A Beautiful, Colorful Life
As a reporter, TNT’s Craig Sager was as warm and bright as they came. But it was his tireless work ethic — in life AND his battle for it — that proved his lasting gift.
Craig Sager lived his life in colors. They’re what he leaves behind — in his words, his will, the ways in which he worked, the works he strove to sew — and why, to we who must believe in such designs, he’ll have never really left.
The game was merely the medium. The colors would’ve surfaced regardless, on any of a million palettes, to summon smiles on the other side. But basketball became the calling, in a way that beckons only those with sufficient heart to change what calls. Sideline reporting was seldom a bastion of color. These were the trenches, to be approached and parsed with all the solemn seriousness becoming of their lot.
But there Sager was, smile a foil for the wincing questions to come. Or maybe the other way around. He disarmed you. Made you laugh despite yourself. Reminded everyone, whether sweating on the mic or game-aglow at home, what fun this is mean to be. That part — the special presence — held fast from first to last.
The colors came later. Rooted in high-school antics, incubated inside a goddam ridiculous wildcat costume, Sager’s trademark fashion sense — Clyde Frazier jonesing on Georgia O’Keefe — emerged as so many great things do: over time, and by not a little curation.
Slowly, though, the colors began to show.
Followed by the daring patterns.
And the finely coordinated clashing.
The quote-hunters camo.
Then, before anyone knew what was happening, color itself had lost all meaning.
An act of pure self-expression? Or more a means of drawing the viewer’s attention towards some greater payoff — knowledge of the game, we’ll say? Probably it’s both, and all the better that. It felt entirely earnest, like sharing one’s ancestral tree, or painting a portrait in an afternoon. Even if your team was being summarily sawed in half, there was Craig, suit the focus of a far-flung alien telescope, to bring it back down to Earth. His sheer size demanded the subject’s attention. His intellect commanded their respect. His heart and mind won their love.
All the while, cancer fight included, the colors shone aloud. A shtick begat a look; a look begat a style; and that style — beloved as he’d become— begat a cause. Through countless bouts of chemo and radiation, his own mortality surely spiraling towards him, Craig Sager turned the monster lurking inside him into something truly beautiful.
“Time is something that cannot be bought. It cannot be wagered with God, and it is not in endless supply. Time is simply how you live your life.”
It’s easy to see the colors of a suit. But Sager was — before the threads, before the fight that so defined him — foremost-first a man of words. Northwestern alum. Cub reporter just trying to crack the press box. Those who knew him best remember a storyteller. One needs color for that, and Sager, for as straightforward taut as his sideline parleys seemed, had tints to spare. Enough to keep him bouncing back, that trademark tireless zeal churning above whatever fronts the cancer opened up.
Time is simply how you live your life.
Eight words. One more than a single syllable. Simplicity betraying an endless depth. The daunting machinations of someone forced by fate to confront the grandest concepts of all — the nature of time; the purpose of life — and finding peace and meaning in the clear. Sager was famous for planning his wardrobes out with an actuary’s concern. Like the words he left us, every color was accounted for, stitched together in ways that first make you wonder what he’s even thinking. Until, after staring for so long the patterns start to pulse, you come to believe perhaps he thought about it all — the colors, the questions, a game so imbued with beauty and immediacy — like every human should. With the love and care of one who cherishes what life holds to see.
Cancer only wears one color. One so dark to behold it would strain your eyes to soup. One no light escapes and too few lives ever do. A color that cuts the figure of a man, or maybe a man-made god, because they’re the sole eviler things we know.
When you’ve seen the color cancer wears, all the others, every hue and shade — they glow a little brighter. In the moments when anger and fear are shed enough to stand, to walk and take reflective stock of a world too cowardly to close, colors are what keep it open. Colors let us know that we’re alive.
Craig Sager is alive because he lived. Because he never accepted cancer’s cold alternative: that a thing can live solely because it dies. When the scourge you face has a mind of its own — a life of its own, and serving merely that— the only true alternative lies in treating yours in kind. That you, too, can nourish and nurture something to having a life of its own. Something simple as a suit or deep as an eight-word edict. Something deep as a suit or simple as an eight-word edict.
There are those who believe heaven and hell are matters of memory. That the goodness or badness of one’s hereafter, and their experience thereof, hinges on how they’re remembered, and the sum weight of their worldly deeds. It’s a compelling story, as stories go, albeit one begging more questions in turn, as stories so often do. But it also feels warmest when who we’ve lost was so beloved. When those memories glow — by dint of volume and quality both — in tints only fathomed in the better-place beyond.
Craig Sager lived his life in colors, and his memory radiates because of it. That of a man for whom a game was life, life a work, and work meant never feeling he’d forsaken the other two.
A life’s suit, blooming bright enough to blind the cameras, that we should all be so lucky to wear, wherever we go from here.
