brady hit Moss for a touchdown AGAIN, or even the emergence of a one LeBron James (I hear things worked out OK for him).
And then we got older still, and so did Stu.
Only for Stuart Scott, age didn’t mean what it normally meant for a 40-something-year-old. Normal for people 40-something years old means their kids will make fun of our dads for having a bad slice on the golf course, or make “mid-life-crisis” jokes about a new Corvette or Harley-Davidson, or point out our mom’s first gray hair, or visit our mom and dad on separate weekends after they divorced. What it meant for Stuart Scott was being diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2007, and then we heard that he would keep fighting. Not living, surviving, or trying. Fighting.
Almost everyone knows someone that they’ve lost to cancer. Grandparents, most likely. Maybe a cousin, or even a parent. It’s the number two cause of death in America, only second to heart disease, and it ain’t in second place by much. Some of us have visited cancer patients, family or otherwise, in the hospital. Stuart Scott? The only way you were visiting him was with a visitor’s pass in Bristol, Connecticut. Or if you had a pass to the ESPY’s in July of 2014, where, after beating cancer for three times (!!!), Scott delivered his famous “When you die, 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.”
And when you hear a guy that you heard exalting in the glory of Michael Jordan’s championship run, and the Red Sox breaking the curse in 2004, and, of all things (and I can’t believe I’m about to say this), LeBron James winning two consecutive NBA championships, saying, “You beat cancer by how you live, why you live, and the manner in which you live”, well, I don’t even think a speech from Alfred the butler to Batman himself could make you want to run through a brick wall any more than that.
A previous statement in this piece should be rescinded. We didn’t grow up with Stuart Scott. Stuart Scott grew up with us.
I think I speak for everyone at Chowder & Champions in saying that, Stu, you taught us to exult in victory and recognize greatness. And to do so, in your own style, is what being as cool as the other side of the pillow is all about.