It’s hard to imagine TV sports before Stuart Scott. The iconic sportscaster helped define a decade of ESPN’s coverage, and introduce catchphrases like “Boo-Yah!“’“ to the mainstream. Boo-Yah: A Portrait of Stuart Scott, the latest installment of ESPN’s 30 For 30 series, is a loving look back at Scott’s life, career and legacy.
The Gist: From 1993 until shortly before his death in 2015, Stuart Scott was a mainstay of ESPN’s programming–a central figure in the world of televised sports. Boo-Yah: A Portrait of Stuart Scott gives a retrospective look at Scott’s life and career, from his youth in North Carolina to his spot at the Sportscenter desk–and the proud legacy he left behind. Filled with interviews with his loved ones and contemporaries, it’s a loving look at a man who worked hard, inspired countless people, and yet always seemed to stay cooler than the other side of the pillow.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Even though they’re produced and directed independent of one another, there’s a certain tone that we’ve come to expect from 30 For 30 documentaries over the decade and a half that ESPN’s been putting them out. They’re serious, well-crafted, loaded with interviews, and treat their subject with gravitas. When the subject is one of ESPN’s most beloved figures? They’re certainly not going to deviate from that; this is a loving retrospective, and Scott’s style was so distinctive that if this is going to remind you of anything, it’s Stuart Scott.
Performance Worth Watching: A wide range of people from Scott’s life show up here–family, friends, former colleagues, the athletes he covered–but the filmmakers are careful to leave Scott himself front and center. This approach doesn’t work with some subjects, but Scott’s career left behind a vast library of archival footage to work with, and it leaves us feeling as though he had an integral hand in crafting the documentary.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: “The hardest thing for an aspiring sportscaster to do is to find their voice,” former colleague Gus Ramsey reflects. “Stuart was exactly like you saw him on-camera, off-camera, he just dialed it up 10 percent.”
For a generation of sports fans–one I firmly belong to–it’s hard to imagine a world before Stuart Scott. Starting in 1993, Scott was a mainstay of ESPN’s sports desk, where his fresh, boisterous and infectiously-charming take on delivering the day’s highlights helped set the tone for a decade of sports coverage–and bring catchphrases like ‘Boo-yah!’ and ‘cooler than the other side of the pillow’ to the mainstream.
Boo-Yah: A Portrait of Stuart Scott, the latest installment in ESPN’s long-running 30 For 30 documentary series, is a loving ode to one of the network’s biggest-ever personalities. Filled with fond remembrances from Scott’s family, friends, colleagues and contemporaries, it tracks his life and career from his North Carolina youth to the University of North Carolina, his first television job in Orlando and his quick rise to The Worldwide Leader in Bristol, Connecticut.
It’s not all meteoric rise, of course; we learn about the eye problems that kept him off the football field as a young man and were exacerbated by an on-field injury later in his career, the resistance his status as a Black man with an unapologetically Black style encountered both from viewers and from figures within ESPN–and, of course, the cancer that took him from the world at the age of 49.
Still, Boo-Yah: A Portrait of Stuart Scott isn’t presented as tragedy; the overarching theme here is joy–the joy that Stuart Scott had for sports, for life, and the joy that he brought to millions through his work (and those wonderful Sportscenter commercials, an enduring testament to his theatrical chops).
In a poignant moment early in the film, Scott’s daughter recalls a lesson he imparted to her when she was young. “I was always scared to play sports. One time, my Dad took me to a field to learn how to throw a ball… and, I wasn’t great. He said, ‘it’s not about you being good. It’s about you getting better, it’s about you saying ‘I can’t do this’, and me proving to you that you can. I’m going to show you that you’re capable of so much more than you think you are.’” It’s this attitude that showed through in his work, and made him beloved to so many.
“If there was ever any doubt,” his ESPN colleague Suzy Kolber recalls with fondness, “all you had to do was go to a sporting event with him and see the reaction from the fans–and the athletes as well. This guy was a superstar.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. If you’re of a certain age, Stuart Scott was an indelible part of your experience as a sports fan–and Boo-Yah: A Portrait of Stuart Scott is a loving tribute to his life and work.
Scott Hines is an architect, writer and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky, and author of the universally-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter.
