by Stuart Scott
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Copyright © 2015 by Stuart Scott
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scott, Stuart, 1965–2015.
Every day I fight / Stuart Scott, Larry Platt.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-19100-6
1. Scott, Stuart, 1965–2015. 2. Sportscasters—United States—Biography. 3. Cancer—Patients—United States—Biography. I. Platt, Larry. II. Title.
GV742.42.S35A3 2015 2015002612
070.4‘49796092—dc23
[B]
About the front jacket photograph: Stuart Scott sat for Dear World, a portrait project founded by Robert X. Fogarty. In his distinct message-on-skin style, Fogarty asks each subject to share a message about something or to someone they love.
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
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CONTENTS
Frontispiece
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE | FATHER’S DAY
CHAPTER TWO | TAKING HITS
CHAPTER THREE | ALPHA MAN
CHAPTER FOUR | GOTTA BE ME
CHAPTER FIVE | BOOMER BETTER KEEP UP
CHAPTER SIX | DROPPIN’ KNOWLEDGE
CHAPTER SEVEN | I WON’T BE HERE FOR MY DAUGHTERS
CHAPTER EIGHT | NEVER DIE EASY
CHAPTER NINE | NOW WHAT?
CHAPTER TEN | BACK IN THE RING
CHAPTER ELEVEN | TWO DATES AND A DASH
CHAPTER TWELVE | POUNDING THE ROCK
CHAPTER THIRTEEN | YOU BEAT CANCER BY HOW YOU LIVE
CHAPTER FOURTEEN | DAD, IS THIS IT?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN | BASKING IN THE GLOW OF THE NOW
EPILOGUE
Photos
Acknowledgments
Permissions
Photo Credits
Index
About the Authors
For Taelor and Sydni
Yes, Stuart Scott was as cool as the other side of the pillow. But he was so much more than the hippest sports journalist ever. It wasn’t just his unique catchphrases that set him apart. Stu was also one of the most authentic people I have ever been blessed to know. Simply put, he was the real deal on and off camera. We met in 1993. I had been at ESPN for a few years by then, and Stu was hired to be an anchor for the launch of ESPN2. Our cool factor went off the charts with Stu roaming the halls and performing “Rapper’s Delight” on karaoke nights. He brought a spirit and a style that had never been seen, never been felt before, at ESPN.
Stu and I hit it off right away and discovered we had a lot in common. We both were from the South, were college hoops fanatics, and were the youngest of four children in our families. It was apparent that Stu came from a good, loving, and supportive family. Soon he started a family of his own. Taelor and Sydni were his world. Oh, how he loved being their dad. He proudly showed us their pictures as they grew into beautiful, talented young women. He’d whip out his phone and show us the latest video of them performing. Taelor playing the guitar, Sydni singing. Nothing, and I mean nothing, made Stu happier or brought him more pure joy.
Later Stu and I shared something else in common. Cancer. But that never was the focus of our conversations. We didn’t feel the need to talk about it. There’s an unspoken language and understanding between those facing cancer. You focus on the fight, not the fright. Every day he fought for his girls … before and after he became ill. I’ll never forget when his cancer returned for a third time. I went with him to the gym to watch him train. He had taken up martial arts and cross-training workouts. In the midst of grueling chemotherapy treatments, it was his way to treat his body as well as his spirit. The punches and kicks he threw were physical as well as symbolic. It was Stu’s way of continuing to battle, to literally kick cancer’s you-know-what! After the workout, he began bragging about Taelor and Sydni. Then he told me: “I want to be here because I don’t want some other dude walking my daughters down the aisle at their weddings.” Those girls gave Stu purpose in his life and his fight.
Though the outcome was not what we wanted, not what we prayed for, Stu’s fight was every bit as valiant and meaningful. Like many, I remain in awe of how he stared cancer smack-dab in the face. Sitting in the audience at the ESPYs, I marveled at how he found the strength to get out of his hospital bed and take that stage. It was incredibly fitting that he received the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance. Jim Valvano and Stuart Scott were cut from the same cloth. Two dynamic men who embraced life and changed lives. That night at the ESPYs, Stu must have been the bus driver, cuz he was takin’ us to school. He delivered an invaluable lesson for the ages: “When you die, it does not mean that you lose to cancer. You beat cancer by how you live, why you live, and the manner in which you live.” His words were as raw, honest, and powerful as the man himself.
Stu’s unshakable courage was inspirational. Cancer never defined him; it’s not his life’s story but rather a chapter in his life’s story. You’ll see in these beautifully written pages that he set a stellar example for all of us in so many aspects of life. Stu said when you’re too tired to fight, rest and let someone else fight for you. My dear friend, you can rest now, and we will continue to fight for you.
ROBIN ROBERTS
INTRODUCTION
WHY I FIGHT
My phone was blowing up. The text messages were coming nonstop, and, with each one, I was feeling more and more like an imposter. There were hundreds of them, almost all using words like “courageous,” “brave,” “inspirational.”
Only I felt like none of those things. No, the only thing I felt, the only thing I’ve ever felt since the day in 2007 I learned that what I thought was appendicitis was actually a rare form of cancer, was … fear. To readers of that morning’s New York Times, I may have seemed courageous. But trust me: I ain’t courageous. I just don’t want to die.
The article, on this March day in 2014, was headlined “A Story of Perseverance: ESPN Anchor’s Private Battle with Cancer Becomes a Public One” and it had all the background. It had the three surgeries that had removed my appendix, large intestine, some lymph nodes, other organs; the fifty-eight infusions of chemotherapy I’d undergone to that point; the Wound VAC that drained the foot-long scar that ran from chest to belly button and that had taken two months to heal after a ten-hour surgery in the fall of 2013. And it had me wearing a black “Everyday I Fight” T-shirt at the mixed martial arts studio near my Connecticut home, where I go straight from chemotherapy to jab and hook and kick until I collapse, drained.
But that’s not courage. That’s survival. When cancer storms into your life, you have a choice: fight, or curl up and just be a cancer patient. That doesn�
��t mean I don’t have my moments. There are times when I say to myself, It’s too much, I don’t have the energy for this fight. There are times I bawl my eyes out and tell my girlfriend, Kristin, who has slept on a cot by my bedside throughout countless hospital stays, “I’m scared, I’m really scared.” I come from jockdom; what guy likes being that vulnerable? I have many such moments, but they’re not the last moment I have. And they’re not my most enduring moments.
Because having cancer, it turns out, is more complicated than you’d think. Like any great opponent, cancer is in your face. It practices the art of intimidation. It gets inside your head and messes with your thinking. It takes its toll on you physically, but the real burden is mental. I’ve told my doctors I don’t want to know my prognosis: “I’m not interested in hearing how long you think I might have.” That would be just another thing to be frightened of and obsess over.
But let’s keep this real. I’m forty-nine. There’s a good chance I’m going to die a helluva lot earlier than I ever wanted to. There’s a good chance I’m going to die soon. And I know it. I know it every moment of every day. And that reality is never not with me.
So this book is a chronicle of my fight against cancer, but it’s even more than that. It’s really a memoir of a life well fought; in sports, the media, or the cancer ward, the one true thing I’ve learned is that life is hard but that there is redemption in the struggle.
Cancer is just the latest, and most terrifying, fight. Though I hate this most unwanted of companions, I respect it for its power—and there are even times when I’m grateful for what it’s given me. Don’t get me wrong: From day one, I was committed to beating it. But along the way, I’ve learned how paradoxical the relationship between patient and disease really is; cancer turns the old cliché on its head. It can kill you and make you stronger, all at the same time.
That’s why words like “brave” don’t really apply when confronting cancer. When you first hear that you have it—a doctor prefaced breaking the news to me by saying, “Things just got more complicated”—you say to yourself: I’m going to die. And, in my case, the very next thought was even more of a sledgehammer: I won’t be here for my two daughters. After a while, once the sting subsides, you ask yourself: How do I fight cancer?
Here’s what I knew about cancer: You get it, you die. But I’d always been a competitive sonofabitch. I turned down a couple of football scholarships out of high school to attend my dream school, the University of North Carolina, where I was friendly with Michael Jordan before he was the greatest who ever lived; I planned on being a walk-on wide receiver there, but an eye disease, keratoconus, ended my collegiate career before it began. As a sports broadcaster debuting on ESPN in the early nineties, I brought the in-your-face attitude of the music I came up on—hip-hop—to SportsCenter. That wasn’t a planned thing; it was just who I was. Yeah, I’m young, I’m African-American, and I’m telling you about this game like I’m talking trash with my boys back home: “Man, Mike about to put it on these boys! Mike about to mess them up!” Even my most famous catchphrase—Boo-yah!—was all about capturing those adrenaline-fueled moments of intimidation in sports.
Yet behind the on-air bravado was a craftsman; I actually kept a running chart of how many statistics colleagues like Keith Olbermann, Dan Patrick, and Chris “Boomer” Berman used in their broadcasts because I was determined to lead the nation in giving the audience cold, hard facts behind the loudness. You could hate me for my style, but my substance was going to be beyond reproach.
On the football field or the TV set, the only way I knew how to succeed was to push myself, to be stronger than my opponent, to work harder. But now there I was, forty-two years old, and the opponent before me was a freakin’ assassin. How do you work harder than cancer? I didn’t know. But when I want to work hard, I go to the gym. After my first four-hour chemo treatment, I was hooked up to a two-day chemo drip in a little bag that attached to a port in my stomach—and thirty minutes later, I was in the gym. On the elliptical machine, I looked down and noticed the name of the medicine dripping into my body: It was called fluorouracil, or 5-FU for short.
I smiled, said a little prayer, and then stuck that pack into the pocket of my gym shorts and said to myself: FU, cancer. The athlete in me realized: This thing growing inside me was trying to kick my ass. Well, I’ve gotta hit first and kick its ass. So I attacked the elliptical and made a promise to myself: From then on, I’d be working out within thirty minutes of each chemo treatment. Later, I’d skip the gym—there were too many inquiries about my health; they were well-meaning, but we members of the alternative universe that is CancerWorld chuckle at the overly earnest, stage-whispered “how you feeling” queries meant to convey deep concern—and instead I started doing P90X or mixed martial arts in the living room of my house. From day one, working out was my own private “FU” to cancer.
Because cancer is trying to rob the most precious thing in the world to me: time with my daughters, Sydni, fifteen, and Taelor, nineteen. They’re why I say “FU” to cancer every day. When I have those moments—when I say to myself, This is too hard, I’m too tired to go on—I remind myself that cancer forced me to reconsider my life’s goal and that I haven’t reached it yet: I want to walk Taelor and Sydni down the aisle. I don’t want them with an uncle or some father figure; that’s my place.
I hate that a group of abnormal cells inside my body has such control over my life. At the same time, I can’t deny that cancer has actually given me something. Because it gives every moment meaning. Because I’m on a time clock and I don’t know what that time clock says. And no moments are deeper than those with my knuckleheaded daughters, for whom I fight every day.
• • •
A FEW WEEKS AGO, Sydni came home—I share custody with my ex-wife—and asked if her girlfriends could come over and get ready with her for that night’s dance. And, of course, could I drive them to it?
Hell, yes. “Do you want me to get some chips?” I called to her.
“Sure, Dad,” she said. “Get some chips.” I could almost hear the eye roll through her closed bedroom door. Sydni is beautiful and talented—she’s the soloist in her school choir—but she’s at that age where anything Dad does, by virtue of him having done it, is uncool.
On our way to the dance, the classic old-school tune “Cameosis” by Cameo came on. I reached for the volume and cranked it up, bellowing, “Now, this is when music was music!” and started singing along:
When you hear a group that moves you
And feel it in your feet
You ask yourself, hold on a minute
What group now can this be.
The girls were all laughing, but Sydni wasn’t having it: “All right, Dad, whatever,” she said, insisting on a newer sound track. Kendrick Lamar came on, and now the girls were the ones singing, Sydni most of all, all of them smiling—they were showing the old man something.
And I just looked at them through that rearview mirror and thought: This is so cool. I’ll never do something more important than this. Taking my daughter and her friends to a dance.
This is what cancer does. It makes you look fresh at small moments and see them—really see them—as if for the first time. Pre-cancer, the ride to the dance would have been merely fun, and then I wouldn’t have thought about it again. But it wouldn’t have hit deep. It wouldn’t have seared into my mind’s eye the image of Sydni’s smiling, singing face.
During Super Bowl week last year, I met Taelor for lunch in New York City. She was between classes at Barnard College. We sat there, my firstborn and I, as she chatted away: about an assignment for sociology, her roommate, a boy who might possibly like her. My phone was vibrating, again and again. The old me would have answered. There’s always time for my girls, after all, right? Not the cancer me. Let it go, man, the cancer me said. Nothing’s more important than being with this person who, together with Sydni, changed my life more than anyone. Later, Kristin would say: “I called you today,” a
nd I’d reply: “I was with Taelor.” ’Nuff said.
I’m not trying to “Kumbaya” you. My daughters are teenagers, man. Sydni is in perpetual eye-roll mode and Taelor is a typical college student; she’ll call for advice or to ask for money or to share a joke—only, of course, not as often as her needy Dad wishes she would. Teenage girls are a whole ’nother thing. They get angry with me, annoyed, embarrassed. Friends tell me they’ll come around. Teenage girls always come around to their dad eventually.
But that well-meaning advice strikes to the heart of my fear. I don’t have “eventually.” The truth is, I’m not as afraid of dying as I am of not being here for my daughters’ aha moment. I’m on the clock and I want to be here when they get it—when they get what I got about my dad: that all the stuff he did that ticked me off? He did that for me.
Ray Scott was a federal postal inspector—the dude carried a gun and cuffs; I’d grow muscles when the neighborhood kids would see him. He promised his four kids that he’d pay our college tuition if we maintained a 2.0 grade point average. After my sophomore year, I was skating along with a 2.7. Dad said he was restructuring our deal—he’d only pay if I kept a 3.0 or better. “That’s crap,” I said. That wasn’t the deal. It wasn’t fair—a common refrain from my teenagers today.
But then something happened: In the fall of my junior year, I was heavily involved with my fraternity, I played club football, and I posted a 3.2 GPA. The next semester, I upped that to 3.6. The following one, 3.4. I remained pissed until years later, when it dawned on me: Dad knew I was better than a 2.7 student. And he knew I needed to be pushed. Funny, isn’t it, how much smarter our dads are when we get older?
That was my aha moment about my dad. Will Sydni and Taelor have theirs about me in time? Maybe that’s selfish of me to wonder. Maybe their aha moment about me is for them—not me. But I can’t help myself. I want them to realize that everything I do, I do with their best interests at heart—and I want that to happen while I’m still around for them to talk to me about it, like I did with my dad.