Every Day I Fight

by Stuart Scott

  Shortly after our time in Jamaica with Lisa, though, we got word: We were expecting. We sat down with a calendar and did the math and figured out that we had conceived on that Saturday when Lisa felt strong enough to stay in her own room.

  We called Lisa and told her God had taken a life—and God had given a life. We told her that Lee Norris was our child’s guardian angel. I’m not a Bible-thumper, but I am a Christian and I do pray and I do believe His will works mysteriously. Need proof? Taelor was born on February 20, 1995. It was Lee Norris’s birthday. I told you: life. What a trip, man.

  • • •

  LET’S KEEP IT REAL. Like most dads who are jocks, I kinda wanted a son. While Kim was pregnant, I wanted to know our baby’s sex. Friends weighed in: Keep the surprise factor, some advised. There’s no right answer. The right answer is you do what you want to do.

  And I wanted to know. I felt like I needed to know, because I wanted to know who I was talking to while I bonded with my child throughout the pregnancy. I wanted to know if I’d be saying “Hey, baby girl” or “Hey, big boy.” I was gonna talk to that belly—and saying “Hey, baby” struck me as plain stupid.

  After the doctor told us it was a girl, I remember driving back from his office that day and thinking, This is the best thing in the world. I’m gonna have a baby girl. All that stuff about having a son was instantly gone; once I knew, I was all in.

  The day Taelor was first put in my arms I was a changed man. Every dad is biased, of course, but c’mon: She was the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen. Five pounds, eight ounces, with a full head of hair. Her eyes were closed and she was blowing bubbles.

  There are probably a million ways to describe what it’s like to have a kid. Every one of them rings true. Here’s mine: When that baby is put into your arms, she is instantaneously set apart from everyone else in your life, even your significant other. When you first meet your child, she becomes the only person—ever—with whom you are already deeply, deeply in love. And the love does nothing but grow from there.

  I was a fanatical father. It bothered me that I couldn’t produce milk. I so wanted to be a part of that. I told my wife, as if to compensate, “I’m changing every diaper when I’m home. I’m here, I’m changing the diaper.”

  Kim would fly for work on my off days. If Kim was gone for a couple of days and I had the same days off work, Taelor and I would hit the road. Sometimes we’d fly to North Carolina to see my folks, or we’d visit Kim, or we’d go hang out with my boy Fred, who was now in Florida. I can’t tell you how much I loved traveling with Taelor. It was not the normal thing for a man to do. One time, I was in a stall in the ESPN bathroom when a couple of colleagues walked in—to this day, I don’t know who they were. One said, “Wife’s going out of town this weekend, leaving our two-year-old with me; what am I going to do?”

  “Yeah, my wife did that to me once,” the other dude said. “I didn’t know what to do all weekend.”

  I was sitting there on the toilet thinking, What is wrong with you guys? You can’t stay with your own kid? I wanted to smack them.

  I was proud to travel with my kid. I had it down to a science. I wasn’t fumbling around like some amateur. I packed a bag; I had the carrier; I’d take the bottles out on the plane and ask the attendant to put them on ice for the flight. It was like clockwork.

  Still, people had a hard time wrapping their heads around the sight of the two of us, and it ticked me off. Whether we were in the security line at the airport, boarding a plane, or checking into a hotel, someone would inevitably say: “Oh, look. Mr. Mom.” People were trying to be nice—complimentary, even. But I hated that. I’m not Mr. Mom—I’m Dad. Is Mom ever Mrs. Dad?

  Or how about this one: “Oh, that’s so sweet. Dad’s babysitting.” Seriously? Babysitters get paid. I’m no babysitter. I’m Dad. That sense of surprise, that inability to process the fact of a dad who was as conscientious as a mom—it’s a sad commentary on what our culture expects from fathers.

  Kim was out of town for my first Father’s Day in June 1995. I got Taelor up and made her breakfast, and then we went to a horse pasture a few blocks from our house. I held her real close to the fence as the horses sidled up and we’d talk to them. And we’d talk to each other: one thing I never did with Taelor or Sydni was speak to them in singsong baby talk. I think that’s why both were so conversational early on and grew up to be well-read and social. I always talked to them like they were adults. That day—even though Taelor was only five months old—I told her all about everyone in her family, even her great-grandfather, my mom’s dad.

  “He died back in 1941,” I said. “He was murdered. He went to get milk for his kids, who were in the bathtub. He walked down the street and got mugged and shot.”

  That’s how I talked to her—a real adult conversation, before she could even talk back. So I wasn’t surprised when she became talkative. I remember sitting in a Cincinnati restaurant when Taelor was eighteen months old, and Kim and I counted how many words our baby girl knew: 153. One time, when she was about three, we were in a Barnes & Noble bookstore and I asked the lady who worked there for a certain book for Taelor. “Oh, those books are for kids nine or ten years old,” she said. “Your girl is too young for it.”

  Oh, yeah? Today, I might shrug and say, “No, really, she can read that book.” Back then, it was a challenge. “Grab one,” I barked to the unsuspecting clerk. “Get me a book.”

  The book in front of her, Taelor just started reading. Clutch. I leaned back, crossed my arms, and glared at the clerk. Like, really, lady?

  Suddenly, I was no longer in much of a hurry to hang with my boys. Taelor was my best buddy. Before I’d leave for work in the morning, I’d head to Taelor’s room. “Hey,” Kim would call after me, “don’t wake her up.”

  “I won’t,” I’d say. “Just gonna see if she’s up. If she is, I’ll just say good-bye.”

  Well, so much for that. I’d walk into the room and she’d be sound asleep. “Pssst, Taelor, baby girl, wake up,” I’d whisper, nudging her. I couldn’t help myself. If I was going to spend the next twelve to eighteen hours at work, I needed a fix. I’d pick her up and bring her downstairs, where Kim would greet us with a disbelieving look.

  “Look who was up,” I’d say. “I figured I’d bring her down and spend some time with her.”

  When Taelor was two, we had friends over for New Year’s Eve. As we got closer to midnight, I snuck away and headed upstairs. She was up—though, honestly, I would have woken her up. I started to rock her in the rocking chair we had in her bedroom. As I rocked her, the emotion of the moment hit me. Another year was about to end, and my baby girl was already two; I started to feel the passage of time. I started to feel overwhelmingly blessed to have this little life in mine. I’d always felt things deeply, and now it was all too much. The tears started streaming down my cheeks.

  Taelor raised her head, looking at me, frowning slightly. “Daddy, are you crying?”

  I smiled. “Yeah, Daddy’s crying,” I said, sniffling.

  She got up, and I bent down to her. She touched my cheek. “Are those tears of joy, Daddy?”

  “Yeah, baby girl,” I said. “Those are tears of joy.”

  • • •

  AFTER A COUPLE OF YEARS, SportsNight was becoming less focused on rock climbing and surfing. More and more, we were giving the same scores and highlights as SportsCenter. It didn’t make sense to have both. Once SportsNight went away in 1995, my colleagues all made the jump to prime-time SportsCenter. Suzy. Kenny Mayne. Bill Pidto.

  All but me. Granted, I already had a show: I was doing NBA2Nite, which I liked just fine. But not getting the call for SportsCenter gnawed at me. Oftentimes, we want the shiniest thing and we’re going to huff and puff about it till we get it. I went to my bosses and let them know what I wanted. The word kept coming back: “Your time will come.”

  I felt like I was being patted on the head, but what could I do? I kept telling myself that, ultimately, I could o
nly control what I could control. That, while I was watching Suzy, Kenny, and Bill anchor our network’s flagship show—and I was legitimately happy for them—I needed to kick butt on NBA2Nite. The rest would take care of itself.

  Why was I the last of the SportsNight crew to graduate to SportsCenter? Beats me. Questions of “why” always perplex me. Even today, Kristin will ask me, “Why do you think so-and-so said that?” and my response is always the same: I don’t know, so why waste the time and energy trying to figure it out? What’s important is what we know. And, back then, I knew I had to deal with not being called up to SportsCenter, and that it was up to me to perform in a way that would make it impossible to be overlooked again.

  My boys would wonder if it had to do with race. I thought that was too easy an out. I didn’t see myself as a victim—particularly when there’s real discrimination out there. If forced to speculate, I’d say I wouldn’t be surprised if there were doubts about me among the network’s higher-ups—but that they wouldn’t be based on how different I looked. I bet it was more about how I acted. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a feeling that I was little more than a catchphrase guy. A young dude with an entertaining shtick.

  I sensed that that perception changed one night in the summer of 1996 when Rece Davis and I were cohosting the two a.m. SportsCenter. The Centenniel Olympic Park in Atlanta had just been bombed. Our sleepy studio burst into action. The script was ripped from the teleprompter. This was live TV and there’d be no net. We were on the air till ten a.m., winging it. That night, more than anything else, changed how I was looked at by the bigwigs in Bristol and New York.

  They might have seen me as some excitable jock, but the fact is I was a veteran of live TV news. Remember, I’d been a local news reporter. And I’d always been a fan of Peter Jennings. I’d watch how, on big stories, he projected a sense of calm and comfort. Most viewers would watch him to get the information he was putting out there. I’d watch him to try to figure out how he did what he did and what made him so good at it.

  I knew it was hard because when a big story breaks your natural tendency is to be amped up—the adrenaline starts flowing. I concentrated on slowing down, even as things were firing at me. It’s a tricky balancing act: You want to project an air of serene authority, but you also want to have energy in your voice. And you have to pull off that careful balance while producers are shrieking in your ear all the while.

  Rece would be questioning the chief medical examiner of Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium, who was on the satellite, while the producer in my ear was telling us that, in one minute, they’d kick it to me to interview the head of security for the International Olympic Committee. No script and no time to prepare. That’s when you think of your folks back home or your boys and you wonder: What would they want to know right now? So I’d ask about whether there had been any elevated threat levels leading up to this, if there were any suspects. I’d keep the queries coming—how robust had the security been compared to past Games?—until that voice in my ear, with no warning, would shout, “Gotta go, gotta go!” Then it’s time to wrap up the interview in a way that looks planned before Rece and I engage in some respectful byplay—some interaction that humanizes us and allows the viewer to pause and react for him-or herself.

  ESPN and CNN were the first on the air to report the bombing, but the rush to be first means nothing if what you’re producing isn’t top quality. And we aced it that night. That was no accident. ESPN in the early to mid-nineties was setting a high bar for smart coverage of big news stories, and that came straight from the top. When highly respected John Walsh, who had been an editor at both Rolling Stone and the Washington Post and founding editor of Inside Sports magazine, joined the network in the late eighties as vice president and executive editor, he brought with him hard-news credibility. He started to build a journalistic culture.

  Walsh is a fascinating character. His friends through the years have included Hunter S. Thompson and Bill Murray. He preached the importance of hard, unbiased news reporting at a sports network—something of an oxymoron at the time. The direct result of Walsh’s influence would soon be found in ESPN’s leading coverage of the O. J. Simpson case and on that night in 1996, when Rece and I spent six hours on the air reporting the Olympic bombing.

  After that night, I received personalized notes from many ESPN executives, all praising the job I’d done. I’d shown the ability to think on my feet and ask insightful questions. I wasn’t just some excitable kid. Almost right away, my time did indeed come. I got my shot anchoring SportsCenter. In 2014, just before we unveiled our new state-of-the-art SportsCenter set, I was asked to look back at my initial broadcast for a promotional piece called “First Show. First Set.”

  There I was, alongside Craig Kilborn, on that pale SportsCenter set. I had a thick dark mustache, and I wore my hair in a type of baby high-top fade, which was all the rage among young black men at the time: short on the sides, long on top. But the thing that really captured my eye was the big, boxy tan suit. “This is back in the day,” I said, “when suits were boxy, with big shoulders. Now everything is Euro, slim-fit. Back in the day, big and baggy was cool. There are still some brothers who will wear suits like that. Not a lot of brothers.” Here I paused, about to level a loving shot to one of my whitest colleagues: “Some brothers. And Barry Melrose.”

  That’s what I saw, looking back at that clip from September 1996: a young black man rocking the style of the day. But I also saw something else, something harder for the naked eye to make out. I saw a dude who had been given the freedom to let his voice fly.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DROPPIN’ KNOWLEDGE

  Remember when Iron Mike Tyson burst onto the scene in the eighties? He’d intimidate his opponent in the prefight stare-down. It would be over before the first punch. Rappers got it—here was a dude whose in-your-face attitude came straight outta their lyrics. LL Cool J gave Iron Mike props: “I’m Mike Tyson, icin’, I’m a soldier at war/Makin’ sure you don’t try to battle me no more.” Big Daddy Kane weighed in: “My sharp tongue is like a license/I strike like Mike Tyson.” There were other ballers, too, who seemed ripped from the pages of The Source magazine. Public Enemy singled out a beefy power forward: “Throw down like Barkley!” Chuck D shouted.

  But by the mid-nineties, right around the time I started anchoring SportsCenter, something changed. Rappers weren’t just shouting out to athletes. Now rappers and sports stars were becoming one. Interchangeable. That’s because a generation of athletes who had grown up on hip-hop came onto the scene—and they looked and acted different from those who had come before.

  I was there in Orlando when Shaq started rhyming with Fu-Schnickens. Around the same time, Michigan’s Fab Five, led by Chris Webber and Jalen Rose, with their shaved heads and baggy shorts, were bringing urban style into the mainstream. Then Allen Iverson, with his cornrows, his tats, and his “posse” of rapping friends burst into the NBA, and a new era had dawned. The hip-hop athlete was born.

  Pretty soon, a whole lot of black athletes were wearing the hip-hop uniform: the droopy pants, the Enyce and Ecko gear, the braids and tats. As for the music, many followed Shaq’s lead and dropped some science of their own: Roy Jones Jr. and “Prime Time” Deion Sanders both tried their hands at the rap game. Later, so many would do the same—including Kobe and A.I.—that it had a name: They were “rapletes.”

  What was going on? Suddenly hip-hop’s influence was everywhere in sports, because hip-hop had become the driving force of youth culture. It went beyond race; after all, something like 70 percent of all rap music back then was bought by white kids in the suburbs. And it was about more than the music; if you were young and interested in pop culture, hip-hop influenced how you spoke and carried yourself.

  By the time I got to SportsCenter, the impact of hip-hop was everywhere … except in the sports broadcast booth. My industry seemed black-and-white in the Technicolor hip-hop world, with our well-coiffed, deep-voiced anchors and their pe
rfect diction. All that passion in our sports and music? It wasn’t often found in the media reporting of the game.

  GQ magazine called me the “hip-hop Howard Cosell”; I guess I was being held up as representative of this new generation. I say “I guess” because this is me, now, looking back. I thought about none of this back in the day. You think I was sitting around, saying to myself, “Self, you gotta represent hip-hop nation on SportsCenter tonight?” Man, I was busy high-fiving my boys after watching Mike come back from his baseball sabbatical by dropping a double nickel on the Knicks. Who had time to think about what it all meant?

  But now I think that’s partly why what I was doing on-air caught on. Because it wasn’t calculated. I was just being myself, writing and talking about sports the way I would with Stephen or Fred or any one of my boys. And that came through. Listen to rap music back then; hip-hop was all about authenticity. If someone “kept it real”—that was the highest of compliments. Viewers are smart; they can tell who is genuine and who is running game.

  Within a couple of years, I was making a cameo in the rapper Luke’s “Raise the Roof” video. Luke was a legend; back in the day, he and his boys in the 2 Live Crew were charged by Florida authorities with breaking obscenity laws in their music. Their album As Nasty As They Wanna Be came out in 1989, and their lyrics were pretty far out there. I was more of a Luther Vandross and old-school rap kind of guy. I was partial to the inoffensive Sugarhill Gang. But I had much respect for how Luke handled being public enemy number one. When the Florida governor banned his music and the sheriff arrested him, Luke said elected leaders should focus on ending poverty instead of his music. Made sense to me. Ultimately, the courts vindicated him.