Every Day I Fight

by Stuart Scott

  This is what cancer does. It makes everything profound. It makes everything urgent.

  • • •

  A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, during a game of the NBA Finals, a couple of security guards were escorting Sydni, Taelor, and me through the concourse; we were on our way to see the family of a friend who was an NBA executive. Because I’m on TV, I tend to get recognized when I’m out, but this was a sports-centric crowd, so I was being swarmed. As fans saw me, they started to call to me. Some asked for autographs. One guy planted himself in front of me.

  “Sorry, man,” I said, “can’t—in a hurry,” as security helped us sidestep him.

  “You’re an asshole!” he called out.

  I laughed. Taelor was shocked: “Dad, that guy called you an asshole!” she exclaimed. “I mean, you can be an asshole, but he doesn’t know that!”

  I cracked up. But back at SportsCenter, the anecdote prompted a bull session hypothetical. A bunch of middle-aged sportscasters started to wonder: What would it take for each of us to throw down?

  “Man, someone calling me a name or cross-eyed, that’s funny,” I said. “That ain’t worth stepping outside.”

  Now, I know how to fight. I train. I know how to punch, how to kick. But you’re not going to call me a name and get me to fight.

  Then the question came: What would you do if someone called one of your daughters a name? I paused. “I’d put him down,” I said.

  That might sound like a contradiction, but it’s actually very calculated. I want my girls to see me walk away if someone calls me a name. But I also want them to know that I won’t let anybody mess with them. I want them to know I’ll protect them. Maybe I’m wrong. But I feel this overwhelming need to show them how much I’m willing to fight for them.

  And that’s what I’m doing every day against cancer: fighting for them. This book is about my fight against cancer, yes, but it’s also about why I fight, whom I’m fighting for, and how I find the energy to stay in the ring.

  It’s also about the central paradox of that fight: You hate this thing inside you. You want to rid your body of it. At the same time, you’re aware of what it’s done to you: how it gives you an urgency to live—really live—every day; how it makes you see the profound in the everyday; how it teaches patience and humility. The contradiction is as top-of-mind as the fact of the cancer itself: Cancer can kill you, but it can also make you the man you always wanted to be.

  CHAPTER ONE

  FATHER’S DAY

  It’s funny what people think. If you look at Twitter, it won’t take you long to find some outraged accusations of bias against ESPN. A good amount of them have been directed at me. We’re not impartial journalists, the conspiracy theorists suggest; we pick and choose certain leagues, teams, and players to support. I’ve been accused of kissing up to LeBron, Tiger, or, back in the day, Michael. As a network, we’ve been said to favor the SEC, act as a publicity arm for Tim Tebow, and bow down before King James.

  It always makes me laugh, because it’s just so naïve. We’re a ratings-driven business, so why wouldn’t we have devoted ample coverage to, say, Tebow when his story was top-of-mind throughout the nation? That’s called journalism, folks. My colleagues and I—we’re journalists. We cover what you’re interested in.

  Now, I also happen to be a sports fan. And I’m very transparent about the fact that I root like hell for my North Carolina Tar Heels, because I bleed Tar Heel blue. But do I pull for LeBron? Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of Twitter comments suggest that I do—in pretty graphic terms. I like LeBron as a person and I respect him as an athlete, but the fact is, James’s teams the past few years have been the pulse of the NBA—and that’s why he has received so much attention from us.

  During the 2013 NBA Finals, I took some heat on Twitter after the San Antonio Spurs beat the Heat by 36 points in Game Three. I tweeted: “San Antonio fans in downtown … Ur team won game 3 … they DID NOT win the title. Stop honking horns, driving slow & yelling out cars. Go Home!!”

  Man, Twitter blew up. You would have thought I’d nominated LeBron for sainthood. The irony is that those in the Twitterverse who were accusing me of bias then were kind of right a year later. When I decided to write this book, I committed to keeping it real with you. So it’s confession time: During the 2014 NBA Finals, I violated the journalist’s code of objectivity. I was rooting for someone to win. And I was pulling harder for that outcome than I ever have.

  But it wasn’t the Heat I was cheering for with all my might. After the Spurs took Game One, I wanted them to win the title. And I wanted it desperately. By Father’s Day, with the Spurs leading James’s Heat 3 games to 1, I had never wanted a team to wrap up an NBA title more than the San Antonio Spurs. But that had little to do with being a sports fan. And even less to do with basketball.

  • • •

  “WATCH HOW THE BALL doesn’t stick,” I said.

  “What do you mean, ‘doesn’t stick’?” Sydni asked.

  “It never stops in one place; they use the whole court,” I said. It was that pivotal Game Five, and we were courtside. I was showing Sydni what I love about the way Gregg Popovich’s San Antonio Spurs play the game. “It’s art, watching these guys play basketball.”

  Sydni isn’t a die-hard basketball fan, and she tends to keep her emotions inside—unlike her old man. Oh, she was interested, but she wasn’t consumed by the experience. Again: unlike her old man. To be sitting there with my baby girl, on Father’s Day, watching a championship happen … and to host the postgame trophy presentation with Sydni standing just a couple of feet from the podium, it was suddenly too much: This, I said to myself, this is what I live for.

  I found myself choking up. I was moved by a confluence of factors: Father’s Day, Sydni’s smiling presence … and the fact that I was about to show off for my daughter. She was about to see her dad do what he does better than anyone on the planet.

  Go ahead and alert the ego police: I know I sound less than humble. A lot of times, on the SportsCenter set, I blurt out: “I love my job!” Often, I look at my colleagues and say, “Can you believe we get paid to do this?” I love it, and I love being among the best in the world at what I do. I wasn’t always good at it. But I’ve worked at it. And I’m damn proud about how I do it.

  Now, as Sydni and Taelor will be only too happy to tell you, that doesn’t mean there ain’t a host of things their dad sucks at, but if there’s one thing I know I can do, it’s the live interview. I’m maniacal about it; watch a game with me in my living room and you’ll hear me shouting “Dumb question!” at the TV when a microphone is put in an athlete’s face just after he or she has come off the field of play. It’s one thing ESPN does better than most networks, because we think deeply about the kinds of questions that can elicit memorable and insightful postgame moments.

  Everyone tends to make the same mistakes. They ask questions that lead directly to yes or no answers. They rush to fill the silence when an interview subject is thinking. “Wait! Just wait!” I’ll scream at my TV. They’ll ask a question and then breathlessly answer it: “Coach, why did you double-team LeBron—were you trying to make his teammates beat you?” They’ll ask generic questions: “Coach, tell us about the third quarter, when you blew the game open.” I’m always waiting to hear the coach say in response: “Well, why don’t you ask me a question about the third quarter?”

  Focusing on specific moments leads to memorable answers. I hate when an athlete is asked, “You just won a championship—how does it feel?” I fantasize about the response: “I just won a championship—how the hell you think it feels?” There are ways to ask the “how do you feel” question without literally asking it. When LeBron won his first title, I said to him: “LeBron, when the clock hit triple zeroes, what was the first thing that ran through your mind?”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “About damn time,” he said—instantly an iconic response.

  Early on at ESPN, I was interviewing Tiger Woods. I forget what I asked him
, but it made him think—so much so that he was silent. Uh-oh, I remember thinking, this is uncomfortable ’cause he’s not answering. I was so afraid of the silence that I panicked and gave him an out by blurting out another question. We had a consultant at ESPN who showed me the tape and asked, “Why’d you ask that second question?”

  “Well, he wasn’t answering,” I said.

  He smiled knowingly. “So wait,” he said. “Just wait.”

  I’ve never forgotten that. If you hate sports interview clichés like I do, then the silence that comes while a subject thoughtfully constructs a real response is not something to be afraid of—it’s actually a good thing. It means you’re going to get something real in return. And this doesn’t just apply to sports interviews. Ever seen All the President’s Men? Now, I’m not comparing myself to journalists who took down a president, but in that film, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, unearth information from sources by letting their subjects fill the silence. Most people want to be understood; the journalist’s job is to ask questions that make subjects think—and then to get the hell out of the way.

  So I spent Father’s Day preparing for that night’s trophy presentation, in the event that the Spurs prevailed—as I hoped they would. In the hotel room or at lunch with Sydni, I was constantly scrawling questions on the back of an envelope that I hoped would make Tim Duncan and his teammates resist the usual platitudes and instead say something real and memorable. Like the athletes who would take the court that night, I spent the day aware of my increased heartbeat and fluttering stomach, familiar sensations that told me I was getting ready for the big stage. I like being nervous. When Taelor competed in dance and Sydni in soccer, I would tell them, “Nerves are good.” What are nerves, after all? They’re just energy.

  So, as we got to the arena and ran through rehearsal a few hours before tip-off, I’d pause every once in a while to focus on the nerves: I’d identify them as energy, focus on that dropping sensation in my gut, and tell myself to take that energy and use it. That’s what I’d tell Sydni before a big game or Taelor before a dance recital: Take the nerves, manipulate them into energy, and make them work for you.

  In my inside jacket pocket, I kept the envelope on which I’d scrawled some questions. I spent the day obsessively tweaking, retweaking, and memorizing them. When the final buzzer sounded, and the Spurs had routed the favored Heat, the fans started pressing onto the court; I told Sydni to stay right by the podium. And then I got up on that stage and knocked that mutha outta the park. Keeping in mind that good questions are also short questions, I asked unlikely series MVP Kawhi Leonard, “If I would have told you before this NBA Finals started that you would be the MVP, you would have said what?”

  “I would have said, ‘You’re crazy,’” said Leonard, an unassuming guy off the court who turns into a warrior on it. And then I weaved in some stats and a smooth segue. Saying good-bye to Kawhi, I said, “Kawhi Leonard, MVP, the youngest Finals MVP since 1999, when a guy named Tim Duncan won the MVP. That’s what we call a segue—Timmy, where are you?”

  Later, off the podium, I asked Duncan, “At what point in the game did you allow yourself to realize, ‘We got this’?,” and he thought for a moment before responding: “You know, it took a while. When that last sub came in, I got subbed out and I got to the sideline and that’s when I let myself feel it.”

  While the Spurs doused one another in champagne, I said good night to America and climbed down from the podium to my daughter. Like the athletes on the stage, I had that familiar adrenaline high. There’s no rush like the one that comes from a momentous live TV shot, especially when you know 18 million people are watching. I was high from a job well done, yes, but also because of what it all meant. The moment had special significance to me. A year ago, when the Heat outlasted the Spurs in Game Seven, I hadn’t been on that podium.

  The day after Father’s Day 2013, I was having serious blockage issues. Before my entry into CancerWorld, I never would have thought that going to the bathroom would become such an integral part of my life. But my whole schedule revolves around planning to or needing to get to a bathroom—a logistical challenge when you host a nightly live TV show. By then, I’d gone through two major surgeries in which many of my organs had been resected—the large intestine, the small intestine, part of the colon. As a result, I can no longer digest food normally. I can eat only the blandest of foods, and even then, whenever I eat, you can hear the constant rumblings of my stomach. But by Game Five, I knew my distress was more than mere indigestion. I was blocked, I was in pain, and I knew what it meant: I’d either developed scar tissue from those past surgeries, or yet another tumor was announcing itself.

  It killed me to leave, but I had no choice. Instead of the party-like atmosphere of South Beach for Game Six, I was headed for the all-too-familiar accommodations of New York–Presbyterian Hospital. In the fall, I’d have a ten-hour operation there to remove more cancerous masses. For now, my terrific team of doctors treated my symptoms for five days. From my hospital bed I watched our sideline reporter, Doris Burke, host the trophy presentation on the podium after Game Seven. Doris is a consummate pro and she did a great job. But I’ve got to tell you, watching it, I wasn’t a happy camper. The NBA Finals trophy presentation is a big deal and it only happens once a year. And I love doing it. And here I was, watching it from a damned hospital bed. “That’s my job,” I said to myself. I was ticked off. Cancer was keeping me from doing my job. Cancer was keeping me from doing the thing I love. Freakin’ cancer. I clenched my fists and vowed I’d be back on that podium in a year.

  And now here I was, just off it, putting my hands on each of Sydni’s shoulders, smiling ear to ear. “Guess what?” I said. “Now I get to fly home—with you!” More time with my daughter—the real reason I was pulling so hard for the Spurs.

  That, and the fact that this meant I could finally start a new clinical trial at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. I’d been trying to start this trial—an experimental type of chemo—for over a month. But before each session, you have to take a scan, and something called the bilirubin and ALT have to be at certain levels in your blood work in order to proceed. I was going to start the trial two days before the 2014 Finals began, but my blood work didn’t qualify. So during the Finals, I got my blood checked in San Antonio—and my levels were good. The trial runs every two weeks; looking at the schedule, that would have been the day after Game Six in Miami. So, had the Heat won Game Five, I would have had to part company with Sydni and fly back to Miami from San Antonio for Game Six, after which I’d work until one in the morning, then charter a plane to Baltimore so I could be at Hopkins by the eight a.m. clinical trial start time … all to sit in a soft recliner for hours while poison gets pumped into my body. And then, in the event the Heat forced a Game Seven, I’d fly to San Antonio for that.

  Phew. I would have done it. Happily. But the Spurs came through, and now you know why I was pulling for them. Take that, Twitter nitwits.

  • • •

  FRIENDS AND FAMILY MEAN WELL; they really do. They frown when they hear of my schedule—like the jet-setting I would have had to do had the Spurs not closed out the series—or when they see me on SportsCenter night after night. Shouldn’t you just be resting? they might wonder. Some might sheepishly inquire, “Have you thought about taking some time off?”

  Uh, no. Man, from the minute I was diagnosed in 2007, I didn’t want to be the cancer patient who is sitting at home, unable to work. This is what I do. It’s who I am. If I’m too weak to work, I’m admitting that I’m too weak to live. I’d be miserable. If I didn’t travel, if I didn’t work, if I didn’t exhaust myself doing mixed martial arts or P90X in my living room, if Kristin and I didn’t don boxing gloves and spar after poison has been shot into my body, I guarantee you I would have succumbed to cancer years ago.

  After my diagnosis, I looked up appendiceal cancer once on the Internet, and I vo
wed to never research it again. The statistics flashed before me: how rare it is, affecting between 600 and 1,000 people per year, and how deadly—the five-year survival rates are not favorable. Why would I seek out such information? It would only scare me more. And that’s when I decided that, yes, I’m going to trust my doctors and my medicine, but that’s not how you beat cancer. You beat cancer by continuing to live. By refusing to be just a cancer patient.

  For the past seven years, I’ve very consciously tried to model perseverance for Taelor and Sydni. If they can see me working hard, if they can see me not quitting, that’s something they can take with them for the rest of their lives. As I’ve said, it’s not courageous—it’s born of necessity. If you want to stay here, you have no choice but to fight.

  But I honestly believe that my lifelong apprenticeship in sports helped prepare me for this mother of all challenges. You know the story of Louis Zamperini, right?—the “unbroken” Olympic runner and World War II veteran whose story of survival, resilience, and redemption was chronicled in a bestselling book and brought to the big screen by Angelina Jolie. Before his death last year at ninety-seven, Zamperini said that his athletic training helped him overcome the beatings and torture he endured at the hands of the Japanese during his years as a prisoner of war. “You have to learn self-discipline if you are going to succeed as an athlete,” Zamperini said when asked to reflect on how he got through those years. “For another thing, you have to have confidence in yourself and believe that no matter what you’re faced with, you can deal with it—that you just can’t give up. And then there’s the aspect of staying in shape. And humor helped a lot, even in the gravest times.”

  Hear, hear, Louis. I learned early on from sports that resilience makes all the difference in life. I knew it when one of my earliest idols, Muhammad Ali, got dropped by Smokin’ Joe Frazier in the fifteenth round of their first epic fight. It was a punch that would have kept anyone else flat on the canvas. But back up came Ali, struggling to his feet. He might have had more triumphant moments, but no truly greater one, because nothing ever so valiantly displayed such a pure fighting spirit.