A moving new ESPN documentary, Boo-Yah: A Stuart Scott Portrait, captures the verve and swagger that made the late SportsCenter anchor one of the best to ever do it.
ByMatthew Roberson
December 10, 2025
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Chris Panicker; ESPN
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For an entire generation of American sports fans, Stuart Scott loomed as large as the superstar athletes he covered. After 22 years at ESPN—bringing a potent dose of personality to the network and minting countless classic catchphrases along the way—the beloved sportscaster died in 2015, at age 49, following a long battle with appendix cancer. The loss was felt acutely throughout the sports world, particularly among devoted SportsCenter viewers, for whom Scott felt like a member of the family. Now, a decade later, ESPN is honoring Scott’s legacy and illustrious life with a new 30 for 30 documentary, Boo-Yah: A Stuart Scott Portrait, which premieres tonight, December 10, at 9 p.m. eastern. According to the film’s director Andre Gaines, the experience of making it was every bit as moving as you might expect.
“It’s the most emotional journey that I’ve ever had really, just because he was taken from us too soon,” Gaines says of the doc, which is named after Scott’s signature exclamation. “Even in that short life, he lived an extraordinary one.”
While Gaines never met Scott, he feels like he did—from having SportsCenter on throughout his adolescence and young adulthood as a daily “white noise,” of course, as well as from watching over 400 hours of footage while making Boo-Yah. Scott was a big believer in chronicling his life, constantly shooting both traditional home movies and more avant-garde, slice-of-life videos, plenty of which appear in the documentary. “Stuart was doing selfie videos before that was a thing,” Gaines says. “On the other side of that was not a sleek phone, it was a big clunky camcorder, and he was doing it just for the fun of it. We were able to take those and edit them in a way that he’s directly addressing the audience. So, we get to know him in many regards, as he’s doing those things when he’s by himself.”
Scott—who began his network career on ESPN2 in 1993, before becoming a staple of SportsCenter on ESPN, as well as ABC’s NBA Finals and Monday Night Football coverage—was something beyond a breath of fresh air when he hit the airwaves. He was an entire oxygen tank. Most traditional sports coverage at the time felt stale and pale, a slew of staidly professional white men in dark suits reporting the facts. Scott, meanwhile, was unapologetically Black, never shied away from being funny, regularly used hip-hop vernacular on the air, and began his time on television often eschewing the typical jacket and tie look. As Scott became a regular at the Worldwide Leader, he seemed to fundamentally alter the way things were done at the network, in the way that Steph Curry and Shohei Ohtani forever changed their respective sports. Only, it didn’t exactly feel that way right off the bat.
“He was faced with, in many cases, insurmountable discrimination,” Gaines explains. “They hired him to be that way, to be himself. Then suddenly they’d say, ‘We don't want you to be that way.’ But he knew there was an audience for it. He knew that he was ahead of his own time, and everyone else just had to catch up to him.”
While Saturday Night Live eventually had Tim Meadows parody him, Scott was far from popular when he first graced America’s television screens. In fact, many Americans were in outright opposition to him. In footage from the film, Scott plays a vicious voicemail he received from a viewer who calls him, among other things, the N-word.
“At the time, nobody was saying, ‘Boy, this guy is so groundbreaking. We need to have him on television and let him do his thing,’” recalls Rich Eisen, Scott’s Sportscenter partner for many years. “He had a lot of pushback about doing def poetry and being out there with his energy, sometimes being a little over the top and using pop culture references that were lost on people who were not familiar with hip-hop. Some fans thought that he was excluding them due to his pop culture references. But he always stood firm. ‘You think I'm being exclusive? I’m actually being inclusive. You’re just not the one who I’m being inclusive of, because you don’t get this.’”
Eisen and Scott started as a duo in 1996, quickly becoming two of the young faces of SportsCenter, a show that millions of people both fell asleep and woke up to. It was an odd pairing, for sure—Eisen, a white Jewish man from New York City with a slightly cherubic face and senator-like brown hair, and Scott, a boisterous Black man with a high fade and an earring who grew up in North Carolina. When Eisen first landed at ESPN, he was 26 years old and fresh off a gig as a local sports anchor in small-town Redding, California. Scott was four years his senior, had worked at the NBC affiliate in Orlando before making the jump, and already had national experience from ESPN2. Eisen reflects back on his initial broadcasts with Scott kind of like the What are we? stage of dating.
“I would look at who I am doing [SportsCenter] with, and it would be with Stuart Scott,” Eisen says. “It would be twice a week, then it would be three times a week, and then it would be basically exclusive. After being exclusive for two or three weeks, I do remember sitting on the set, and at one point Stuart turns to me and says, ‘Hey, are we a team?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know. It sure looks like it!’”
Rather than creating an unworkable culture clash, the team’s disparate backgrounds and on-air styles complemented each other beautifully. As long as they weren’t quizzed on each other’s preferred at-home entertainment, everything went swimmingly. “I would definitely do Seinfeld references all the time,” says Eisen. “He goes, ‘What was that line from?’ I’m like, ‘That's from Seinfeld.’ He just rolls his eyes and he goes, ‘Brothers don’t watch Seinfeld.’”
SportsCenter, and ESPN at-large, have undergone several facelifts since Scott’s death. Thanks to an influx of young talent, the vast transformations in the media industry, and a prioritization of debate segments over highlights, it’s easy to point to Scott, Eisen, and Dan Patrick’s era as the golden years. But regardless of your opinion of ESPN’s flagship show in its current state, it’s undeniable that the ability of its talent to showcase things beyond the box score all began with Scott’s trailblazing run.
“The show is definitely a lot different than it used to be,” Gaines accepts. “The bedrock of what SportsCenter is, Stuart deserves a lot of credit for that. He’s somebody who established a tone, a zeitgeist, and an ethos for what SportsCenter really is, and the freedom and the personality that we see now on not only SportsCenter, but so many ESPN shows. He just completely reinvented it. This type of thing can’t be ignored.”
Scott’s steadfast charisma went far beyond the SportsCenter desk, too. In clips throughout Boo-Yah, he turns simple things like sitting on the couch with his then-girlfriend, Kim (who would become his wife and later the mother of his two daughters), into a barrel of laughs. His proposal to Kim was shot in a way that would make Martin Scorsese proud. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, the main star of ESPN’s reliably brilliant “This is SportsCenter” commercials. A standout athlete as well, Scott was perhaps equally well-versed in jock land as he was as a performer.
“He had the spark from the beginning,” Gaines says. “That’s a rare thing. As a director—both documentaries and narrative films—there’s just certain people that the camera loves. It makes my job a lot easier just because there’s a magnetism that they have.”
However, in Scott’s case, there was a tragic downside to that. Scott was six feet of unbridled confidence, which led him to a tryout with the New York Jets in 2002 that was a lighthearted television gag to everybody but him. Guests in the documentary, as well as Gaines and Eisen, all say that Scott wholeheartedly thought he was going to make the team as a 36-year-old wide receiver. With one eye already damaged from keratoconus, a rare condition that thins the cornea, Scott was hit in the other eye by a football while working out with the Jets. The injury required surgery and briefly kept him out of work. “Charisma has the ability to get to anybody’s head,” Gaines chuckles. “It did have the impact of getting to his head and [giving] a boost of false confidence.”
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Gaines says, while making the documentary, he found footage of Scott playing basketball with Michael Jordan, dunking and telling MJ “that's how it's done.”Dimitrios Kambouris
For anyone who remembers tuning into Scott’s sports coverage—whether it was scarfing a bowl of cereal and watching a re-run of last night’s SportsCenter before the school bus came, or catching Monday Night Countdown after a terrible day at the office—Boo-Yah is a guaranteed tearjerker, full of moving stories about Scott getting his cancer diagnosis while in Pittsburgh for a Steelers game, regularly leaving chemotherapy to immediately go practice mixed martial arts, and garnering enough strength to deliver his completely shattering speech at the 2015 ESPYs, just months before he passed.
Eisen says he wants to sit down with his wife and three kids to watch Boo-Yah together, so his children can learn about his beloved friend all at once. He says they know his name, but not much of his story, besides the fact that Eisen’s computer at home is protected by a password that has something to do with Scott. “The hint is Stuart Scott, because part of the password does include boo-yah,” Eisen says.
For both Gaines and Eisen, however, boo-yah is not their favorite Stuart Scott-ism. Gaines is partial to, “Can I get a witness from the congregation?” Eisen’s go-to is “As cool as the other side of the pillow,” a line that has become so ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget that its popularity stems from a guy who would say it over highlights of slam dunks and home runs.
“It always breaks me up at night when I flip the pillow over,” Eisen says, choking up a bit. “He’s right. The other side of the pillow is pretty cool.”