STARTING FIVE

1. Stuart Scott, 1965-2015

A cruel fate for a man who loved his job, loved his children and loved his fame and all the trappings. I’d be the first to admit that, professionally, Stuart Scott was never what I loved about SportsCenter, but he was definitely a natural as a broadcaster. And he certainly was dedicated to his work.

It’s funny how far the culture has come since ESPN launched in 1979. One year later a hilarious film –probably my favorite comedy– called Airplane came out, and there’s an entire scene featuring two African-American males speaking “jive.” Remember, the Sugar Hill Gang had only released “Rapper’s Delight,” the seminal hip-hop song, one year earlier (also 1979).

It wasn’t as if African-American culture had not already, to everyone’s benefit, infused itself into American culture: How lucky were those of us who are roughly Scott’s age to have been raised in an era that gave us The Jackson Five (unbelievably talented performers), the Flip Wilson variety show, Richard Pryor, Earth, Wind and Fire, The Temptations/Spinners/O’Jays, etc., to name just a few. And as much as I loved Roger Staubach as an athlete, I worshipped Walt Frazier and even Sugar Ray Leonard just as much.

But, in 1980, black culture remained peripheral. It was still a service road adjacent to mainstream (read: white) culture. That began to change in the 1980s and early 1990s, especially musically (from Prince to Run-DMC to, when it started getting real, Naughty by Nature and NWA). Do The Right Thing was also a landmark moment.

And make no mistake, the popularity of sports and the prominence of black athletes, who had gradually become bolder over the years (all hail the The Greatest, Muhammad Ali) also played a role. Magic Johnson, the Miami Hurricanes, Mike Tyson: they were far more than sports icons, they were cultural pioneers.

(Magic vs. Larry was always about so much more than Lakers versus Celtics: it was White America versus Black America and don’t ever let anyone tell you differently.)

Also, Eddie Murphy helped change the game as well. He was relentlessly honest and brilliant. You had to be a complete troll not to admire him.

In 1992 I spent an entire day –literally, about 18 hours–in Bristol to report a bonus piece (you’d call it “long form” now) for Sports Illustrated on “SportsCenter.” I met people like Bob Ley, Keith Olbermann, Bill Patrick and Linda Cohn. You could see this franchise was on its way to greatness; you could also see that it was much like the rural Connecticut area in which it was situated: overwhelmingly white.

Late the following year, Stuart Scott arrived. And you have to give him credit: even if you didn’t care for “boo-yow!” (that’s how he actually wrote it on shot sheets) or “Pookie and Ray-Ray”, he was, like Kenny Mayne, an original. And, he had carved out his own niche by appealing directly to the brothers who watch SportsCenter and the brothers who are featured on SportsCenter.

Scott ruffled some feathers, at least professionally. One on-air personality at ESPN actually quipped “Stewardess, I speak jive” to another as Scott was doing highlights (once that I am aware of, but probably more often). He also often forgot that he was a person who covered elite sports stars as opposed to being one himself. It was interesting to me that ESPN, in its tribute last night, included the anecdote from Dan Patrick, perhaps the most talented anchor ever to work at ESPN, in which a recreational game of hoops turned into blood sport, with Scott “undercutting” Patrick on a drive to the basket and never even checking to see if Patrick was okay (he wasn’t; he’d cracked a vertebrae; I love how Patrick does not fail to note that he did bury the game winner, though).

Dan Patrick actually played college basketball, a fact he never mentions on air. Stuart Scott did not, but he was never reticent about implying that he was athletic.

I met him twice, and he was genuinely nice. You could tell that being STUART SCOTT was highly important to him, but I also sensed a person who was searching for approval.

We first met in Los Angeles in the spring of 1999. I had been working at an ESPN-managed event (it just happened to take place at the Playboy Mansion...holla!) and the ESPN communications person who was chaperoning/guarding me, a woman, invited me to hang out with her and Scott, who was in town for some sort of endorsement deal, afterward. Scott had a limousine at his disposal and suddenly I was, for a few hours, living The Life.

He was nice enough to let me hang with the two of them (I doubt he was thrilled to see me…Three’s Company only when Jack Tripper is around, which is a reference he’d never have made). He wanted to know why an SI colleague of mine dogged him in print so often, but this was 1999 and people were still taking sides in terms of how we wanted our SportsCenter flavored. The three of us rode the limo up past Malibu on the PCH –there was a brief stop as two adult males relieved themselves on the side of the road with a gorgeous view of the moonlit Pacific stretched out before them–and while I’d never say the two of us bonded, I came away thinking that he is a decent guy who really was completely devoted to his job and to the role he had etched for himself.

Three years later we met again, in New York City. I was writing a piece on Scott’s ascendance for TV Guide and in between the time we had set up the interview and the interview itself, a bizarre thing happened. Scott, in his mid-thirties, decided to spend a week at a spring training session with the New York Jets at wide receiver. He told people that he was honestly seeing if he could make the roster. No joke.

Well, Scott was working with the ball machine that fires out those tight spirals after practice one day and a football slipped through his hands and struck him in the eye. The relatively good eye. His career was in jeopardy because his sight was in jeopardy, and you can’t narrate highlights if you can’t see either them or read a teleprompter. This happened before the advent of The Big Lead or Deadspin, so it never became the BIG DEAL that it might have. But Scott did miss a significant amount of time at work.

That experience, it seemed, humbled him somewhat. He realized how precious his job was, how blessed he was to be part of this incredible cultural phenomenon (“Get out the checkbook and pay grandma for the rubdown…”) (by the way, notice that the Sonics play two different games in this highlight sequence). And while I would occasionally roll my eyes at his poetry slams, I also realized that he wasn’t doing it for me or my demographic. I also appreciated that Scott was trying something different (“Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” is, I believe, the way you put it).

My best friend, who goes by the moniker Moose, is in her late forties and has overcome cancer three times. Just last month she had what we hope will be her last surgery related to it. Only through seeing her battle can I even begin to comprehend how tough and cruel cancer must be. Far crueler still if you have two daughters and you are fighting every day to continue to be a part of their growth into womanhood.

Stuart Scott fought an incredibly brave fight in his final years, doing SportsCenter and the Monday Night Football gig as much as he physically could. There was a wisdom and grace to his presence that had not been there in those brash ’90s years (that can be said for so many of us between, say, our 28th and 48th birthdays). Michael Jordan, a fellow UNC alum who predated Scott in Chapel Hill by a couple of years, put it succinctly last night: “He was a trailblazer.”

Indeed he was. Stuart Scott will be missed. He was an undeniable presence at ESPN and, like Chris Berman or Dan & Keith, a defining one.