ESPN sportscaster Stuart Scott
It’s not often that can you tune into ESPN, the NFL Network, or any other national TV sports channel and see every sportscaster with their eyes full of tears. But that was the case on Jan. 4, when news broke that longtime ESPN sportscaster Stuart Scott lost his battle with cancer at the age of 49.
Scott, a pioneer among African-American sportscasters, was one of the longest-tenured broadcasters at the sports network, having served with ESPN since 1993. He befriended everyone who worked for ESPN, and although his colleagues knew he had battled cancer since 2007, the announcement of his death appeared to hit hard among every one of them. Many assigned to break the news couldn’t do so without choking up.
Tears also poured from the eyes of many viewers who watched or heard the announcement. Dion Johnson, a 35 year-old sports fan from Washington, D.C., said he couldn’t help but get teary-eyed when he learned of Scott’s passing.
“I’ve been a sports junkie since I was four years old, and when he began on ESPN’s SportsCenter, I was in my freshman year of high school,” Johnson said. “Waking up in the morning to Stu and Rich Eisen brought life to my morning bus stop/homeroom classes and got me hyped for the day.”
Like many others, Johnson credited Scott for introducing hip-hop culture to the sports journalism world.
“Someone who spoke like us, was finally representing for us, but back then I didn’t realize how groundbreaking that really was until I became an adult and a father,” said Johnson, who now co-hosts his own sports talk podcast, The Know-It-Alls. “There was a time where if you had dreams of being a sportscaster, as a Black man you had to ‘play the game’” and lock away your true personality to be taken seriously. Stu’s ascension gave young Black men the courage to show the flavor or soul that you gain when growing up in a urban neighborhood.”
Former Winston-Salem Chronicle sports writer Ed Hill Jr., now in his 31st year as the sports information director for Howard University in D.C., shared the same sentiments about Scott’s pioneering style.
“He changed the landscape of sports journalism forever,” Hill told the AFRO. “The energy and enthusiasm he brought with his lingo was so genuine; it represented a culture of people that hadn’t been represented before him.”
“Most of the sports broadcasters before him, even the Black sportscasters, were real dry and conservative in their approach,” Hill added. “But now, just about everyone uses Scott’s style. He truly set the bar in the industry.”
Michael Wilbon, another high-profile ESPN commentator and a former columnist for The Washington Post, backed the claims of Scott’s revolutionary effect on sports journalism, while admitting that he himself was one of the “conservative” Blacks in the business at the time of Scott’s arrival.
“I was brought up in a buttoned-up world of traditional journalism where the person reporting/commenting/analyzing didn’t call attention to himself—Stuart, very deliberately and without much fear, was in the process of taking us to a new world of sports coverage, one where you let your emotion come pouring out much of the time, where personality would infuse the coverage,” Wilbon wrote in a tribute to Scott published on ESPN.com.
“It wasn’t just that a Scott-delivered story sounded ‘Blacker’—and it did; it sounded younger, and hipper, had greater edge and connected with an entire population of viewers who had been ignored,” Wilbon wrote. “How nerdy is it, looking back, to have felt that Stuart was some kind of pioneer for simply wanting to be himself on television? But he was exactly that, and because that evolution took the better part of 20 years, there is now an entire generation of young media folks, Black and White, male and female, who don’t feel the need to conform, and that is an enormous and admirable part of his professional legacy.”