Every Day I Fight

by Stuart Scott

  “You do not get to speak to her like that,” Taelor would reprimand me.

  “I’m talking to your sister,” I’d say. “Stay out of it.”

  She would not back down. “No, you do not get to talk to her like that,” she’d insist.

  What an interesting dynamic as a parent. Part of me wants to say, I’m your father—you don’t get to talk to me like that. But another part of me is, like, Damn right, girl. You battle anybody who you feel is messing with your sister. You battle and you don’t give up the fight.

  When Taelor would stand up to me I’d secretly swell with pride. I may have to pretend to be stern with her, but inside I’m thinking: I love your moxie right now. Your parent is sitting here blasting you and you’re, like, “Pffft, bring it, ’cause I’m gonna bring it right back at you.” When she’d fight me, even as a strong-willed six-year-old, I kinda loved it—because it showed me how tough she was.

  Kim and I separated in 2005, and the divorce was final in 2007. Marriage is hard, man. Even when you think you’re doing your best to keep it together, it doesn’t always work out. Sydni was five, Taelor was ten, and it ripped their life apart. Funny, I’d always been so dead set on protecting them, but I couldn’t protect them from this. What they knew their whole life as safe and secure was no more. When you divorce, you change your children’s lives forever. I don’t know about other parents, but I’ll never get over that. My ex-wife and I forever altered our girls’ sense of security.

  They were both more confident before the divorce, especially Taelor. When they were little, I always thought Taelor would be the more outgoing one. But it turns out she’s not as social as Sydni. They’re both highly sensitive. Sydni hides her sensitivity behind a blank stare more than Taelor.

  After the separation, I moved into my condo and I hurriedly furnished it so it would feel like home to the girls. My ex and I shared joint custody; I’d get the girls three nights a week. On Tuesdays, I’d pick Sydni up after school and we’d go to West Hartford Center, the closest cool downtown to us. Sydni took tae kwon do and Taelor took dance lessons there. Sydni and I would hang out at Starbucks. I’d get a coffee and she’d have her “yellow milk”—vanilla milk, but she was used to it in the yellow container from the grocery store. She was a lot like me as a kid—she had energy to burn. She’d bounce around Starbucks like that Tasmanian Devil in the cartoons. We’d take coffee stirrers and use them as drumsticks and have our own little jam session at the table.

  Those are some of my best memories, Sydni and I hanging out every week at Starbucks. Today, she’s fifteen and doesn’t seem as jazzed by the memory as I am. “Hey, Syd,” I’ll say, “want to go to Starbucks for a jam session?”

  “No, Dad,” she’ll say, sighing.

  It’s funny, watching them grow. Parents tend to label their kids—the smart one, the jock—but I found it interesting just how both of my girls defied expectations. Taelor started dancing at four years old and became a very eclectic kid. She never dressed like the other girls; she dresses more like a struggling New York artist. She never had a ton of friends but always had an adult’s sense of humor. She is a great writer and dancer. Once, her dance company won platinum—the highest score—in an intense competition. I can still remember her jumping up and down—pure joy. Is there any feeling on earth better than what you feel when you watch your kid triumph at something?

  Taelor didn’t play sports, but I know she was a naturally gifted athlete. In eighth grade she played on the volleyball team. She had never played the game. I went to her first game and she didn’t know what she was doing. As a parent, when you watch your kid flailing around like that, you’re, like, Eeesh. I couldn’t get to another game for a couple of weeks. Meantime, Taelor said: “The coach has to play everyone, and I’m one of the best players.” I didn’t say anything, but I thought: My God. She’s delusional. Dude, you’re not one of the best players.

  Well, I went to the next game and I didn’t know who she was. She was all over the court, running down every ball, setting up her taller teammates for spikes, barking commands. My jaw was at my knees. In two weeks she had totally picked up the game and was one of the best players on the team. Still, that didn’t compel her to stick with it or to take up other sports. She was too interested in art and film and dance.

  Sydni is more social than Taelor. She’s constantly texting her friends. She has gifts playing soccer that other girls don’t have. She’s fast as all get-out. She turns on the jets and she’s gone. And she is a ridiculous singer.

  When Sydni was little we found out she was allergic to peanuts and tree nuts. Dealing with that has always been a part of her life, and I’ve always been proud of how she does it. She’d go away with the soccer team and have to bring her own snacks. She’d have to check with school cafeteria workers about the ingredients of menu items and with other girls’ moms about snacks brought in from home for special occasions. It was a pain, but she always accepted it as just part of her life. She never felt sorry for herself. We’d go to a restaurant, and, as young as six years old, she’d ask to speak to the chef: “I’m allergic to peanuts and tree nuts,” she’d say. “Can you make sure whatever I have has no peanuts or tree nuts? And can you make my food on a dedicated free spot?”

  Most nights, I’d get back home at two or three in the morning after SportsCenter. Sydni, at about four years old, would get up in the middle of every night and walk all the way down the hall to my bedroom to get me so I could walk her back down the hall to the bathroom so she could pee. She’d climb up on the toilet, and I’d just stroke her hair or scratch her back before walking her back into her room, where I’d rock her back to sleep in the rocking chair. I remember looking at us, me and my little girl, in the mirror, rocking slowly, and I remember being so, so tired … but I also remember saying to myself: Don’t ever say no. Don’t ever be too tired for this.

  Because I knew that someday it was going to stop. Some night, I was going to get home from a draining night on the SportsCenter set and I wouldn’t hear the pitter-patter of those little feet coming down the hall. I don’t remember the night it happened, but when it ended—it ended.

  At my condo, Taelor and Sydni had a bunk bed in their room, but Sydni would sleep with me in my room. People who don’t have kids tend to react like “Oh, that’s weird.” But if you have kids, you get it. Around when she was eight, I started wondering, When is she going to stop? When is she supposed to stop?

  A friend of mine told me: “You’ll know. She’ll know.” And then one day, when she was nine, she said, “Dad, I don’t think I want to sleep in the bed with you anymore.”

  And I said, “Okay.” It was the most natural thing. But, man, did I miss having her there. People always say, when you have a baby, just wait until your kid walks or talks or plays sports. No. Don’t look ahead to anything. Enjoy every moment in the present, man, because these moments end. And once they end they don’t come back again. One day, my little girl stopped coming down the hall for me to walk her to the bathroom and then rock her back to sleep. One day my baby girl decided it didn’t feel right to sleep in her dad’s bed anymore. I got lucky: She told me so. Usually you don’t know when these moments end. You just know I don’t get to do that anymore.

  I don’t know how, but I knew this. That these moments end, so you’d better soak up every one of them. You soak it up because you don’t get to take them to pee in the middle of the night forever. You don’t get them kicking the covers off you at three in the morning forever.

  • • •

  I DIDN’T KNOW HERM EDWARDS, but I knew that booming coach’s voice of his. It was January 2002, he was the head coach of the New York Jets, and I cold-called him with an idea: I wanted to come to minicamp as a player, with ESPN cameras documenting how I did.

  “Can you play?” he asked. I could tell he was amused.

  “Yes, coach, I played high school ball and club ball at UNC, which was like D II level football,” I said.

  “What p
osition you play?”

  “Wide receiver, coach.”

  There was a pause. “Aw, what the hell, c’mon up,” he said. “This oughta be fun.”

  What I didn’t tell Coach Edwards was that I’d been playing in a league in Waterbury, Connecticut, for about five years. It was contact flag football, live-speed, full blocking from the waist up. We’d play nine-on-nine with two refs. Each team had multiple former college players. One guy had been a wideout at Division II Southern Connecticut State, a 6′4″ receiver who ran a legit 4.4 forty. For three straight years he lasted deep into NFL training camps. Two years in a row, we watched him catch a preseason touchdown pass only to then get cut. The next week, I’d be lining up against him—and holding my own.

  It’s interesting why he didn’t end up making the league. At Southern Connecticut, no one played press coverage against him due to his speed. So he didn’t know how to handle NFL bump-and-run coverage. Being the big fish in a little pond in college worked against him because he wasn’t used to cornerbacks getting all up in his grill on the line of scrimmage.

  Anyway, I’d always wondered just how good I could be at football. Yes, I was doing this for a story. But I was also doing it to test myself and for the pure love of the game. Coach Edwards invited me to the team’s OTAs—organized team activities. We’d practice, have team meetings. After going through OTAs, the next step would be participating in minicamp—with my camera crew catching the highs and lows.

  In preparation for OTAs, I hit the gym. One of my best buddies in Connecticut is Brian Gallagher, a personal trainer at Farmington Farm Gym. I grabbed a buddy of mine who had set track records at Dartmouth, and we hit Brian’s gym every day. I’d run hundreds of pass patterns a day, my buddy trying to check me.

  I went to a celebrity golf tournament in Hawaii, where I ran into Drew Brees and LaDainian Tomlinson. They were both with their then girlfriends—now wives. I asked them if they’d work out with me. Talk about a busman’s holiday—here are two of the best in the world at what they do, on vacation in Hawaii, and they kindly agree to work me out. Love those dudes to this day.

  We found a field, and for two hours it was Drew rifling spirals and LaDainian beating on me, and me beating on LaDainian. I was holding my own running patterns against LaDainian and checking him, which gave me a bit of a swagger that he must have noticed.

  “Man, you got cleats on!” LaDainian said. Yeah, I’d come prepared.

  “You’re a Pro Bowl running back, don’t give me any of this ‘You got cleats on!’” I said.

  That same trip, I got together with Jaguars wide receiver Keenan McCardell. We ran patterns together and spent hours talking receiving.

  I felt ready for my first day of OTAs, which took place at Hofstra University. We’d start with conditioning drills and weight lifting, go into a classroom session, and then hit the field for practice. Going in, I expected one of three reactions from the players. Some would be excited to see me. Some would be ticked off that I was there—an interloper. And some would just be skeptical.

  Quarterback Chad Pennington was in that first group. My locker was next to his, and when he walked in and saw me his eyes lit up. “Well, okay, man,” he said, giving me a bro hug. “I saw the name—was wondering if that was you. That’s cool.”

  I could tell wideout Laveranues Coles was a skeptic. One of the linebackers—I didn’t even know who it was, just that he was a big boy—walked by us and said to Laveranues: “This ain’t no place for reporters. I bet he won’t come across the middle.”

  I said, loud enough for others to hear, “I’m right here.” I just wanted everyone to know: If you want to say stuff, say it to my face.

  Once we got in the gym I could tell Laveranues was starting to come around. He saw that I was willing to work. In the classroom session, we worked on a curl pattern, how to drive the cornerback off, plant, and come back. And then we went out onto the field.

  There, I was timed running my fastest-ever 40-yard dash, 4.55. I’d been timed at 4.6 in college. Not bad for a thirty-six-year-old. There were some murmurings of “atta boy” and “way to go” after that; I was winning over at least some of the skeptics.

  Next, we were going to catch passes off the JUGS machine. I’d never caught off a JUGS machine. I was running a wideout pattern. I’d always learned that you put your hands up to catch the ball at the last possible moment—you don’t want to be waiting for the ball with your arms outstretched. The first ball that came to me got on me much faster than I ever would have thought; it was there, past my hands, before I could react. The thud was deafening. The ball hit me square in my left eye, ripping it open. All was quiet.

  The ball literally split my eyeball open. The lens and the iris had come out. I remember getting in the shower and thinking, Man, my eye is messed up, before being taken to the hospital. I had emergency surgery that night. I was hurt, but also embarrassed. Later, I would read that the wide receivers coach had me ranked sixth of the eight receivers in camp. That, plus my time in the 40, gave me some solace. But that was later. That night, I was down. Besides worrying whether I’d have my eyesight come the next day, I was bummed because this was not how the day was supposed to play out. What’s that saying? Man plans, and God laughs.

  You know about my history of eye trouble. It’s gonna read like a litany of bad luck, and you’re going to wonder why this dude keeps playing sports, since many of my injuries have happened on a field or court. What can I say? It’s what I do.

  I’d had a cornea transplant in my right eye in 1983 that didn’t take; they did it again, but my vision in that eye never got back to where it had been. Two years later, I had a successful cornea transplant in my left eye. From then on, my left eye was my good eye—I wore a contact lens that gave me 20/25 vision in it.

  In 1989, playing pickup basketball in Raleigh, I was on the sideline waiting for next when someone whipped a pass that hit me in my right eye. It hurt like hell, but I shrugged it off and played. Two days later, I started seeing stars. The next day, what looked like a curtain came up from the bottom of my vision. In other words, the bottom half of my vision just went dark. A detached retina. My eye doctor stapled the retina back together and put a water bubble in my eye to keep it together. Two years later, in Orlando, I saw the curtain again and knew what it was: The retina had detached all by itself. This time I went to Duke—yeah, Tar Heels suck it up and go to Duke when it’s medically necessary—for a laser reattachment.

  But now with my left eye—my good eye—shattered, I was worried for my career. My right eye had 20/35 vision, but now the vision in my left eye was horrible. On top of that, over the next year, I battled glaucoma. My eye pressure kept getting higher and higher, and I must have had six or eight surgeries to decrease it.

  Almost a year to the day after the Jets debacle, I went to Vegas for Tiger’s annual golf tournament. I wasn’t wearing glasses, and I had a contact lens in my right eye. I was meeting one of my boys in a casino lobby. We saw each other and did that brother high-five hug. Only, as he came to me, his pinky inadvertently went right into my left eye. I heard it pop. It was one a.m. in Vegas and I knew what had happened. Another rupture. Tiger was kind enough to let my brother Stephen and me use his jet, a Cessna Citation X—the fastest civilian jet in the sky—to fly to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. I had another cornea transplant. A year later, another one.

  All this time, the real danger was the glaucoma. The pressure kept building and building, and finally, my optic nerve gave out. By 2004, I was effectively blind in my left eye—which had been, up until a couple of years before that, my good eye. Again: Man plans, God laughs.

  I remember my eye doctor telling me I shouldn’t be playing football. And the truth is, I would have played a lot more football in my life were it not for my eye troubles. But, sorry, I’m not not going to play football. Now when I play I wear protective goggles. They offer some protection, but if you get punched in the eye you’re not going to be completely protected. So I try
to be smart about it.

  “Anyone who’s had the same things that have happened to me, what are they going to do?” I told Kristin. “Sit on the couch forever?”

  “Some people do,” she said.

  “I don’t think most would,” I said. “I think most people would just live their life.”

  “Most people wouldn’t play football again,” she said, smiling.

  “That’s probably true,” I said. “But I’m not going to compromise on my quality of life. Maybe that’s stupid.”

  But Kristin, God bless her, wasn’t hearing that. “Some would call it stupid, but you would probably call them stupid if they never did anything for the rest of their lives because they had eye problems or cancer or whatever,” she said.

  If my left eye gets hit even a little bit again, it can rupture very easily because there’s nothing left in there but cornea. The things that give it strength—the iris, the lens—are long gone. We were in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, just walking along, and someone right in front of me shot out his arm. Because I don’t see out of my left eye, it doesn’t close. The guy hit my glasses, my eye was wide open, and the glasses went right into my eye. My eye-print was left on the glasses. I was afraid it was another rupture, but it wasn’t.

  When I’m in bed, I sleep on the right, so that if I’m looking at Kristin my left eye is on the pillow. Why? So my right eye can pick up anything coming at me. Why tell you this? Because if I’m in danger of another rupture while walking on the beach or while lying in my bed, I know enough now to know that I’m not in control of what’s going to happen. Remember: Man plans, God laughs. So what the hell? Might as well do what I love. Might as well play some football.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I WON’T BE HERE FOR MY DAUGHTERS

  It was supposed to be a laugher. But sports—a lot like life, as I was about to find out—don’t always play out as expected. On Sunday, November 25, 2007, I was on my way to Pittsburgh for a Monday Night Football matchup the next night between the 7-3 Steelers, a Super Bowl contender led by Big Ben Roethlisberger, and the lowly 0-10 Miami Dolphins.