ESPN's Stuart Scott Is Literally Fighting Against Cancer By: Fightland Staff, Fightland
"Last November, the BBC produced an audio documentary called “The Rhetoric of Cancer" in which the protagonist diagnosed with cancer wades through his ambivalence about the martial metaphors used to talk about the disease and its treatment—“battle,” “war,” and other euphemisms for “fight”—and a search for a lexicon with which he’s more comfortable. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to have cancer,” says Andrew Graystone, the narrator and central character of the documentary, “but I warn you that when I die, if anyone says that I have lost my battle against cancer, I will personally come back and haunt them.”
"It’s an interesting look at the words embedded in the discourse around severe illness, and it’s all I could think about while reading the recent profile of Stuart Scott in The New York Times. The longtime ESPN anchor has been enduring cancer treatment on and off since 2007. According to the story, Scott has had 58 infusions of chemotherapy to date, and a scar traveling down his abdomen evidences several surgeries, the most recent of which took place in September and kept him off the mat for five months. That’s right, the mat: Scott trains mixed martial arts, even during cancer" treatment.