When Sydni Scott wants to hear her father’s voice, the massive body of work Stuart Scott left behind, the “Boo-Yah” compilations, the legendary highlight reads, and the “This is Sportscenter” shorts give her plenty of options. For her quick fix, Scott picks up her phone and sorts through the numerous voicemail messages from her dad that she’s saved. However, there’s a specific one that stands out.
The two disagreed about some heels she wore and left at his house, and he swore that she didn’t until he eventually found them. She recalled, “He called to tell me I was right and ended with ‘this is your paternal unit,’ a line he used for years. I can hear him laughing to himself as he finds them. Taelor Scott, her older sister, also has a go-to saved voicemail. It’s her father calling from an event where Kendrick Lamar, a rapper she introduced to her dad, was performing.
Taelor Scott said, “It’s a really grainy video message with horrible audio. I listen to it now, hearing him have his Kendrick moment. It’s said that there’s many artists like that I won’t be able to share with him going forward.” It’s approaching eight years since Stuart Scott, 49, died seven years after he was diagnosed with appendix cancer.
A celebration of his legacy was recently held in New York at the annual “BOO-YAH” event that has raised more than $16 million with ESPN and the V Foundation for the Stuart Scott Memorial Cancer Research Fund, which has a mission that was important to him: Making a significant impact on the racial disparities in cancer outcomes.
Sydni Scott said, “His legacy is as much about sports as it is about the Black community and Black families. So, to be part of the work trying to essentially elongate the time Black families spend together, through the study of racial disparities in cancer research, that’s a meaningful part of his legacy.” Another part of her father’s legacy? The way he single-handedly changed the delivery of sports news through his hip-hop and cultural references, an approach never seen nationally before he joined ESPN in 1993.
Born in Chicago, raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a graduate of the University of North Carolina, Scott put his cultural identity on display nightly through his catchphrases that resonated with African Americans, attracting a young demographic to ESPN. His career inspired his daughter Taelor, who was 19 when her father died, to pursue a career as a visual storyteller. For the sisters, there is so much to miss about their father who, during the 2014 ESPYs and six months before his death, delivered one of the network’s most emotional moments as he accepted the Jimmy V Perseverance Award.
Taelor Scott said, “What I miss most is someone to share everything with. As time goes on, your contact list gets shorter and shorter, and I feel like there’s a huge hole. And I have a deep nostalgia for when I did not feel that particular emptiness. It’s like your biggest fan is not going to be there.”
Her sister agrees. “Missing my dad is so caught up in the nostalgia of adolescence, of growing up, of childhood,” Sydni Scott said. “I had to forge this path out of childhood into adulthood — which I’m early on the journey — without him.