If you watch ESPN, you’re surely familiar with Stuart Scott. You don’t forget his style. Here he is giving highlights from a 1998 game between North Carolina and Duke.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWXHDa6Ta1s
Scott grew up in Winston-Salem and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill. Sports broadcasts have been filled with tributes to Scott since Sunday morning, when he died of cancer at the age of 49. Those memories include the way in which he battled cancer since 2007.
"When you die, that does not mean that you lose to cancer; you beat cancer by how you live, why you live, and in the manner in which you live," Scott said when he accepted the Jimmy V Perseverance Award at the ESPYs last year.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9cSX5XPY70
Columnist Adam Lucas from GoHeels.com, the official site of Carolina Athletics, joined WFAE's Mark Rumsey to discuss Scott's legacy.
"I think maybe older folks, and I put myself in that category, maybe underestimate how important he was to the current generation of college players and also the players a few years removed who might be in the NBA," Lucas says. "Those folks really grew up with him."
"Marcus Paige, Carolina's point guard, I talked to him yesterday about it, and he said, 'Stuart Scott is the reason why I'm in the journalism school because I watched him on TV and he made it fun. I realized, hey, I could do that and it could be fun.'"
Lucas also discussed Scott's role during Late Night With Roy Williams, the passion and flair Scott brought to his job at ESPN, and a few of his favorite memories.
"Usually when (Scott) came into Chapel Hill, he would stay a couple days, go to some old restaurants he liked as a student, see some friends, things like that," Lucas says.
But a few years ago, Scott made it clear he had to leave around 4:30 the next morning.
"It turned out that his daughter had a 9:00 a.m. soccer game and he wanted to make it back home for that, and he did," Lucas says. "He came down to Chapel Hill for maybe about less than 12 hours, did Late Night for no cost whatsoever - never even mentioned payment - and was back in time to see his daughter's soccer game. That was just prototypical Stuart Scott."
You can hear more of our conversation with Lucas by clicking the play button at the top of this page.
