Michael WilbonDec 10, 2025, 12:00 PM ETCloseMichael Wilbon is a featured columnist for ESPN.com and ESPNChicago.com. He is the longtime co-host of “Pardon the Interruption” on ESPN and appears on the “NBA Sunday Countdown” pregame show on ABC, in addition to ESPN. You can follow him on Twitter: @RealMikeWilbon
30 for 30: ‘Boo-Yah: A Portrait of Stuart Scott’ trailer (0:30)Catch the historic 30 for 30 premiere: ‘Boo-Yah: A Portrait of Stuart Scott’ on Dec 10 on ESPN. (0:30)
Editor’s note: This Michael Wilbon column originally was published Jan. 5, 2015, a day after Stuart Scott died. It has been updated with Wilbon’s reflection nearly 10 years later.
It’s awful we’ve been without Stuart Scott this long — 10 years — but we thank those who have the good sense and professional integrity to remember him publicly, to honor him… for his family, for the network, for the art of expression which he took seriously and enhanced even if he thought all he was doing was being himself. He was. And he wasn’t. And for that and his precious time with us we are all better off.
That scenario, or something like it, played out way too often during the last seven years of Stuart’s 49. He’d close his eyes during the commercial breaks at times. There were trips to the bathroom that we knew included violent illness. There’s not a person in the Bristol studios who didn’t say at some point, “Stuart, seriously, you shouldn’t work tonight,” and his response pretty damn frequently was: “Bro, I’m good.”
We were from the same place, the South Side of Chicago, but approached what we did in radically different ways, which is why I didn’t know exactly what to make of Stuart when I first saw him on-camera in the early 1990s. I was as intimately familiar with Pookie and Ray Ray as he was, but didn’t think they belonged in a delivery of the day’s sports news.
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.
When I think of ESPN, I’m in many ways stuck in the 1990s, the days before I actually started working there. While there are dozens of talented and dedicated people at the network, ESPN’s Mount Rushmore, to me anyway, is Chris Berman/Dan Patrick/Bob Ley/Stuart Scott. They were the faces on the front line who took the network from fledgling to global entertainment giant.
And what I loved is that Stuart, who was no shrinking violet, was fine with his role in all of it, being the transitional figure he was and taking the mood from buttoned-up to cool. He was also smart enough, particularly the last five years, to ignore the morons and bigots on Twitter, the noise and intolerance of it all.
One of the things Stuart shared with St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bryan Burwell, besides death from cancer in the primes of their lives, was the ability to be so upbeat and good-natured in the face of withering criticism from people who didn’t want their morning newspaper or evening news to move one inch from what it had been in whiter times.
The first thing we need to do, and it doesn’t have to wait until the playoffs, is pour one for the brothas who are no longer with us, Bryan Burwell and Stuart Scott, without whom the discussion of sports or anything we wander into will, sadly, no longer have the flavor they helped give it.
So here’s what Stuart Scott’s teammates could see that viewers couldn’t. They couldn’t see him suffer through a chemotherapy session at, say, 10 a.m., catch a quick nap and maybe a small bite, put himself through a kickboxing class or some other rigorous physical routine in an attempt to strengthen his body for its fight with cancer, show up at the studio to prepare for a Friday night NBA doubleheader that might require us to work until 1 a.m., and plow right through the evening without so much as a bad word for or to anybody.
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. 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. Not every reference to music needed to be the Beatles or Rolling Stones, not for those of us who preferred Earth, Wind & Fire or Chuck D. More than anybody working then or now, Stuart Scott changed the very language used to discuss sports every day. He updated it, freshened it, made it more inclusive. And he took hell for it.
Covering the playoffs without him and his spirit is unthinkable. Being a Chicago kid (he was born there, and his family moved to North Carolina when he was a young teenager), there’s a reference Stuart would get, from the movie “Cooley High” . . . and already he’s not here when I need him, because Stuart always recalled memorable movie lines with total precision, something I’m not any good at. Anyway, there’s a scene toward the end of the movie where a crew of young ‘uns mourning the death of murdered friend Cochise, played by Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, are assembling under the “L” tracks. And I think Preach, played by Glynn Turman, suggests they should pour one for the brothas who aren’t there.
30 for 30: ‘Boo-Yah: A Portrait of Stuart Scott’ trailer (0:30)Catch the historic 30 for 30 premiere: ‘Boo-Yah: A Portrait of Stuart Scott’ on Dec 10 on ESPN. (0:30)
Catch the historic 30 for 30 premiere: ‘Boo-Yah: A Portrait of Stuart Scott’ on Dec 10 on ESPN. (0:30)
CloseMichael Wilbon is a featured columnist for ESPN.com and ESPNChicago.com. He is the longtime co-host of “Pardon the Interruption” on ESPN and appears on the “NBA Sunday Countdown” pregame show on ABC, in addition to ESPN. You can follow him on Twitter: @RealMikeWilbon