Every Day I Fight

by Stuart Scott

  Life was good—on the air and off. I loved the hot weather and the golf. I met my future wife, Kim, just before moving to Orlando. As a flight attendant, she would pop in and out of town. We made some great friends, including Lisa Rayam, one of WESH’s anchors. She was married to Lee Norris Rayam, one of those rare souls you meet in life. He was a singer, an actor, an antiviolence community activist, and a mentor. He was program director for the Central Florida Urban League, and he introduced inner-city youth to poetry to divert them from the bad options that waited on every urban corner. Lee Norris and Lisa sang to each other at their wedding, which was incredibly moving. When Kim and I got married, they sang at our wedding.

  Meantime, on the air, I was me. I had learned not to try to be something on TV that I’m not. I started to incorporate different parts of my personality—I love sports, and I was going to let that love fly. I remember a couple of times, my news director said to me, “Hey, tone it down a little. Save that stuff for ESPN.”

  Funny, I wasn’t even a big ESPN watcher. Once I got there, I found out that buddies of mine, like Rich Eisen, came of age watching Dan Patrick, Keith Olbermann, and Craig Kilborn every night and dreaming of being on the SportsCenter set. I knew who Dan, Keith, and Craig were, but I didn’t care about them. I cared about the games. I didn’t relate to the guy reading me the scores; I related to the guys doing the scoring.

  I was never interested in being like anyone else or having a shtick. A lot has been said through the years about how I brought something of a racial consciousness to sports broadcasting. I was just being myself—talking about sports the way I would with Stephen or Fred. So who I was on-air wasn’t conscious or calculated; I was just lucky to end up somewhere—ESPN—where they let you have a personality and be yourself. They smartly weren’t interested in the blow-dried automaton that monotonously dictates scores and highlights.

  Instead, I was someone who was passionate about sports and wouldn’t suppress my feelings—no matter what a news director said. This is sports, man; we ain’t curing cancer. Now, in retrospect, I can see how that can be viewed in racial terms. After all, the black athlete has long blazed a trail in terms of self-expression. From Billy “White Shoes” Johnson’s end-zone dances to the emergence of the high-five in the late seventies courtesy of baseball’s Glenn Burke and the high-flying Louisville Cardinals in college basketball (“Doctors of Dunk”), the black athlete has led the way in terms of on-field celebration. And the suits in the front offices—especially the NFL—have tried to legislate that celebration out of the game. Hey, suits: It’s supposed to be fun. That’s why they call it a game.

  Like “White Shoes,” I was going to let my love for these games show. You know what I’ve never done at a sporting event? Boo. I don’t get the whole idea of booing. You’re booing someone because they just failed at something? Seriously? Do you know how hard it is to do what they’re doing? That they’re among the best in the world at what they do?

  Too often, sports coverage is the media equivalent of booing. I never want my broadcast to feel like that. I grew up respecting athletes for what they accomplished and trying to understand what life was like from their point of view. If more of the media had that kind of open-minded curiosity, maybe we wouldn’t have such “gotcha” journalism today.

  I’ve been criticized for being too chummy with and soft on athletes. That critique is born of a very particular type of journalism: one in which predominantly white, middle-aged writers and broadcasters paternalistically judge young, often black, athletes. I’ll ask tough questions, if need be. But they’ll be in service of explaining rather than judging. The viewer can then judge for him-or herself.

  For example, when Allen Iverson was arrested early in his career for having a concealed weapon in his car, I didn’t ask him: “How do you square what you’ve done with your responsibility to be a role model to America’s youth?” Instead, I asked him: “You just had a beautiful baby girl. What will you tell her about these events?”

  And Allen, God bless him, looked at me and spoke from the heart: “I’ll tell her her daddy isn’t perfect and that I made a mistake,” he said. “And that I’m trying to do better every day.”

  I loved Allen for that answer, because it was real and full of heart. And that’s the interviewer’s job: to get past all the artifice and all the clichés, and to arrive at something authentic. Allen would have never been so open and vulnerable if I had come at him like I was judge, jury, and executioner.

  • • •

  IN FEBRUARY 1993, ESPN sent producer Gerry Matalon to Florida to do a feature for Outside the Lines on Shaq and Orlando, how this small-market town was adjusting to having this gargantuan phenomenon in its midst. Gerry and I would go on to be great friends. He’s now senior coordinating producer of on-air talent development at the Worldwide Leader. I had never met him when he asked to interview me for the piece.

  We sat down at a game and did the interview. Afterward, Kim had a thought: “Why don’t you go ask if you can send him a tape?”

  So I went back to Gerry. “If I want to send ESPN a tape, can I send it to you?” I said. “That way, you can take it to whoever you need to, instead of it just sitting in a pile.”

  He said he’d be happy to. I sent it off and thought nothing of it. Until the phone rang a couple of months later.

  “Stuart, this is Al Jaffe at ESPN,” a voice said.

  I knew who Al Jaffe was—the vice president of talent. I figured it was one of my boys, probably Fred, busting my chops. “Come on, stop playing, man,” I said.

  “Uh, I don’t play,” he said. “This is Al Jaffe. We’re starting up ESPN2, a new network. It’ll be young and hip, and we’re interested in you for it. We’d like you to come to Bristol for an interview.”

  The first thing I did was call around to get some intel on ESPN’s interview process. A consensus quickly formed: You’d better know your sports. Like, seriously know sports. Like, be able to name at least five players from every Major League Baseball team—and their stats.

  So I made a chart comprising the roster of every pro team in every major league, and I committed it to memory. Lord knows how smart I’d be today if I didn’t cram my brain with all that useless information back then. In Bristol, Al Jaffe asked, “Can you name me at least five players from every Major League team?”

  “Yeah, I think I can.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Give me five Kansas City Royals.”

  “George Brett, of course,” I said. Jaffe nodded. “You’ve got David Cone and Tom Gordon on the pitching staff. Wally Joyner …”

  I owed him one more. “And Greg Gagne,” I said, resisting the urge to refer to the shortstop as “Boomer” Berman did: “Gagne with a spoon.”

  There was silence. “Am I right?” I asked.

  Jaffe broke into a slight smile. “I don’t know,” he said.

  And with that, Al Jaffe hired me for the forthcoming ESPN2, where I’d be a SportSmash anchor, doing five-minute updates of scores and news every half hour. That meant leaving beautiful Orlando for Bristol, which didn’t seem to have a whole lot going on in it. But I didn’t care. ESPN was a place where on-air talent had the freedom to be themselves. And I was ready for that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BOOMER BETTER KEEP UP

  At 7:30 on the night of October 1, 1993, a new sports network was born and carried into some 10 million homes: ESPN2, or, as we called it, the Deuce. Today, ESPN2 is hardly distinguishable from ESPN. But back then, it was going to be a whole ’nother thing. It would be a younger, hipper alternative to ESPN, and the signature show, SportsNight, would be the new generation’s answer to SportsCenter. SportsNight had lowercase on-screen graphics and a graffiti-infused theme running through it. We would focus on alternative sports more attractive to a younger demographic—things like snowboarding and mountain biking. That was the plan, anyway.

  On that first night, it was not altogether clear we had a success on our hands when anchor Keith Olberma
nn, curiously wearing a leather jacket, opened the three-hour show by saying: “Welcome to the end of my career.”

  Afterward, there was a party to end all parties on our Bristol campus. A parade of limos made its way up the Saw Mill River Parkway from New York City. Studio executives, media honchos, and the random celeb made the trek up to sleepy Bristol to mark the dawning of what we hoped would be a new era in sports broadcast journalism. I remember being in the greenroom and seeing Downtown Julie Brown and MC Hammer—this was a few years after Hammer Time, but the dude was still rocking some puffy pants.

  A lot has been said and written about that party. Some ESPN staffers pulled all-nighters. I soaked it all in. I recognized the partying for what it was: a big exhale. There had been a lot of tension leading up to the Deuce’s debut.

  We’d been rehearsing for months, and Olbermann had already threatened to quit many times. He had moved over from SportsCenter, where he and Dan Patrick had helped build a brand, and wore that leather jacket on-air, violating the first rule of cool: If you try too hard to be it, you ain’t it.

  Keith had a reputation for being difficult. I didn’t know him well—and still don’t. Full disclosure: Suzy Kolber was, and is, a close friend. She came to the Deuce thinking she was Keith’s coanchor. Only Keith didn’t see it that way and treated her more like a sidekick.

  Either way, it wasn’t my business. I’ve never had a feud with a colleague. Every once in a while, I’ve had words, especially in my first few years at ESPN. One time, I remember going at it with fellow anchor Brett Haber. There’s a tradition on the SportsCenter set: The anchor who has seniority gets to choose what side of the set he sits on. Well, I’d been at ESPN longer than Brett, but he’d been at SportsCenter longer than me. So it wasn’t clear who had more seniority, but I deferred to him and sat opposite where I liked to be: on his left, which is the right side of the screen to the viewer. I didn’t think I’d care, but we did the show and I was uncomfortable with the camera angle the whole time. The next day, in our show meeting, Brett wasn’t there. I told the director, “Hey, man, tonight I’m sitting on the right, ’cause I like that better.”

  I swear the color drained from his face. “You’re going to tell Brett,” he said.

  “Sure, I’ll tell Brett.” What was the big deal? I mean, what was Brett going to do? Get mad at me?

  Later, I came up to Brett in the newsroom. “Hey, man, I’m going to sit on your right tonight ’cause I don’t like the other seat,” I said, before turning and walking away.

  He pursued me. “Hey, hey!” he called. “Are you asking me or are you telling me?”

  I stopped and spun around, and now we were face-to-face. I was in my late twenties, all fire and brimstone. Instead of defusing things and just saying something like “That’s just the way it is, man,” I stepped up and then brought it down. I got in real tight, nose-to-nose, and whispered, “Telling you.” He froze. Issue done. That night I sat where I wanted and Brett was so, so nice to me. Now, today, I don’t think I handled that confrontation in a mature way. But I’ve gotta say: It was satisfying. And the bigger point is that Brett and I were cool from then on. I may have been immature, but I knew even then that life’s too short to keep alive meaningless feuds and invent silly slights.

  As with Brett, whenever I had a toxic conversation with a colleague, it never went beyond that: It was over and we always went back to being professional. It sounds odd, but that’s easy to do when you just don’t care what others think of you. If someone didn’t like me, I was always aware that that was on him or her. Not my problem, dude.

  Suzy was more sensitive than that, and she went through a tough time those first six months of SportsNight, until Olbermann hightailed it back to SportsCenter. Years later, Suzy would show the world what I saw during the early days of the Deuce: that she was a consummate pro. Her character was on full display when, live on-air, a drunken Joe Namath slobbered over her and kept saying “I want to kiss you” in an embarrassing display that quickly went viral.

  I remember calling Suzy during that time and telling her, “I’m sorry you went through that; that must have been tough. But it didn’t look tough on TV—you handled it with total class.” What struck me was how compassionate she was toward Joe—not only when I talked to her after the fact but even in the moment, on live TV. She could have made him look even worse, but while interviewing him and throughout the story that followed she was concerned about Joe—he felt awful about the whole thing—and she was consistently classy. That’s the Suzy I got to know at SportsNight, the Suzy I coanchored with after Keith went back to SportsCenter.

  So not even six months after ESPN2 debuted, I was coanchoring a show. That excited me, but I wasn’t awed. I think that attitude comes from the athlete in me. I didn’t think, Oh, God, this is national TV. I thought, All right, let’s do this show, man. You’ve got to be a little cocky to succeed. I was doing SportsNight and also NBA2Night. One year, I did a season of NFL Primetime with Boomer and Tom Jackson. I remember very vividly, before my first show with Chris Berman, my colleague Rich Eisen asked, “You nervous doing a show with Boomer?”

  I like Boomer. I respect Boomer. He’s a great talent. All of us on the air owe him 10 percent of every paycheck we get because he’s our SportsCenter forefather. But nervous? C’mon, man. “I’m not nervous doing a show with Boomer,” I told Rich. “He better keep up.” I was going to do my thing.

  Meantime, on SportsNight, we started to hit our stride as a show once we were cut to an hour per night. It’s funny, as at many workplaces, there was always a lot of bitching about management at ESPN. Perhaps that’s to be expected when your biggest star, Keith, is also the newsroom’s complainer-in-chief. But I never went in for that. If he was ticked off about something, that had nothing to do with me. As a black man in the workplace, you keep your head down and don’t bother with stuff that isn’t your business. Besides, I was new and happy to be there. But more important, I’m an intensely loyal person. And early in my time at ESPN, something happened that led me to understand for the first of many times just what a caring, compassionate company I was working for.

  • • •

  MY WIFE, KIM, and I were awakened by our ringing phone at two a.m. one day in June 1994. On the other end, all I could hear was sobbing and cries of pain. My heart raced. Was it my parents? One of my siblings? Kim’s family?

  Gradually, I was able to piece it together. The caller was our close friend from Orlando, my former colleague at WESH Lisa Rayam. We knew she and Lee Norris had gone to Jamaica to celebrate the two-year anniversary of their wedding, that moving ceremony in which they serenaded one another. Between sobs, Lisa was saying something about some craftsmen she and Lee Norris had met on the beach. I heard the words “breakin.” And “gone.” As in, “Lee Norris is gone.”

  Gone. Murdered.

  The story started to become clear. How Lisa and Lee Norris had encountered some local craftsmen selling wood carvings on the beach at Runaway Bay, the resort community where they’d rented a villa. How they didn’t buy anything from the vendors, but that didn’t stop Lee Norris from giving them some money anyway. That’s the kind of guy Lee Norris was: generous, kind. How, that night, they were awakened by sounds of someone breaking into their villa. How they jumped out of bed and tried to hold the bedroom door closed while a man or men fought to push it open. How, in the struggle, as the door pushed open, Lisa recognized one of the local craftsmen from the beach before getting hit in the head. How she didn’t even remember the gunshot that had murdered her husband.

  “Take all the time you need.” That’s what my bosses at ESPN said the next morning. It would be the first in a long series: Throughout my time at the Worldwide Leader, the executives who ran the place defied the cold, heartless corporate stereotype. Time and again, they led with their heart.

  So, the next morning, Kim and I boarded a flight for Miami, where we met up with Lee Norris’s two brothers, and on we all went to Jamaica. We went strai
ght to the hospital, which felt third-rate and dirty. Lee Norris’s body hadn’t even been cleaned up yet. Lisa was adamant that she wasn’t leaving Jamaica without her husband’s body, but the police weren’t releasing it. The Jamaican tourist board put all of us up at a luxury hotel, and the countdown started as we all had to wait for the bureaucracy to move. Jamaica is totally laid-back, which is fine if you’re having a relaxing vacation and don’t run into any problems. But when the stakes are high and you need action, the wheels of justice are frustratingly slow. Kim and I weren’t going to let Lisa go through this alone, and my bosses agreed: “Stay there,” they all but demanded of me.

  We were in Jamaica for over a week. Even though Lisa had her own room at the hotel, she stayed in ours the first four nights. On Saturday morning we heard Lisa start singing. Her voice had always been on loan from God, and singing was always something she and Lee Norris shared in a very deep way. The day she started singing she said to us, “I think I want to spend some quiet time alone,” and she went to her room.

  So much of our time had been spent worrying about Lisa that Kim and I hadn’t had time to grieve. We both broke down. So much emotion had built up that the floodgates just swung open. We made love.

  Now, there’s a backstory here. When Kim and I had first gotten married, the doctors discovered she had trouble conceiving. She had surgery, and her doctor told us that if we were planning on having children, we’d better hurry up and get on it. In late ’93, we started trying—and trying and trying. It was actually kind of funny. Since Kim was a flight attendant, and I was married to her, I could fly for free. She’d call when the opportunity was ripe, and I’d hop on a plane to do my husbandly duty. One time she was in Missoula, Montana, when I got the call: “I’m ovulating.” Nine hours later, I was in Montana, doing “calisthenics” with the wife. Despite these efforts, we still had no luck getting pregnant.