Every Day I Fight

by Stuart Scott

  That’s what has set ESPN apart since I joined the team. The guys in charge value creativity and diversity in radical ways.

  We were encouraged to be creative in the moment, even while on live TV. If we were having fun on the set, the thinking went, the viewer will have fun watching us. Remember that time 50 Cent threw out the first pitch at a Pirates–Mets game and the ball went at least a hundred feet wide of home plate? We couldn’t stop showing it. I was, like, “Dude, don’t you practice? That’s not even close.”

  The same night, the USA soccer team played Azerbaijan in a World Cup warm-up match. The World Cup would be starting in fifteen days. For some reason, I was assuming the team must have already left the States—and that this game was in Azerbaijan. I knew that our Bob Ley would be covering the World Cup, so I figured he was there with them. I threw it to him with the intro: “Let’s go to Bob Ley, in Azerbaijan with Team USA.”

  While Bob was doing his stand-up, the producer in my ear clued me in to a pretty big oversight on my part. When the red light in front of me came back on, I decided on the spot to come clean.

  “Thanks, Bob,” I said. “As you can see, Bob is not in Azerbaijan. Bob is not even in San Francisco tonight, where the match is actually being played. If you walk out right behind me, outside our studio door, hang a right, Bob Ley is right down that hall.”

  Now, that was funny. But what was funnier was a viewer’s tweet to me, which we instantly put on screen and closed the show with: “What do you and 50 Cent have in common? You both tossed to Azerbaijan instead of sixty feet away.”

  In that case, as in so many others, we made the viewer a part of the fun. That mind-set comes from the top. I’ve always had the freedom to think up new ways to get across the same old information. For me, those ways often reflected the African-American experience—which gets to the diversity ingredient of Skipper’s secret sauce.

  Take, for example, my spoken-word SportsCenter segments. Instead of delivering the typical scores and highlights, I’ve come out on set to a live mic and, behind some old-school jazz, laid down some poetry jam. There was the Kentucky–Florida basketball game:

  Kentucky’s Terrence Jones drives

  To his surprise

  The shot won’t go and Florida starts to run

  In b-ball it’s called transition

  Of your own volition

  Step on the gas pedal

  Heavy metal

  Fire under the kettle

  Whatever you want to call it

  Call it a Patric Young dunk

  Kid brought the funk …

  Gators down two

  But who knew?

  Kentucky’s freshman big man could be this clean

  Anthony Davis sets the screen

  Steps back beyond the line

  Tickles the twine

  From three.

  Name one place where an anchor wouldn’t be laughed off the set if he suggested rapping old-school over scores and highlights. In early 2014, I gave Steph Curry the SportsCenter poetry-jam treatment:

  Part of a 30–5 Warriors run

  Steph wasn’t done

  Shooting from distance not working so much

  Young fella drives, twists

  Serious touch.

  Again, writing. It doesn’t take as long as you might think to write one of these. You have to see the video first and then write to it—but then it’s all a matter of flow. Rhyming for spoken word is made easier because you can speed up or slow down your pace to make the rhyme. My favorite spoken-word segment came a few years ago, when I paid tribute to Mike in “Best Ever” on his fiftieth birthday:

  Brotha, I was sold when he won six NBA rings

  But the thing

  That makes Best Ever sing

  Not scoring titles and MVPs

  The double nickel that he sliced the Knicks at their knees

  The 63 he put on Bird

  Larry Legend saying “Please!

  Is that God?”

  Isn’t it odd

  That Best Ever is not about numbers

  But whatever he made you feel

  Just watching

  Shock, then awe

  Then amazing that drops your jaw

  Might be pride or scorn

  Depending on whether you were born

  A Bulls, Knicks, or Celtics fan

  Man, he’s even better than Best Ever

  In a career he has weathered every storm

  Paved the way for athletes to say “I am an icon”

  A brand

  Over my likeness I stand

  On this day we stand tall, too

  Honoring you

  Michael Jordan

  Best Ever.

  Happy birthday, black cat. Spoken word.

  Twitter blows up when I break out a spoken-word jam. Not everybody likes it, though most do. But here’s what Bodenheimer, Skipper, and Walsh all knew: It’s okay if not everybody likes it. If you try to please everybody you succeed in just being bland most of the time.

  That was part of my argument last year, when one producer objected to one of my most recent catchphrases. When, say, Yasiel Puig went yard against Justin Verlander, I played off a popular Kendrick Lamar song and said, “Puig to Verlander: Pitch, don’t kill my vibe!”

  Every time I used the line, the Twitter audience loved it. But one producer was offended—not at what I’d said, but at Lamar’s original lyric, which substituted a B for the P in pitch.

  “Look, man,” I told the dude. “This is what we do. We borrow from culture and create things out of it that have to do with sports.”

  “But it uses the word ‘bitch,’” he said.

  “But it’s ‘pitch,’” I said. “I’m taking a Kendrick Lamar title and making it baseball-centric. You gotta understand, man, I’ve got two daughters at home so I’m aware of the sensitivity we need to show here.” What I was doing was no different from what another anchor used to do, borrowing from that viral Dave Chappelle skit where Chappelle and Wayne Brady are cruising the ’hood, acting all gangsta, and Brady, the most unthreatening black man, keeps saying, “Is Wayne Brady going to have to choke a bitch?” Well, anytime we showed highlights of tennis great Novak Djokovic, my colleague used to say, “Is Novak going to have to Djokovic?” The only difference is that none of the producers got that reference.

  I kept using the phrase, after the producer and I had a high-minded conversation about it that I appreciated. But the key takeaway for me is that a show producer raised the objection—not one of the executives. Because the executives always knew that to keep SportsCenter fresh we had to continually push the envelope.

  Those ESPN suits got—well before I did—that anchors with the freedom to make pop-culture references helped appeal to a diverse audience. They understood that when I reference my black fraternity and Rich Eisen references Seinfeld, we say to two very different groups: We’re speaking to you. They got that that makes for smart business.

  Striking that balance wasn’t always easy, at first. In my early years at the network, with a bit of a chip on my shoulder, I kept feeling like I had to point out the blind spots of my colleagues when it came to race. Now, I probably did it in ways that I wouldn’t today. I tended to be a little more in-your-face back then—the curse of youth.

  I’m always aware of being a black man. You can’t help but be. At one point, we were doing a story on former Cowboys receiver Michael Irvin when he had been arrested. It wasn’t even my story, but I read the script, which pointed out that he’d worn a mink coat to court. I was hot. “Why say he was wearing a mink coat?” I asked the producer.

  “Because he was wearing a mink coat” came the reply.

  “But that has nothing to do with anything,” I said, probably raising my voice a little. We can be accurate and wrong. Because highlighting that detail played into Super Fly stereotypes that aren’t fair. We went around about it. Whenever someone claims to be color-blind—black or white—I’m suspicious. Because it’s impossibl
e to be unaffected by race—it’s all around us every day. I was kind of edgy about pointing that out. But it was important to me to raise the issue so that people started really thinking about the choices they made.

  Once, a couple of my boys and I were standing in a hallway, talking. A white colleague walked by and said, “Hey, it looks like a party.”

  It stopped me. “Hey, man,” I said. “Why isn’t it a summit?”

  He looked confused.

  “Really,” I said. “Why’s it gotta be a party? How many times do three white guys stand around in the halls of a corporate place? Walk by three brothers, and it’s a party?”

  Here’s the thing. Before you think I was being oversensitive, black men get this kind of thing every day. Little asides that contribute to, rather than break down, stereotypes. And what’s so interesting about ESPN is that that kind of thinking has no place in the vision of Skipper and Walsh. The executives have always stood for the most diverse workplace imaginable—which also happened to be in their business self-interest.

  One coordinating producer didn’t get it. Someone once showed me the post-show reports he gave to the executives, and he killed me a lot of the time. I remember what he’d say whenever I hosted with another black anchor: “They were having too much fun.” He never said that about Berman or Kilborn, whose goal had always been to host a comedy show. (Craig went on to precede Jon Stewart as the host of The Daily Show before getting his own late-night network talk show.)

  Again, this producer wasn’t a high-level guy and he wasn’t there long. I’m sure he showed his colors in a lot of ways. It was clear to me that his view of the world was out of step with ESPN’s, because I knew what the executives stood for.

  I rarely watched Seinfeld. But Rich Eisen did. When we cohosted SportsCenter, he’d make references to lines from the show that many viewers knew and understood. I’d make references to what I watched instead: New York Undercover, the show on Fox that starred Malik Yoba and Michael DeLorenzo as undercover cops—the first police procedural to star two men of color.

  Whenever I’d show highlights of Bobby Phills—who played for the Charlotte Hornets and would later tragically die in a car accident—I’d pay him his props as a fellow Alpha man by shouting what we shout: “1-9-0-6!” It was a reference to the date of our fraternity’s founding.

  “What did that mean?” a producer asked once.

  I got that he had to ask—they have to protect the brand. Even though I felt like joking, “Dude, I’m not secretly saying something about hookers and drugs,” I played it straight. “It’s a fraternity reference,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “if you’re going to make a fraternity reference, why not do something like Animal House?”

  “Because I didn’t live Animal House,” I said. I got where he was coming from: Not even half the audience was going to get the reference. But I made the argument that there is an audience that will get it. Alpha is the first and largest black fraternity, and it’s worth something to have its alums watching SportsCenter and thinking to themselves, probably for the first time, “Wow, SportsCenter is talking to me.”

  In the early 2000s, I came to see how important the diversity of these references was to the success of SportsCenter. You had the cultural observations of Boomer, Olbermann, Patrick, Kilborn, Eisen, and me. Add into that mix the Canadian flare of John Saunders, the astuteness of Mike Tirico, the class of Robin Roberts, the high-mindedness of Bob Ley, the hockey wisdom of Steve Levy, the free flow of Scott Van Pelt, and the silliness of Linda Cohn—man, you’re touching everybody out there. Potentially every viewer will feel at one point or another that ESPN is reflecting his or her world. ESPN is one of the best examples of why diversity works—because it has always made SportsCenter a better show and ESPN a better network.

  But none of that would have mattered if tuning in to SportsCenter wasn’t seen as cool. For all their brilliance, the smartest thing the suits at ESPN did was hire the Portland, Oregon, ad agency Wieden+Kennedy to write and produce commercials that sold the show as the meeting place of the sports world. Wieden+Kennedy were the guys behind Nike’s iconic “Just Do It” ad campaign—and they’d make SportsCenter just as iconic. I knew their commercials had broken new ground when I’d be at a game and pro athletes—I’m talking big-name stars—would come up to me and be, like, “Yo, man, how do I get into one of your commercials?”

  “I don’t know, man, that’s not my department,” I’d say. “Have your agent make some phone calls.”

  The Wieden+Kennedy team was brilliant. They wrote these subtle scripts and filmed them in the most deadpan ways. I’d always acted, but my experience had been in theater—where you have to play it big and loud. Here, I learned, less was more. Playing smaller made the scene more subtle.

  My first one featured me and Kenny Mayne tutoring then rookies Kobe Bryant and Keyshawn Johnson on how to handle the media. Kobe and Keyshawn played all meek, totally against type, and Kenny and I were in their faces like drill sergeants, cursing and yelling at them to shout out, “I’m the man!” When the ad ran, of course, I knew the curse words would be bleeped, so I cussed up a storm—something I wouldn’t do today. There was no Internet to speak of back then.

  Another early one was of me whistling and washing my hands in the men’s room. You hear a flush and a coworker comes out of the stall and exits. Then you hear a flush and a jockey comes out of another stall and exits. Then you hear another flush and a horse comes out of a stall and exits; my expression is briefly puzzled, before I return to whistling and washing, while the words “This is SportsCenter” appear on the screen. That one took a while to shoot because the horse decided to do some of his business right on the bathroom floor.

  Three of my favorites featured me with my man Scott Van Pelt. One had Big Ben Roethlisberger saving people from our building while a fire alarm blared. I’m outside watching this with Van Pelt, and I say, “Does he know this is a drill?”

  One that didn’t air a whole lot had me and Van Pelt dressed in our designer suits backstage, just off the SportsCenter set. We’re jittery, like we’re athletes waiting to come charging out for the player intros. We’re warming up: “One-two, one-two. Get ready. One-two, one-two.” We’re dapping each other, getting pumped. Then it’s time. We rip off our suits like they’re warm-ups—underneath, we have the same exact suit. We run onto the set.

  The one that was just genius in its subtlety took place in the cafeteria—Van Pelt and I are behind Arnold Palmer as he first puts lemonade into his glass and then follows it with iced tea. It was Arnold Palmer making an … Arnold Palmer. We just looked at each other, like: You seeing what I see?

  Another one finds me saying that every so often there are rain delays. Then you see a leak from a pipe above our set—and a grounds crew coming out and laying down tarp. “You just hope it lets up,” I deadpan.

  Rich Eisen and I actually wrote one—I’m not sure if it ever aired. We were shooting a bunch of ads and the director said, “We’d like to shoot one more, a Christmas thing. Any ideas?”

  So Rich and I came up with something. We’re in the newsroom, with some sappy holiday music playing in the background, and I hand him a gift: “Hey, man, I got you something.” He opens the present and it’s an earpiece, like we wear on-air. “Go ahead, try it on,” I say. He puts it in his ear. “It’s a perfect fit,” he says. “How’d you know?”

  Then he stands up and we exchange the most awkward-looking guy hug imaginable. Just like at our day jobs, we were free to be part of the creative process behind the ads.

  What is so great about the “This is SportsCenter” campaign is that it makes being at Bristol the fantasy. In the ads, everyone from Roger Federer to Tiger Woods is hanging out at ESPN. To me and my coanchors, we were broadcasting scores and highlights from a sleepy Connecticut town. To Wieden+Kennedy, what we did had a lot of romance to it. They sold us as the standin for the American male sports fantasy. Pretty cool.

  • • •

/>   WHEN SYDNI WAS BORN, in October 1999, I continued a ritual that started when Taelor was born, and that continues in some form to this day. Every night, I’d sneak into their rooms and watch them sleep.

  This is my purpose, I’d think, looking at them. This is the only purpose I have. Protecting these two sleeping girls.

  It probably sounds like some stupid tough-guy thing, but every night I’d have the same thought: You can’t come in here and hurt them. I didn’t even know who the “you” was—but I knew that this is why I was here. And I’d carry on these conversations with whoever was out there trying to do my babies harm. You’ll have to go through me and kill me. Not on my watch. This is my watch.

  Sometimes I’d sit in the rocking chair in their room and listen to the hum of their breathing while consciously sending out these warnings. They’re sleeping in my house, now. You don’t get to hurt them. Not here, not tonight. This is why I’m here. If you want to hurt them, I will end your life. Or die trying.

  Even now, I open Sydni’s door at night and watch her sleep. Taelor, too, when she’s home from college. I’ll watch for a while, thanking God, and then I’ll kiss each on her forehead. Because even though Taelor may not call as often as I want her to and Sydni will roll her eyes when I think I’m being one cool dad, I stare at them at night and … they’re still my little angels.

  They’re very close, my girls, and fiercely loyal to each other. Taelor is the protective big sister. Even when she was younger—she’s five years Sydni’s senior—she’d come down on me if I was too tough for her liking on her baby sister.