by Stuart Scott
But Jim Valvano’s great ESPYs speech in 1993 really made me realize that there are lessons for the ages in our moments of struggle and challenge. I’m a Carolina guy, a Tar Heel through and through. After college, I covered North Carolina State for WRAL-TV in Raleigh, North Carolina, when Coach V was going through a recruiting scandal at State. One of my first big one-on-one interviews came during that time, when Coach V sat down with me at his house. We sat out back and his wife brought us lemonade, and when the camera switched off, we talked about life. It dawned on me that he’d had rivalries with Duke and my beloved UNC, but I couldn’t think of any Dukie or any Tar Heel who didn’t genuinely like Jimmy Valvano.
So maybe I was predisposed to be moved by his speech because of my affection for him, but I don’t think that was it. I think it was his words, it was his defiance, it was his attitude despite the odds. Think about those words: the simplest yet most poignant seven words ever uttered in any speech anywhere: Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.
I was just starting at ESPN at the time and had just gotten married. My wife, Kim, a flight attendant, and I would soon be starting a family. I remember hearing Valvano’s words and thinking: That’s the key to life. It was like someone grabbing you by the collar and saying, “Hey. Don’t. Give. Up. Not now. Not ever.”
Say what you will about Lance Armstrong—I think he did whatever everybody else in his sport was doing, and that it shouldn’t tarnish his accomplishments on a bike—but what is undeniable is that here was a world-class athlete who got cancer in his brain and in his nutsack. And he basically said, “Screw that. I’m getting off this table.” I dig that. I played sports all my life and I dig that attitude. Okay, you’re hurting? Get up anyway.
I dig it when I see it at any level. A couple of years ago, Sydni was in a big soccer match and an opposing player took her out with a cheap shot. She landed on her shoulder, which had already been injured the year before, and wasn’t moving. They have this dumbass rule in her soccer league that if your kid gets hurt, you can’t run onto the field. Well, I didn’t ask. I ran full speed to her while her coach called out, “Stuart, you can’t be here.”
Screw that noise. That’s my baby girl in a heap. When I got to her, I bent down and said, “Babe, I’m here.” And you know what she said? Crying and in pain, she blurted out: “Dad, get off the field!” Later in the game, she lumbered back onto the field. She wasn’t running fast, but she got up, dusted herself off, and came back for more.
That’s my girl, I thought. I love that moment.
Remember Sam Mills? Talk about resilience. Sam was a 5′9″ linebacker who made a career of proving his doubters wrong. Along with Reggie White, he was arguably the best defensive player in the USFL, and he went on to become a five-time NFL Pro Bowler with the New Orleans Saints and Carolina Panthers, the last time in 1996 at age thirty-six. As inspirational as his football achievements were, it’s what happened after his playing days that made Sam one of my role models. We got friendly when he was a defensive coach for the Panthers in the early 2000s. He was diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 2003 and was told he had only a couple of months to live.
What did Sam do? He did what Sam did. He fought like hell. He’d go from chemo straight to the gym—for a hellacious workout. He continued to coach and was an inspirational force behind the Panthers’ run to Super Bowl XXXVIII. He lived two more years, but more important, he truly lived, getting the most out of each day. He did it his way. We were kindred spirits.
These are the reasons, culled from a life in sports, that I knew early on I couldn’t be just a cancer patient who takes his medicine, goes to chemo, and lies around feeling sorry for himself. I haven’t allowed myself a single Why me? moment. Because, if I start asking Why me? as it relates to cancer, I’d have to start asking Why me? as it relates to all of my good fortune: Why was I able to do this job I love? Why was I blessed with Sydni and Taelor and such a great family? Once you start questioning the bad stuff that comes your way, you have to start questioning the good—and I wouldn’t trade the good for anything.
Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t days when I lie around doing nothing. I’m always on the go; after all, at work and as a parent, my life is full of deadlines. But on the days when Sydni stays at her mom’s, I may work out and then spend the rest of the day on the floor in my living room, watching 24 or Homeland. Fighting cancer takes energy—and there are moments that require its conservation. Kristin will say, “What do you want to do today?” And I’ll reply: “Nothing.” She knows that means it’s recharging time.
Cancer is complicated, man. Every day, I’m on edge, waiting for the next shoe to drop. Any little pain, and I’m like, Oh my God, is that cancer? Has it spread? Is it growing? It’s an everyday thing. That’s why I seek out, and love, my moments of peace: Eating cereal on my couch late at night, my all-time favorite movie will come on and I’ll sit back and watch that most unlikely philosopher prince, Rocky Balboa, exhibit the character traits I still aspire to. Sitting on a beach, listening to the waves, just being. Driving my black E350 Benz on a warm, late summer evening, blaring some old-school LL Cool J, the sound track to West Side Story, or Mumford & Sons. Being on a plane … and hearing a baby crying. That’s the sound of life, man. Moms: Stop apologizing for your kid crying—he or she has a right to be there. I love to revel in the beauty of a baby’s cry.
All these things make me stop and say: I love this. Though football is my first love as a sport—to this day, I’ve never grown tired of throwing a football around—since getting cancer, golf has become my sanctuary. As much as I love working out and mixed martial arts, golf makes me feel like less of a weak-ass cancer patient than anything else. On the links, the fresh air filling my lungs, I feel free and at peace. On the golf course, I think of cancer less than at any other time, and I’m more defiant in its face. Yes, defiant, because I’m sure cancer doesn’t want me feeling so good.
That’s why, when I made it to Baltimore for the first clinical trial session after the Spurs spanked the Heat last spring, I brought along a 7-iron and a couple of balls. After the poison entered my vein and started coursing its way through my body, I stepped outside the hospital and dropped my ball on the side of a busy road. On the other side were woods. If you were some dude who happened to be driving through Baltimore that day, you might have seen some crazy-ass golfer hitting a couple of drives over traffic into the woods. And if you could read lips, you might have seen that he said, after his last swing, “FU, cancer.”
CHAPTER TWO
TAKING HITS
I was nine years old when I took my first hit. And I loved it.
It was on the football field. I was number 34 on the Mount Tabor Tiny Falcons in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I grew up. I played outside linebacker and wide receiver.
A week before our first game, I was trying to tackle Larry Dulin; he wasn’t a big kid, but he was bigger than me, and he’d had some momentum going when we collided head-on. Both of us went down; I sprained my wrist on the play—it would be the first time I’d wear an Ace bandage, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world. Though I felt the hit all over my body, I remember springing right back up and thinking, Wow. That’s cool. I immediately liked the contact, the physicality. I liked the anticipation of collision followed by the sensation of it, and I was never afraid of getting hurt. I sensed that the body at top speed was naturally braced for impact. Now I know that my instinct was dead-on: In football, as in life, the hits you don’t see coming are the ones that do the most damage.
Really, I’d fallen in love with football before I even played a down. Before we moved to Winston-Salem for my dad’s job, we were in Chicago, where I was born. One day, when I was four years old, my dad returned from a business trip with a present for me and my older brother, Stephen: an orange football with white stripes on either end. The first memory of my life is of Stephen and me tossing the football to each other on our front lawn and asking Dad, “Can you come out and
play with us?”
He always would. Stephen and I were recently talking about our dad, and we both had the same memory of the only time he said no, he couldn’t play with us. Ten minutes after he’d refused us, the front door opened. Here came Dad, hands outstretched, calling for a pass.
I realize now how monumental that was. How many kids can say their dad was always there for them? I’m not sure Sydni and Taelor can say that, despite how much I try. Yes, I fell in love with football on the field. But I think I was conditioned to love football at four years old because my dad gave me one and threw it around with me. And my dad was Superman.
• • •
OUR HOUSE ON BENBOW Street, about twenty minutes from downtown Winston-Salem, was a 1,200-square-foot ranch. I shared a room with Stephen, two years my senior, while my older sisters, Susan and Synthia, bunked together. It was close quarters, but I never felt cramped or crowded. All I felt was the thrill of all the possibilities to come, and that’s a testament to our folks, Ray and Jackie Scott.
We moved to our all-white neighborhood in January 1972 from the all-black South Side of Chicago. I was six; Susan, the oldest sibling, was thirteen. I know now that our lifestyle might have been characterized as lower middle class, but back then? Man, in Chi-town, we’d been in an apartment and then a town house. Here we had a house with a lawn that led to some woods—perfect for exploring. And we never wanted for anything.
Just a year before our arrival, the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools were desegregated. That made us pioneers. Every team we played for, every classroom we entered, we seemed to break our town’s color barrier. But here’s the thing: We were aware of it, but ol’ Ray and Jackie never made a big deal of it. At school, we never entirely fit in, not with the white kids, and—having come from the North—not always with the few other black kids. At home, we embraced the fact that we were different.
We didn’t watch American Bandstand. We watched Soul Train, “the hippest trip in America.” For us, Don Cornelius was the slick embodiment of cool. We listened to gospel, Nat King Cole, and Ray Charles. And tons of musical sound tracks. On Saturdays, we’d all have to clean the house while the songs of West Side Story, The Wiz, and Godspell filled the air.
As a parent today, I tell Sydni and Taelor all the time that I want to be the best dad in the world. My mom and dad never told me they wanted to be the best. They just were. For example, back then, there was no such thing as a black angel for the top of your Christmas tree. Well, that didn’t stop Mom. She would take shoe polish and make our angel look like us. Same with greeting cards; she’d take a brown pen to them. She didn’t say, “Look, they’re black, just like you.” She’d just do it. It was subtle, but it told us to be proud of who we were.
Because we didn’t always get that message outside the home. When we moved to Winston-Salem, I was in the first grade. Our first week of school, my dad and Rascal, our German shepherd, would meet Stephen and me halfway on our mile-long walk back home. On the first day that we made that trek by ourselves, we passed a house with a statue on its front lawn of a small black figure holding a lantern. A lawn jockey, I’d come to learn. On the porch stood a group of white kids, staring us down.
“Nigger! Nigger!” they shouted at us, through bared teeth.
Stephen and I knew the word and felt the hate. But we also knew another word.
“Honky! Honky!” we called back, with as much venom in return as we could come up with.
The white boys looked quizzically at one another. Then, as if on cue, they turned to us and started shouting this latest epithet back at us: “Honky! Honky!” It was as if they figured, Well, whatever this word is, it must be degrading—so let’s call them that! Stephen and I burst into laughter as we continued on our way, leaving them totally perplexed.
Here’s the thing, though: I remember this incident, sure, but I also remember that, at the time, I didn’t feel hurt or victimized. I credit my parents for that. Something had been instilled in me that wasn’t going to let the irrational anger of strangers make me doubt my own identity. Even in first grade, I wasn’t going to be a victim.
A little over a year ago, I got some heat for something I tweeted: “True racism is group w majority/economic/political power discriminating against others … Blacks/Hispanics can be ANGRY/RUDE but not ‘Racist.’” Man, you can guess how that went over. But I stand by it. Racism is the institutional manifestation of prejudice. Black people can be prejudiced and ignorant, yes, but since blacks by and large don’t control our institutions, they don’t have the power to act on those impulses, to subjugate others. This is something I learned forty years ago in Winston-Salem. I don’t care if someone—white or black—doesn’t like me because of what I look like. If they can act on that dislike in a way that harms me, then we’ve got a problem.
Growing up, we heard as much ignorance from blacks as from whites. My siblings and I didn’t just look different from the white kids; we also didn’t sound like the black kids. We were in the South with flat, Midwestern accents—and we came from a household that heavily valued education. As a result, we’d often hear from our black classmates, “You talk like a white boy.” All four of us got that all the time. Later, I’d come to realize how hard it is for people who are poor and whose parents aren’t educated to value education; then, it hurt, because who we were seemed so often to be in question. It was like we were constantly being asked Whose side are you on? in some race-based game we didn’t fully understand.
Another time, in fifth grade, a group of popular sixth-grade white boys started letting me hang with them. “You’re a cool guy,” one boy said. “We’re not going to call you Stuart anymore; we’re going to give you a nickname.”
Cool, I thought: acceptance.
“We’re going to call you Sambo,” he said. Now it was my turn to not know the meaning of a racial slur. That night at dinner I told my parents I’d made some new friends and they had even given me a nickname: Sambo. At the drop of the word, my folks looked at each other. Uh-oh, I thought. Something’s up. They looked angry, but I could tell they weren’t angry with me. They explained to me that Sambo was an offensive term and that these boys weren’t my friends. “It’s like they’re calling you nigger,” I was told.
Again, I wasn’t bothered by it. But what must have this been like for Ray and Jackie Scott? Years later, I got a taste. When Taelor was five we were at one of her dance recitals. After the recital, the parents left the girls to let them play together in the school’s basement. As I was heading up the stairs, I heard a bloodcurdling, screeching cry; as a parent, you recognize your kid’s cry. I about-faced and jumped down a flight of stairs, sprinting to my little girl, who was crying and gasping for breath. She was the only black child in the troupe and one of the other little girls had just told her, “We don’t want to play with you because you’re black.”
The other little girl’s mother seemed mortified and apologized profusely, swearing her daughter hadn’t learned that attitude at home. But I admit I wasn’t hearing it. I remember wishing that little girl’s dad was there so I could beat him down. Even now, fourteen years later, I feel rage. Because I couldn’t protect my five-year-old little girl from experiencing her first taste of bigotry. I tear up now, just thinking about it. Is that what Ray and Jackie felt? That sense of crippling parental helplessness?
Kids are resilient, though. Like Taelor when she was five, I eventually shrugged off the incidents in my youth practically as they happened. The day after I told my parents of my new “nickname,” Ray Scott, handcuffs hanging off his belt loop and gun holstered, made an appearance at school. I don’t know who he talked to or what he said, but thereafter those boys didn’t say anything to me ever again. Which was okay—the moment I’d learned they were playing me, I’d already moved on. In fact, I sensed a little bit of fear coming from them after my dad made that visit. You don’t mess around with Superman.
• • •
RAY SCOTT IS SLOWED by Parkinson’s now, but
he was and remains the man. My whole life, he radiated dignity, respect, character, and honesty. Pops was a serious man. To this day, I’ve never heard him raise his voice, but he was very firm. When he told you to do something, you did it. Growing up, I had friends who would sneak out of their houses late at night to party with their friends. I’ve talked to my siblings about it—it never crossed our minds to do something like that, because of Dad.
First, we were not totally convinced he would not take our lives. That’s only a slight overstatement. Remember, we’re talking about a law enforcement official. He talked in a level voice that, accompanied by his direct stare, intimidated. He didn’t even know he did this, but his eyes would flicker when he got worked up. He’d bat his eyelashes and that, juxtaposed against the eerily calm tone, hinted at just enough menace beneath the surface that we wouldn’t think of defying him. He wouldn’t yell, but you only had to be spanked by Ray Scott once to want to stay on his good side.
Looking back on it, Dad’s spankings hurt, but disappointing him hurt more. I was crushed to think my Superman was disappointed in me. I mean, this dude was a federal law enforcement officer—how cool is that? Postal inspectors work with FBI and ATF agents. When I was in high school, he spent six months undercover in New Orleans, posing as a postal worker named Franklin Baxter in a post office that had been corrupted by a drug cartel. At the end of his assignment, he had to arrest all these people he had worked with and, in some cases, befriended.
That’s the literal definition of integrity. I watched him closely, stirred by his eloquent example. He’d get up every morning and run seven miles, come back and meticulously enter his time and route in a log he kept on his desk. He was seen as the neighborhood problem-solver. When our neighbors found that their son had run into trouble with drugs and petty crime, it was Dad they turned to for help.