Every Day I Fight

by Stuart Scott

  I had met Obama once before. He was on the campaign trail near my home, doing a meet and greet in a neighbor’s house. He saw me and smiled. “We’ve spent a lot of nights together in hotel rooms, you and I,” he said. The first thing he ever said to me.

  That time, we ended up talking about our girls. I told him that Taelor, the elder, was into shopping, but Sydni not so much. “Just wait, man,” he said, smiling knowingly. “Trust me. Been there. They’ll both get there.”

  When we squared off on the hardwood, I quickly learned that the dude is a serious basketball player. Classically trained. Nice lefty crossover, smooth pull-up jumper. You can tell he’s gotten good coaching and knows the sport. I, on the other hand, am a football player. I’m athletic, but he’s a better basketball player than I am. Early in our game, he drove and I fouled him pretty hard. It’s the first time I’ve ever fouled someone on a basketball court who had a Secret Service agent hovering nearby. “You know he’s going to be president someday,” the agent joked after the hit.

  The only way I could stay in the game was to rough him up, to play extra-physical. And with an armed guy nearby, I was kind of dissuaded from amping up the aggressiveness too much. But I’m not making excuses. Even if I had bodied him up more, I couldn’t have beaten him—I could have only extended the game a little longer. He took me to Barack’s House of Pain, 7–3.

  Afterward, we chatted again about our girls. He did a twenty-second video message to my daughters: “Taelor and Sydni, I’m with your dad, playing basketball, and I just wanted to let you know he’s thinking of you and is proud of you.”

  Subsequently, on two separate occasions, I had friends who would be seeing him, and I told them to ask him about our game. Both times, Obama responded the same way. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I handled him.”

  I handled him. You know who else would have said something like that? Michael. In fact, I remember reading during a particularly stressful time in the ’08 campaign, when all seemed hopeless and lost, that Obama told his campaign aides, “Just give me the ball. I’m like Jordan.” There is a certain similarity there, a common swagger. Not to mention a shared wiseass nature—with a biting edge.

  In 2012—four years after his beatdown of me—I saw the president at a fund-raising event in Tampa. Taelor went with me. After he spoke, we made our way across the crowded room to say hello. He saw us and called out, loud enough for many to hear: “Stuart, did you stretch?” He had that same sardonic smirk Michael gets when he’s getting on you. “How are your hamstrings feeling from when I beat you? They recover yet?”

  “Thanks a lot, Mr. President,” I said, laughing. “You’re going to talk trash about me in front of my daughter? Thanks a lot.”

  We took an official photo with him, but then I whipped out my cell phone and asked the Secret Service agent to take a picture of the three of us. “I can’t,” the agent replied.

  “Of course you can,” the president said. “Take a picture of my man and his daughter and me.”

  I cherish that picture, but—as in my relationship with Michael and Tiger—what I cherish more is that we share common values. My friends who don’t have kids don’t understand. As much as I love Kristin, my parents, and my siblings, the fact is that Taelor and Sydni are really the only two people in my lifetime whom I loved with all my heart and soul the exact moment I first laid eyes on them. It’s instantaneous and it’s overwhelming. And, without ever necessarily coming out and saying it, the constant thread in all of my interactions with three of the biggest names in recent history is really a shared acknowledgment of how life-changing, and life-affirming, it is to have kids.

  • • •

  SOME YEARS AGO, I read the following quote from Spike Lee and thought instantly of my time at UNC: “It comes down to this,” he said. “Black people were stripped of our identities when we were brought here, and it’s been a quest since then to define who we are.”

  In some small way, I recognized my own experience in Spike’s description. Clearly, I was born here, and nothing nearly as traumatic as slavery or even overt institutional racism had ever happened to me when I was growing up in Winston-Salem. But we never fully fit in, with either the whites or the blacks. It was when I got to college that all that seemed to change. There, I grew to embrace my racial identity at the same time that I reveled in the wonders of diversity. The result is that, today, I am comfortable among any group, anywhere. Today, I never feel like I don’t belong wherever I am.

  UNC was maybe 12 percent black at the time, but the number felt much higher than that. There were times when it felt like an all-black campus. We’d have all-black parties at Great Hall or you’d sit on the wall outside the library, where the brothas would hang, and there was this feeling of belonging that I’d never experienced before.

  Even today, how many people do you pass during the course of one day on the street? Hundreds, right? Black men, when we pass each other, we tend to nod to each other. You see a brother and give a flick of the head, as if to say, What’s up?—especially if you happen to be in a crowd of white people. This isn’t about being separate; it’s about acknowledging a shared common ground.

  I know, because it doesn’t just happen with race. It happens with cancer patients, too. We don’t have to talk about how jacked up chemotherapy is and how much cancer wipes you out or how tough it is on our loved ones. Just looking at and hugging one another acknowledges all that; it says, I get it. Same with black folk; I don’t have to sit and discuss with a brother how tough it is to be a black man. I just nod and he just nods, and we’ve established a fleeting common connection.

  At UNC, I discovered this camaraderie—which, previously, had been the feeling that attracted me to football and the theater. A sense of belonging to something bigger than myself. And that feeling really came together for me when I pledged Alpha Phi Alpha in my sophomore year.

  Alpha is the oldest black fraternity in the Greek system, founded in 1906 at Cornell University. Its motto is “First of All, Servants of All, We Shall Transcend All,” and its stated goal is “manly deeds, scholarship, and love for all mankind.” It’s about brotherhood, scholarship, and service. It builds leaders. Through the years, it’s been at the forefront of our country’s social movements, addressing everything from apartheid to AIDS to urban housing. We had a saying: “Not every great man is an Alpha, but every Alpha is a great man.” Among the great Alpha men are Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and Andrew Young.

  But those names, as great as they are, aren’t what did it for me. No, I had long yearned to be an Alpha because Stephen was an Alpha—he’d pledged two years before at Western Carolina. And because Synthia had pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha, which is Alpha Phi Alpha’s sister sorority. And because Fred was an Alpha, having pledged as a sophomore, my freshman year. I’d watched Fred go through the grueling pledge process—and it was tough. But it didn’t scare me off.

  Pledging an African-American frat is different; I think it’s fair to say it’s physically and emotionally harder than pledging all other fraternities. You have to keep up on your own studies while at the same time committing Alpha history to memory—instant recall, even. Because there just might be times when you’re having to do push-ups with a stack of books on your back and a Brother shouting nonsensical epithets in your ear while you’re expected to recite chapter and verse on Alpha’s historic legacy.

  When you pledge, you’re called a Sphinxman. There were twelve of us in our pledge class—some pretty prominent names today—and we’d march in a straight line around campus. There were strict behavioral rules: You had to maintain a “Sphinx-like” expression, you couldn’t eat sweets, and you couldn’t socialize.

  Well, you could do anything you wanted to—you just had to hope you didn’t get caught by a Brother. One night, I was discovered in a girl’s dorm room. It was completely innocent—we were just studying. But that didn’t matter. I wasn’t supposed to be there.

  The next pledge session, I was read
y to get my butt wrung out in front of my fellow Sphinxmen. Only something else happened, and it has provided a lesson I carry with me to this day. I was seated in a plush leather chair and treated like some kind of deity. Brothers hovered around me, giving me candy bars, cupcakes, and Coca-Cola—all normally prohibited. The only caveat was I had to watch my linemates get battered—right in front of me. While the Brothers plied me with sweets, they got all over my comrades, in their faces, while I watched, helpless, knowing I was the cause of my Brothers’ distress. It was a brilliant move by the Brothers, having much more of an impact than if they had just given me the business.

  It was a powerful lesson. If you mess up, I realized, you’re not just messing things up for yourself—you’re letting down your family. I learned discipline that night, and I learned that there are other people in this world whose lives are affected by my actions. That night, I learned to never let down anyone who depends on me.

  Once an Alpha, I became the Step Master of our wildly popular step shows. Stepping is a type of percussive dance that draws on everything from gymnastics to break, tap, and African tribal dancing; it’s a precise, thrilling performance. Stephen and Synthia could both step their butts off, so there was no way I wasn’t going to work hard and excel at it, too.

  From Alpha, I got what I’d gotten from football and the theater: a sense of belonging, a dawning realization that—this thing you’re doing? It’s exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. It’s who you are.

  But that doesn’t mean I was done with football. I’d arrived at UNC still determined to walk on to the Division I football team, even though, during my senior year of high school, I had that corneal implant and my eye doctor forbade my playing football until I recovered. Today, after a corneal implant, you’d be good to resume activities like football within a month. Then, recovery included many months of nonaction.

  Come sophomore year, I was wrestling with whether to try out. I knew I’d be pledging Alpha. Would going for both only guarantee that I would half-ass each? And, besides, I had to level with myself: A walk-on would probably not see much playing time. No matter how well I played, I’d likely always be behind the scholarship guys.

  It wasn’t Division I football that held allure for me, after all; it was the game itself. And Carolina had an awesome club football team. We played Division III schools, the Marine Corps, North Carolina State’s club team, and Division I-AA schools like South Carolina State and Charleston Baptist College. The quality of play was good, like a cross between semi-pro ball and junior varsity.

  I played for three years. We played on Sundays and practiced three or four times a week. I played wideout and cornerback and broke my ribs twice in my senior year—but wore a flak jacket so I didn’t miss a game. That year, I took it to Appalachian State: 7 catches, 150 yards, 2 touchdowns. The best part? Even though I wasn’t much of a party animal, I’d been out till six a.m. the night before. All those coaches who tell athletes to refrain from extracurricular activities? Had I known how I’d play after an all-nighter, I might have made that my regular regimen.

  Club football was a lot of fun, but I have to admit, I still yearned to find out how I’d do with the big boys on varsity. A lot of the football players lived at Ehringhaus, and one day a bunch of them were playing pickup touch on the field adjacent to our dorm. I joined up, and what transpired led to one of the most satisfying days of my life.

  I was playing with guys like Kelvin Bryant, who’d later become a standout running back for the Philadelphia Stars in the USFL and the Washington Redskins in the NFL; Earl Winfield, an all-ACC receiver; and Larry Griffin, who would go on to play in the Pittsburgh Steelers defensive backfield. It was just touch, but everybody was going all-out. And I balled up with those guys. I wasn’t the best player on the field, but I more than belonged on it. I scored three touchdowns in that game. Walking off, I remember thinking, I could have done this.

  But had I done it, who knows if my college experience would have been as well-rounded and rewarding as it was? In high school, I was dead set on playing football in Carolina blue. Funny how things turn out. Who was it that said life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans?

  • • •

  I MET THE FEMALE me in an Interpersonal Communications class my junior year. And Barbara Lee met the male version of herself in me. Most Southern girls are bouncy and sweet and demure. They’re raised to refrain from speaking their minds, lest they offend. Barb? Hardly any of that applied to her.

  Barb wasn’t warm and fuzzy—unless you got to know her. I’ve often thought there’s a serious double standard in American culture. Men who are serious and aren’t afraid to speak their minds are called great leaders. Women with the same traits are called shrill or, worse, bitches. Barb isn’t a bitch—but she’s a serious person who won’t bat her eyelashes and play smaller than she is just to fit in. We were kindred spirits from the start. We got each other. There was never so much as a flirty word between us. But I knew instantly that here was a lifelong friend.

  Through the years, we’ve been there for each other. We both had daughters within two months of each other, so the phone lines between us were constantly buzzing with parenting talk. We cried on each other’s shoulder when we both went through divorces. When I got sick, she didn’t ask what I needed. She’d had loved ones battle cancer and she knew what to do. Once, while I was in the hospital, knowing that when I got home it would be a chore to climb the stairs, she hired a crew of workers and turned my ground-floor storage room into a den so cool, the moment I saw it I felt like I’d been hanging out in it forever. During my hospital stay in September 2013, again without asking, she chartered a plane and flew my parents out to see me—and she put them up. She knew I’d need an assistant after I got sick, so she took it upon herself to interview all candidates and hire one, warning each candidate: “He’s not mean; he’s just not very talkative. He’s all business.”

  Funny, I could have said the same about her.

  I enjoyed that Interpersonal Communications class, but the best thing about it was that it gave me Barb. My second favorite class was Introduction to TV Production, which I also took junior year. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew I liked TV. In that class we wrote, lit, and directed broadcasts. Writing scripts, planning shots: This was kinda cool.

  The first piece I produced was of Soul Train impresario Don Cornelius interviewing Tina Turner. Fred was looking all Super Fly playing Don Cornelius, and we convinced a girl named Jeanette to wear a short leather miniskirt and play Tina. I still remember the music underneath—“What’s Love Got to Do with It”—building to a climax as the camera slowly panned up Tina’s long legs.

  The other video I did was a faithful rendition of the scene in Rocky IV when Rocky tries to talk Apollo Creed out of fighting the Russian behemoth Ivan Drago. Fred—what a trouper—played Apollo, and our buddy Skee, a Stallone look-alike, did a dead-on Rocky.

  I loved learning how to edit. Something that once only lived in my imagination now actually … existed, because I created it. I miss editing packages to this day. Before going to ESPN, I won an award for editing together Orlando Magic highlights to the sound of C+C Music Factory’s “Everybody Dance Now.” There was something thrilling about taking a concept from birth to fruition.

  Despite my enthusiasm for editing, I was still searching for what would become my lifelong passion. That changed on May 20, 1986. That was the first day of my summer internship at WTVD in Durham, the ABC affiliate.

  I thought I’d basically be photocopying scripts and fetching coffee for the anchors and reporters, but that day the assignment desk sent me out on a story. Shaw University, an all-black school in Raleigh, was having a press conference to address its serious financial issues. Along with a cameraman, I was to cover the event.

  Of course, I wasn’t going to be on camera. My job was to interview people there so that a sound bite could run on-air that night. When I got back to the newsroo
m, the producer told me to write up a V.O. bite—a voiceover. I’d done that in our TV Production class. So I sat at an ancient typewriter—remember those?—and pounded out a lead-in to the bite. Pretty cool, I thought. They’re having me practice my writing.

  But then the producer came by, looked at it over my shoulder, and said, “Okay, now go show it to Larry.”

  Gulp. Anchorman Larry Stogner was—and still is—the dean of Durham broadcast journalism. I doubted that he had the time to read my script, so I approached his desk timidly.

  “Mr. Stogner, my name is Stuart Scott. I started my internship today,” I stammered. “Wanted to show you a V.O. bite.”

  Larry Stogner seemed like a casting director’s idea of an anchorman—the perfectly coiffed shock of frosted hair, the deep voice. He slowly looked up from his desk and took the paper from my trembling hand as he put his glasses on. I watched him read. He was looking down at that paper for what seemed like ten minutes, but was probably thirty seconds. He crossed out one word. And then he said:

  “All right, thank you, Stuart.”

  And he flipped the page into the box on his desk that held the scripts for on-air that night. I remember thinking, over and over: That’s going to be a news story. A real news story.

  Later I called my mom and dad, and they heard their son hyperventilating: “When Larry Stogner reads a story tonight about Shaw University, those are my words!” I blurted out. “I wrote that!”