By Mallory Mattingly
For the first time in 22 years, Rich Eisen returned to ESPN to host SportsCenter.
During the show, he took a moment to honor his late friend and former ESPN SportsCenter host, Stuart Scott.
“It has been a blast being here tonight. But listen, we all know there should be someone else right here in this chair next to me, right there, as he was for my seven years in the role he referred to as my TV wife, and that’s my dear late friend Stuart Scott, who is indeed looking over my shoulder tonight,” Eisen said on the show.
“I frequently think of Stewart a lot and what he might think of the sports headlines of the day, like, say, Bill Belichick being the head football coach at his beloved school,” he continued. “We used to host SportsCenter after LeBron’s high school games. So what would Stewart think of James still playing at age 40 with 40,000 points and with all these new crossing of Sports TV streams like say ESPN buying NFL Network and partnering up with my daily show. What would it look like if Stewart sat in with, say, Ernie, Shaq, Kenny and Charles when inside the NBA comes here to ESPN this fall?”
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“I could go on and on because I miss Stuart so very much. He should be in that chair with me, with us, tonight,” Eisen concluded as he grew emotional.
Scott died on January 4, 2015, from appendiceal cancer, a very rare cancer that “grows from cells that make up the appendix,” and can spread to “different parts of the abdomen,” according to the National Cancer Institute.
Before he passed, Scott wrote a memoir about his fight with cancer, “a labor of love and a love letter to life itself.”
In it, he detailed his childhood in North Carolina, his family, his athletics and his career as a sportscaster.
“Struck by appendiceal cancer in 2007, Stuart battled this rare disease with an unimaginable tenacity and vigor. Countless surgeries, enervating chemotherapies, endless shuttling from home to hospital to office and back — Stuart continued defying fate, pushing himself through exercises and workout routines that kept him strong. He wanted to be there for his teenage daughters, Sydni and Taelor, not simply as their dad, but as an immutable example of determination and courage,” a synopsis of the book reads.
In 2014, Scott was awarded the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance at the ESPN ESPYS, concluding his speech with a now iconic quote.
“When you die, it does not mean that you lose to cancer. You beat cancer by how you live, why you live and the manner in which you live,” Scott said.
Eisen and his viewers certainly felt Scott’s absence during his first SportsCenter broadcast in over two decades.
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