Farewell Mr. Scott

Stuart Scott started his career at ESPN in 1993.  I was a sophomore in high school and I watched SportsCenter.  I do not like to think about the fact that was more than 20 years ago, but I have spent most of my life watching sports with Stuart Scott.  Stuart Scott delivered highlights, lowlights, and information in away that could not be found anywhere else on television.  During an hour of SportsCenter there were plenty of highlights and cool plays to keep a fanatically sports fan like myself engaged, but Stuart Scott made the highlights a little bit better by shining some personality into main stream media coverage of sporting events.  

In my late twenties I packed my belongings and moved to North Carolina.  Scott is a favorite in these parts.  He graduated from the University of North Carolina and worked for a few years at WRAL in Raleigh.  There are some cool videos of Scott standing on bridges and overpasses during snowstorms if you look around on YouTube.  Scott loved area and loved UNC.  Not just the sports teams either, but the actual school.

As a card blogger I ran into Stuart Scott during the spring of 2005.  Upper Deck put out a product that spring that was ESPN themed.  I picked up a box of the product from Sports Card Dugout in Webster Groves and found that the set was generally a complete disappointment.  The set was 90 cards of blah with a few equally boring relics.  There were some decent autographs in the product however.  The autograph I pulled was:

In fact, as I recall, I had a really strong run of non-baseball player autographs that summer.  Kerri Strug, that kid from Goonies who played Rudy, and Jesse Ventura.  I sold all of those autographs in a heartbeat, but kept the Stuart Scott.  I am not even sure if the card is really all that valuable, or if I could have gotten much for it back in 2005, but selling a Stuart Scott just seemed wrong.   The Stuart Scott autographed seemed like one of those cards that, no matter who or what you collect, could fit and have a happy home just about anywhere.  

For almost the past decade this card has been living in an oddball box at the bottom of my card closet.  You know, cards that you like that just do not quite fit into any other box.  After I saw the news of Stuart Scott's passing this morning I went and dug this card out of my oddball box and put it in with the rest of my baseball autographs.  

A card cooler than the other side of the pillow.  (Fist bump).