Ten years after Stuart Scott was honored at the ESPY Awards with the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance, his legacy and message to “Fight like hell” continues to endure and inspire people around the world. The V Foundation for Cancer Research is commemorating the anniversary of the speech by matching all donations up to $75,000 to benefit its Stuart Scott Memorial Cancer Fund. V Foundation chief executive officer Shane Jacobson also revealed Wednesday on ESPN Radio’s UnSportsmanLike that there would be a “record-setting announcement” made by host Serena Williams in the spirit of Stuart Scott during the ESPY Awards on Thursday night.
ESPN Radio host Freddie Coleman has worked at the company for 20 years and recalled walking out of work with Stuart Scott on the ESPN Campus in Bristol, Conn. on Thursday’s edition of #Greeny. Coleman had just finished his radio show and Scott had completed an edition of SportsCenter, and both hosts were preparing to leave the area. It had been a while since Coleman had seen Scott, leading him to start a conversation and ask about how he was doing, realizing that he was battling cancer and still coming into work.
“He said, ‘I’m hanging in there. I’m fighting, I’m fighting, I’m fighting, you know, but I’m not going to give in and I’m not going to give up on this battle,’” Coleman recalled Scott conveying. “And I said, ‘No matter what my friend. You know we got you. Just stand on your shoulders,’ and he said, ‘I know that. It means the world to me to know that I got so much support from people because to know that I have their back and they have my back means the world to me.’”
Before they left the campus, Coleman remembers giving Scott a big hug and not wanting to let him go. He wondered if it would be the last time that he would see him and thought if he would have to do work from somewhere else. Yet he did not realize that when someone is fighting cancer and has been able to beat it, it does not guarantee that they will continue to do so.
“I didn’t realize how sick he was until I saw him on stage at the ESPYS three months later after that,” Coleman explained. “I said, ‘Oh my goodness, I can’t believe he had that kind of strength’ that he was willing to come in because the work meant a lot to him; being around people meant a lot to him; having people see him meant a lot to him, and it wasn’t a vanity thing; it wasn’t an ego thing – it was just who he is.”
Coleman never discusses Scott in the past tense, instead maintaining him in the present tense because he is always going to be present. When ESPN held a memorial service on its campus following Scott’s passing, he was surprised to see how many people he knew. It was during that time when he had a chance to meet his brother, to whom he expressed his condolences and stated that Scott means a lot to them. His brother then told him that he and Scott used to always get into arguments about things Coleman was saying on the radio. Moreover, he was told that Scott was both a fan of him as a person and a fan of his on the air.
“You just never know what people are going through or people and who they are,” Coleman said, “but it’s the measure of a person that people talk more about him outside of what he did, being an influential SportsCenter anchor and ESPN host and about the man Stuart Scott was, and that was one of the more vivid memories for me that I had a chance to know the man behind the microphone, behind the TV screen, and those memories will always stay with me regarding Stuart Scott.”
