by Stuart Scott
Everyone seemed to trust him, which I took pride in. When he’d show up at school, with those handcuffs on his belt and that gun holstered, I’d be all like, “Check out my dad,” trying to get my friends to see that my dad had theirs beat in the badass department.
Once, when I was seventeen, I was driving the family car—a 1979 Pontiac Bonneville. I had my gangsta lean on (like the soul man said: “diamond in the back/sunroof top …”), and I might have been testing the speed limit just a bit when the flashing blues and reds came up on me from behind. Now, I was a black man in the South, and my folks had had “the talk” with me. No, not the one about the birds and bees. This one is about the black man and the police. It’s a conversation that takes place in black households throughout the country, where driving while black is always a very real threat. My folks taught us what you do when you get pulled over: Flick on that dome light. Hands on the steering wheel. When the officer approaches, you do as Richard Pryor counseled—you announce your intentions: “Officer, I’m about to reach into the glove compartment for the registration.”
But there was a problem. As I started to open it, I saw my dad’s gun. I shut the glove box, and my hands went back on the steering wheel.
“Officer,” I said. “My father is Ray Scott, federal postal inspector.”
“You’re Ray’s boy?” he said.
Phew. “Yessir, and I want you to know that this is his car and his gun is in the glove compartment.”
He let me off with a warning and a message to say hello to my dad. Driving home, I felt nothing but a sense of pride that my dad commanded that kind of respect.
I’m convinced that my dad, in everything he did, was a better man than I’ll ever be. And it wasn’t just my dad: A whole generation of guys—Tom Brokaw called them the Greatest Generation—were all about what a man should be. We’re losing them at a rate of 1,500 per day now. I love seeing them, walking among us in their ratty cardigans and Members Only jackets, because they’re a reminder of what they did—and how their Boomer and Gen-X sons and daughters have come up short.
They were the good guys who saved Democracy and then rebuilt the countries they had defeated. They created the greatest economy in history, based on values like shared sacrifice and responsibility. They made successes of themselves, but refused to shut the door behind them. Like Ray Scott, they saw everything in terms of right and wrong.
From Jackie Scott—nicknamed Jackie Baby as a kid—I got my sensitive side. When she was young, she was painfully shy. But she started to find her voice with my father. She spent decades as a public school kindergarten teacher’s aide, during which time she earned a reputation as one of those people who likes everybody and whom everybody likes. My mom never had an enemy. How many of us can say that? Dad could be stern, but Mom was a sweet woman who cared—and worried!—about everyone.
They’ve always had an amazing relationship. They were good, churchgoing people who were aware of the Biblical admonition that “the head of a wife is her husband.” Dad used to shake his head at that one. “The best relationships are relationships where the woman lets the man live with the illusion that he runs the household,” he’d say.
“Your mom is smarter than me,” he’d tell us. “She’s better than me.” He thought she’d saved him. He was a quiet, tough kid from the Chicago streets when they first met. She smoothed him out, helped open his heart. He, in turn, gave her confidence.
They got married in 1958, and the passion never seemed to wane. Marvin Gaye’s song “Sexual Healing” came out when I was in high school, and whenever it would come on, Dad would grab Mom in the kitchen and start dancing. “Hey, I’m right here, okay?” I’d bark, and they’d laugh.
Mom had a way of making everything special, in a very understated way. When I was thirteen, I idolized Stephen. But Stephen, at fifteen, didn’t always want to be saddled with his younger brother. One weekend, he and his buddy Sam from across the street were going to Atlanta to visit Sam’s adult sister. I desperately wanted to tag along, and I cried and cried when they told me I’d be left out. I don’t remember my mother cradling me and telling me it was all going to be okay. She might have, but that’s not what I remember.
Instead, I remember that I was on my bed, sniffling and feeling sorry for myself, when she popped her head in. “Hey, let’s go see Grease at Thruway Shopping Center,” she said. “Let’s walk there.”
Huh? That’s eight miles away!
“It’s something to do, something different,” she said, smiling mischievously. “An adventure.”
So that’s what we did; we walked to the theater. We stopped on the way and got ice cream. Ever since then, Grease is one of my favorite movies—not for the movie itself, but because it reminds me of how my mom could create memories. To this day, I get choked up thinking about the day Mom and I walked to the movies. And if Grease is playing on a cable channel, I’ll phone her right away and we’ll watch a few minutes together, each of us silent.
Mom instilled in us a willingness to be different. I was an athlete in high school, yes, but I was also vice president of my senior class, and I acted and danced in school and community theater productions. I remember preparing for our 1982 production of West Side Story, my all-time favorite play. One moment, I was in the gym lifting weights getting ready for football season; the next, I was with Mom at the mall, buying a dance belt for the play. You know what a dance belt is? It’s like a jock, only it’s more of a thong, and it pulls everything up. I’d wear a jock for football and a dance belt for our play—and, because of the confidence instilled in me by Mom, I could laugh off the good-natured ribbing of my gridiron teammates when they saw the dance belt in my locker.
So often, growing up is about conforming to labels: There are the jocks, the nerds, the brainiacs. We never thought like that. That came from Mom, but she wasn’t alone. I had a de facto second mom: my big sister Susan.
When I came along—the baby—Susan dropped Stephen and Synthia like a bad habit and doted on me. She and I have always had a different kind of closeness than that which I share with Synthia and Stephen. We get each other. Like me, she’s type A, hard-driving. And she might be the smartest person I know. Growing up, she was our mother hen. She is fiercely loyal and will speak her mind to anyone in defense of her siblings. During my sixteen-day hospital stay in September 2013, a medication I was taking caused my vital signs to crash, and the catheter they’d placed in my manhood was creating severe discomfort. (Guys, anyone who says that a catheter there won’t hurt hasn’t had the procedure done to them, okay?) I didn’t have the energy to even speak, which is why patients need strong advocates with them in the hospital. It’s not that anybody is trying to hurt you; it’s just that you need someone to say, “Hey, Doc—now!” And I had Susan as my voice.
“You need to listen to him,” she told one of the doctors, whom I didn’t really know: She was on the team of my regular docs. “He’s not dramatic and he doesn’t make stuff up. So if he’s saying something is really bothering him, it’s really bothering him.”
“I know,” the doctor said. “I’ve been taking care of your brother all week—”
“I’ve been taking care of him his whole life,” Susan pointedly replied. Silently, I was like, You go, girl! Give ’em hell!
Susan has been a very successful corporate executive. Once, when she momentarily fell on some hard times, she asked me for money. And I could tell she hated it. I just stopped her. “Here’s why you need to stop,” I said. “I’m going to help you, and it doesn’t begin to stack up to the ways you’ve helped me in life.” When I was younger and struggling to make it as a TV reporter, she helped me with money. It’s what family does. Even today, Susan is the person I call when I need advice or simply need a good cry.
Synthia is the saint of the four of us. She’s the most spiritual. We’re all Christians, but her sense of values and morals is stronger than that of anyone I’ve ever met. Growing up, she was a goody-two-shoes, but an athletic, ass-k
icking goody-two-shoes. She was a superb high school athlete—a three-sport star every year. She played soccer for Anson Dorrance at UNC at the beginning of that program’s dynastic run and won two national titles there. She’s a former Secret Service and ATF agent and is now chief of a firehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina.
She may be pious, but she’s tough. And that was true growing up; Synthia was a protector. She was respected in the neighborhood. The McCarthy boys lived down the street from us. They were some tough Irish kids. We’d play with them, but—kids being kids—we’d also fight with them. One day, when I was twelve, I got into it with Jeff McCarthy—who was fifteen, a year older than Stephen. I don’t remember why I was fighting him, but I remember just swinging. He was bigger and stronger and he was peppering me with blows, splitting my lip while I flailed away.
Just then, I could hear Synthia before I could see her. The sound of her sprinting down the street signaled to me that the cavalry was on its way, and she arrived with ill intent. She pulled McCarthy off me and gave him a legendary Benbow Street beatdown. After that, she had her street cred. No one in the neighborhood messed with her again, not even the toughest boys around, John Wayne Kelly and Jesse James Kelly. Yeah, with names like those, how could you not rumble? But even they kept their distance from Synthia.
Stephen and I were closest in age, and he was my constant playmate. We used to go over to other kids’ houses and leave confused: This was how they played? Because at home, Stephen and I created whole alternative worlds for ourselves. We were constantly improvising, with ongoing characters and elaborate storylines that played out for hours at a time. Today, I view what I do on SportsCenter as storytelling—and whatever creative mojo I have doing it can be traced directly to the hours that Stephen and I spent in our bedroom on Benbow Street.
We had the G.I. Joe, Steve Austin, and O. J. Simpson dolls, and we’d borrow one of our sister’s Barbies so that, in what may now be seen as a chilling case of foreshadowing, O.J. could have a pretty, blond girlfriend. When we were still in Chicago, Stephen had a crush on a fellow third-grader named Kelly. I just remember she had some sexy eyebrows. Somehow, that turned into “playing Kelly,” which meant we’d agreed on a setup—we were both police detectives, Kelly was his girlfriend, and she’d been abducted—and then we’d just go, ad-libbing all the way.
I had an imaginary friend that, for some reason, was named Jane Jane Shittufah. That led to a whole ’nother narrative—we called it playing Jane Jane. Stephen and I would be in one gang and Jane Jane headed the bad guys’ gang, which consisted of Midget Moe, his brother Midget Moo, and Coba C.
Years later, I pledged Alpha Phi Alpha, the black fraternity, in my sophomore year at UNC. Stephen had done the same the year before at Western Carolina University. Part of the pledge process was a boot camp, and you were prohibited from smiling. I was like a sphinx—until one day the brothers called Stephen and had him visit to help break my composure. He just walked up to me, leaned in real close, and whispered, “I’m Jane Jane Shittufah,” and I fell out, literally slapping my knee. Even today, we talk about Jane Jane and Kelly and how we had O.J. paired off with a Nicole Brown Simpson look-alike while, in real life, he was still married to his first wife.
Not to sound like too much of an old-timer, but when Sydni gets home from school, there’s Facebook, her iPhone, and the TV to occupy her mind. I’m a big believer in the value of all those technological advancements, but when I think back to Stephen and me playing in our room for hours on end, I can’t help but wonder if something hasn’t been lost from those days. After all, there was no Twitter, Nintendo, or even cable TV. If we weren’t outside playing sports, we were inside lost in these intricate worlds of our own making, where we were limited only by the elasticity of our imagination.
Stephen and I could be crudely silly together; in fact, I still pull a lot of our old hijinks today. For example, I like to fake fall in crowded places; when you pull it off just right, the expression on bystanders’ faces is priceless. I started doing it in seventh grade, falling off our bicycles with my buddy Robby Fox, and it continues today. I was in Laguna with Kristin and Sydni and fell—everyone around us gasped, but Kristin and Sydni, knowing me, just rolled their eyes and kept walking. Even when I’m getting a chemo infusion, when the unsuspecting nurse first puts in the IV line, I fake pass out—it’s worth it to see that brief moment of panic in her eyes before she realizes her patient is just a big kid.
I know it seems insensitive today, but when we were kids Stephen and I used to play blind. One of us would put on sunglasses and walk into the grocery store while holding the other’s shoulder; the “blind” one would say, “C’mon, man, let me drive—I haven’t driven since the incident.” Mom and Dad used to kill us for doing it, but we could tell they were secretly amused by it, too.
But it wasn’t all just fun and games. Stephen played big brother protector, too. When I was in fifth grade, Stephen was in a different school for seventh grade—nearly two miles away. My nemeses were Gary and Dale—two white boys at the bus stop who we referred to, respectively, as Flatface and Fatface. One day, I got into a fight with one of them. I think it was Flatface. I handled him. The next day, a Friday, it was Fatface’s turn. He jumped me and I sent him home with a bloody lip. Another kid told me that when Fatface got home his father upbraided both boys: “You jump on that nigger and whup his ass next time!” he instructed them.
I was heading for a whupping on Monday. I couldn’t handle both brothers at the same time. I told Stephen about my dilemma. He seemed not to hear me. After school on Monday, as the bus rolled up to my stop, Flatface and Fatface rushed off and waited for me on the sidewalk. I shuffled off the bus, resigned, ready to take my beating.
But there, leaning up against a tree, was Stephen. He’d raced nearly two miles after school to get there. When they jumped me, he jumped them, and we commenced kicking those boys’ butts. A lady came out of her house and yelled, “Stop doing that! What are you doing?” And Stephen said, “It’s okay, ma’am, we’re just playing Army!”—as he kneed Fatface in the side of the head.
He’d seemed uninterested when I told him over the weekend what I’d be facing. Yet there he was. Stephen had gone from playmate to hero.
• • •
I THINK I FELL so in love with football because it’s the one sport where every single play is filled with violence and physicality, and yet you’ve got your family around you, protecting you. More than any other sport, football is about that Band of Brothers mentality. It’s just you and these other guys, and the prevailing ethic among you is: I’m going to fight for you.
And it’s not just like that in the game. Every single moment of football practice is filled with that kind of camaraderie. There’s something about the combination of all that violence with all that caring that hooked me. I’ve never been in the military, but I bet it’s similar. The closest thing I’ve ever felt to football’s “one for all and all for one” mentality came in the theater. You work on a production for weeks on end, and there’s all this action backstage: set changes, costume changes, running lines. You’re in it together, and you’re dependent on one another.
When I try to recall what I was thinking and feeling in those first heady moments of my love affair with the game, it wasn’t anything about getting a college scholarship or making it to the pros or even experiencing the thrill of competition. It was purer than all that. It was thinking all the time: I love this. Running a tight pass route. I love this. Throwing a block that frees a teammate. I love this. Coming off the field to the sound of my amped-up teammates slapping my shoulder pads in celebration. I love this. And that passion remains just as powerful today. Every single time I’ve played catch with a football, the reason I’ve had to stop was either it was time to go, practice was over, or I had somewhere else to be. I’ve never felt bored throwing a football back and forth. I’ve never said to myself, “I don’t feel like doing this anymore.”
In my second year of fo
otball, I started touching the ball more. I was naturally fast, and I played wingback in a wishbone offense. The first touchdown I ever scored came that second year on a 21 trap—I went 15 yards. Here I was in a uniform just like Gale Sayers and Roger Staubach, and I’m scoring touchdowns. Yes, plural: that same game included two more, one from the 26-yard line and the other from the 15.
Man, I was hooked. It felt good inside. I turned into a good wide receiver. I wasn’t blinding fast, but I could outrun guys and I ran crisp routes and could catch. There’s something magical about how it all comes together, the act of running a route and getting your hands around a spiraling ball that’s delivered to the perfect spot at the precise moment you come out of your break.
I played other sports, but nothing held me like football. When I was fourteen, I took tennis lessons from David Lash, a legendary coach. He’d taught John Lucas, who had gone on to be the top-ranked collegian and play on the pro circuit while also being the top pick in the NBA draft. Lash told me I had a lot of potential in tennis. But I kept telling him I loved football. “You’ll never make it in football,” he finally said. “You’re too small.”
I never went back to him. You’re going to tell me you don’t think I can play football? Man, I don’t got no time for you. I’ll show you.
When I enrolled at Reynolds High School in 1980, I was in the weight room one day when one of the football players was trying to bench-press 110 pounds and was having trouble with it. He was a little guy, maybe 150 pounds. I started laughing at him. “Man, you on the football team and you can’t bench 110?” I said.
“You making fun of me?” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Stuart Scott.”
“You Stephen’s brother?” He smiled. And so it was that I met my best friend in life by calling him out on being a weak-ass brotha.