Craig Sager is gone

Sideline reporting in the NBA is not just a thankless job, it usually seems like an unnecessary one. Nobody needs to hear a coach refuse to say anything interesting at halftime, and that’s pretty much the name of the game. Which is why when I say that Craig Sager made the sideline report a work of art, you understand what I’m saying. It’s like turning last night’s dinner into a work of art. But he did it.

Sager was a towering figure, in the game and in life, and everybody was rooting for him like they knew him personally. He was out there every night in the brightest suits, with the brightest smile, making something out of nothing. Making, in many ways, more out of this particular nothing than anybody had ever done before. We’ve lost him, and it is very hard thing. He seemed indestructible, even when we knew he wasn’t.

The sad news about Craig Sager was not, by any means unexpected, of course. Since his diagnosis in 2014, the basketball world has been pulled into the drama with him, and with his family – we knew when he went into remission, and we knew when the cancer came back. He was given 3-6 months in March, and he beat that, but there are some things you can’t beat in the end, and this was one. It just seemed like he would, which tells you a lot of the things there is to know about who he seemed to us to be. And now, we grieve.

I am certain that a huge part of the grief we all feel is because of how Sager lived his life, as bold, and out there, and adventurous as anybody. Everything about him seemed to be brave and bright and people responded to it in a deep, emotional, even visceral way. We hear stories of his friendships, his nights out, the places where he found himself — Lee Jenkins has some of the more epic stories. The famous clip, where he shows up in Hank Aaron’s 715th home run celebration (he’s the one in the white coat) is pure Sager. He was 22 and working for a local radio station in Florida (WSPB) when Sager drove up, on a hunch, to try to see history. How on Earth does that add up to jumping around home plate with the guys as Hank rounded third? How did he end up there?

It was the thing he had a knack for, and it stuck with him his whole career. The same energy that propelled him out of that dugout, when he had no business being there, carried him all the way. And along that way, he made an impact, seemingly, on everyone he ever knew. There is no world in which a sideline reporter becomes friends with Gregg Popovich, who is to interviews, at the best of times, what The Incredible Hulk is to origami. But if you weren’t moved by this moment, you’re made of stone. Most of you will know what it is without me saying so, and without clicking.

But I am certain also that another huge part of it is that the process the basketball world has gone through with Craig is one so many of us know already. This unfathomable arc from cruel news, to cruel hope, to its end, is one too many have to walk every year. It hurt to see it happen to someone who invited himself into our lives, as basketball fans, but I know that it hurts even more for those for whom it is familiar. Losing someone to cancer is something that it is too hard to do once, let alone again and again.

Craig Sager has lost his fight with cancer. It’s a hard thing to say, and cancer is a hard ass thing to talk about. Fight cancer, we say, and people do. F— cancer, we say, and from the bottom of my heart, once again, yes, absolutely. But in the vocabulary around cancer, which is exceedingly martial, we have to be aware that winning and losing isn’t entirely up to us. Beating cancer, which Craig did for a while, takes everything; a superhuman will and heart. But sometimes even that isn’t enough. No superhero movie ends in defeat, but battles with cancer often do, whoever you are. There is, sometimes, no way to be strong enough to win. It is, sometimes, something nobody could have beaten.

Craig Sager, certainly, for all anyone could tell, was as strong as they come, and braver than he was strong. He made a living by being out a little farther, and standing a little taller, than anyone else, and he did it for more than forty years — since, at least, he was a twenty-two year old kid, when he jumped in the huddle to be the first reporter to talk to Hammering Hank. And he never stopped doing it, not until he absolutely couldn’t.

Sometimes, in this and many other cases, the fight is all anyone can do. I wish he’d had the chance to do it longer, and so does everybody else. But the one thing nobody could ever say is that he didn’t make the most of it. Craig Sager is gone, a stranger we cared about very much. You can’t ask for more than he got, and that is a beautiful thing. That’s how you live, if you’re serious about it — take nothing for granted, and do what you can today, for as many todays as you have. That’s what he did. And if basketball fandom is, in some ways, a small little world, it’s still the place where he’ll long be remembered.