by Craig Sager
In the late sixties, we won fifty-four consecutive conference games and five straight Little 7 championships, and we were annually the final small school standing in the state tournament. That was the result of Coach Van’s demands.
I was never the most talented basketball player, nor the tallest or fastest, but I believed in myself and I believed that positive thinking actually made a difference. The way you think influences the way you feel, and the way you feel determines how you act. It’s been my philosophy since high school. Think positive, believe in yourself, and you will see the result. That’s why I made it onto the court during games. By believing.
Just think about the simple act of shooting a free throw. Many players think about not making free throws. They flood their brains with everything that can go wrong. Coaches overcorrect and add even more stress to the player. Me? I step to the free throw line and just assume I am going to make it. I miss sometimes, of course, but I never miss two in a row. In fact, before basketball games at Batavia, as my teammates and I took our last free throw practice shots before tip-off, all of them walked off to the bench having made their last free throw. I always ended my pregame warm-up after missing a free throw, because I had so much confidence that I would never miss two in a row.
Not unexpectedly, I could not appreciate the tactics or approach of Coach Van until I was a grown man. I respected him, but I did not fear him. He had a unique ability to push us further than we ever thought we could go with an inherent belief that you never, ever give up. I have thought of Coach Van a lot over the past two years as I lay in hospital beds, my body worn down from the needles, the tests, the leukemia. Even on the toughest days, when pain radiated from my almost bald head to my black-and-blue toes, I never thought of giving up. This was nothing compared with Coach Van’s practices, although the stakes are higher.
*
Ask any of my friends or family who have known me over the years and they will all tell you that I am the same guy as a sixty-five-year-old as I was as a fifteen-year-old. Same spirit, same drive, same goofiness, same resolve. When the Powerball lottery grows to a decent amount, I always buy a ticket or two, confident that I will win. Of course, I have not won the jackpot, but it does not discourage me from playing again, still confident that this time I will hit it big.
That enduring feeling of hope that tomorrow will be my day, that there is nothing stopping me, has never left. Every year since 1981, I have placed a bet on the Chicago Cubs to win the World Series—that’s thirty-five years of losing bets. In December 2015, I put down $1,000 for the Cubs to do it this year. You gotta think positive.
*
Fearlessness: check. Optimism: check. Curiosity: check. Work ethic: check. Belief: check. Determination: check. Hope: check. God, Ernie, Mom, Dad, and Coach Van, thank you. I have needed every one of those attributes over the past two years.
5
FAMILY
In the fall of 1980, I was working in Kansas City as a sports television anchor at the local NBC affiliate and hosting pre-and postgame shows for the Kansas City Royals. I was having a blast as a twenty-nine-year-old working the games, making appearances, and dating. It was at a Royals game that I met a nineteen-year-old girl and, perhaps not surprising for a guy who moves quick, we got engaged after just two dates and married just three months later. The marriage didn’t work in the long term, but it did produce three amazing children.
By the time my first child, Kacy, was born in 1986, I was working at CNN and at Turner in Atlanta, covering college football, basketball, track and field, and international events, but my mind was never too far from little Kacy. Every moment that I was home, I held her in my arms. A part of me couldn’t believe that I was a father; inside my body, I thought and felt like a kid. But I quickly learned that being a father was both difficult and well worth it. When I was home, I would take Kacy with me to work, to the store, and to games just like my mother had done with me. Kacy (I called her “Big Stuff” because I took her everywhere) was my buddy, and I carried her pictures, her drawings, and her notes to me with me everywhere I went.
When she reached school age, I would drive her to school and then carry her into her classroom, tickling her along the way. When her kindergarten teacher suggested that I was not helping her develop independence by walking her into school every day, I responded that the teacher should worry about the parents who don’t take their kids to school every day. The conversation eventually led to a meeting in the principal’s office, after which I received an ambiguous apology from the teacher, including this gem: “You are a wonderful father and an asset to our class.” That note is framed in my basement.
Today, my relationship with Kacy mostly revolves around sports and our shared passion for basketball. She has grown into a remarkable woman, who knows more about basketball and the NBA than I do and who regularly wins her fantasy leagues. When I was first diagnosed with leukemia, Kacy was at the hospital challenging doctors and nurses with questions, protective of her dad, and she soon became a leukemia expert, reciting all of my medications and dosages without prompting. Our relationship is complicated but reassuring, and I have never stopped loving my oldest.
Two years after Kacy was born, my first son came into my life. It can’t always be easy being Craig Sager’s son, especially when you share his name, and certainly when, during your childhood, you often saw your father on a small television screen instead of tucking you in at night. But being my son also came with some spoils.
In 1996, I was covering an international basketball tournament in Italy with former NBA great Danny Ainge, when he mentioned that despite playing professional baseball for a time, he had never attended a World Series game. It just so happened that the Atlanta Braves were hosting the New York Yankees in the Series, and since we were both flying back from Italy into Atlanta, I invited him to stay for a night and attend a game with me. We changed clothes at my house and jogged over to a local soccer field, where Craig, then about seven years old, was playing. His team, even at a young age, was loaded with talent, and Craig was among its stars. It was always such a proud moment when I could take in one of his soccer or baseball games. I just loved watching him out there.
So Danny, whom few folks at the field even recognized, and I stood on the sidelines cheering Craig on. The score went quickly from 5–0 to 10–0, and the parents on the opposing team started to yell at our coaches for running up the score. This goes on for a few minutes while we score a few more goals and the vitriol coming from the other team’s parents gets even louder.
“I can’t take this anymore,” Danny said to me, and he walked right down the sideline to where these angry parents were still shouting.
“Listen, I am here to watch a good soccer game and a good soccer team,” he scolded as the game played on. “If your kid is not good enough to play at this level, then play somewhere else.” I will never know if Craig was proud or embarrassed of his father’s friend, but I’m never going to ask. As for me, that was the Danny Ainge that I knew, and I just looked on with a smile.
Craig has always been an exceptional athlete, much more so than I ever was. He was the rare eight-year-old playing Little League baseball with kids three or four years his senior. Despite his natural athletic gifts, he always worked hard at his endeavors and out-hustled his opponents.
It has been more than five years since my own father passed away, and I think about him often when I think of my oldest son and my relationship with him. I do think that the older Craig has gotten, the more he understands who I am and what I do. We are blood brothers in more ways than one.
Krista came next, in 1991. My youngest—at the time—and I had a routine when she was younger. Every night when I was home, she would take a bath, brush her hair, and brush her teeth, and then we would lie next to each other in her bed to read Baby Piggy and the Giant Bubble. It was a tradition that never got old and was our special time each day to read, to laugh, and to talk. She also had a teddy bear that she called Stitches, w
hich I had given to her the day she required stitches on her forehead after knocking into a door. Stiches went with her everywhere, including on a road trip with me to Detroit. When we went to check out of our hotel, Krista realized she did not have Stitches and we panicked. I figured the bear must have gotten rolled up in the sheets and sent to the laundry. The front desk manager, Martha Richards, allowed me and my daughter to go to the basement laundry, where we looked through the piles of sheets until we found Stitches.
Today, Krista is such a positive, optimistic young woman, who has picked up the game of golf like her father and who has such a big heart. I forget sometimes that she is a woman with a career, a steady boyfriend, and an amazing future. I still think of her as my little girl.
During the Olympic qualifying basketball tournament in Puerto Rico in 1999, my three kids came down to visit for a few days and they were fascinated by the lizards and iguanas present seemingly everywhere you went. They were hard to catch, but with my kids looking on—and with my cameraman, Steve Henry, as my accomplice—I snuck up on a little green iguana on a palm tree and grabbed him by the body. We caught a second one and put both into water bottles with holes poked into them for air. The kids named them Rico and Juanita.
As you might imagine, taking animals into the United States was prohibited, so I did my best to conceal the bottles in my carry-on bag. When I opened the bag in the airport to check on them, there was no longer a “them”—just a “him.” Juanita had escaped. Miraculously, we somehow got through the airport, and Rico came home with us. We had fun watching him grow. Since iguanas grow based on the size of their habitat, we kept building bigger and bigger cages and watched Rico grow to more than six feet long! As the kids got older, so did Rico, and he eventually moved to my mother’s house and somehow made it to ten. To this day, the kids and I still talk about good old Rico.
My work did take me on the road a great deal, and in some years I was on the road more than two hundred nights, which kept me away from my children. The kids grew accustomed to my absence from their activities, school plays, games, and bonding time. But when we were together, it was all about fun. I always tried to make my trips as short as possible. It was not uncommon for me to take the kids to school in the morning, fly to a city for a few nights, then be back a little over forty-eight hours later, eating lunch with them at school, a McDonald’s bag in hand.
I recall one time taking Kacy and Craig to twelve different McDonald’s so they could collect all the Happy Meal toys (and a few duplicates) from that series in one day. When we returned home, they graded each McDonald’s on its food, prizes, and playground, and attached the Polaroid we took at each location to a page in a book.
As my marriage fell apart and the family dynamic changed, my relationships with my kids became more complicated. It didn’t help that I was on the road so much, driven to succeed, to witness every moment that the world of sports had to offer. But I cherished the moments when the four of us could all be together. I remember being so proud as Kacy marched with her bass clarinet in her hands at the 2003 Rose Bowl, with her brother, her sister, and me cheering from the stands.
I may not have always been as attentive a father when the kids were little. I admit that I would often take Craig to an Atlanta-area toy store and have him pick out a new item, which he then would play with on the floor of the nearby Hooters while my buddies Gus Larrison, Crazy Steve Welch, and Hammond Reynolds and I enjoyed some beers. I was one of the founders and owners of the more than one dozen locations of Jocks & Jills, a sports bar in Atlanta, and when Kacy and Craig were toddlers, I was known to put them in the Pop-a-Shot basketball netting so they couldn’t crawl far.
Perhaps my parenting skills were a little unconventional, but I loved being a dad. Yet as I turned fifty, something was still missing in my life.
*
Though my first marriage did not end well, I was not disillusioned by love or even by the idea of marriage itself. In fact, I was driven toward it. I wanted to experience real, passionate, and true love, and I looked forward to finding a life partner. I knew the goal, but getting there would not be easy. Finding a soul mate—and someone who could put up with me, my travel, and my sense of adventure—would not be easy. So I dated a lot, and it wasn’t until December of 2000 that the search ended.
A friend kept telling me about this girl, a beautiful blond Midwesterner who had the smarts to match her good looks. My friends had tried to set me up before, but it had never worked out long-term.
“Craig, no—this time I am serious,” my friend Larry Young told me. “She is your dream girl.” He repeated this last part three times in one conversation. Every time Larry would run into her in Atlanta, he would immediately call me to remind me that my true love was in front of him.
On December 28, 2000, Turner broadcast the MicronPC.com Bowl in south Florida, and I intended to fly directly to San Antonio the next day to meet up with a bunch of college buddies to watch our alma mater, Northwestern, play Nebraska in the Alamo Bowl on the 30th. But after several flights were canceled due to inclement weather over the Gulf of Mexico, I flew to Atlanta, where I planned to stay at the Wyndham Hotel in Midtown. (At this point in my life, I was on the road so much that I saw no need to have a “home” in Atlanta. My parents had moved to the city from Florida in the 1990s, so I kept my wardrobe in their guest room and came by when I needed to refresh the outfits.)
Across from the Wyndham was the original Jocks & Jills restaurant and sports bar. I made a point of stopping in. On this night, after I landed, I remembered that the NHL Atlanta Thrashers were playing at home, so I then went to the Jocks & Jills location in the CNN Center to join the postgame crowd.
Whatever disappointment I felt from the travel inconvenience was immediately forgotten as I walked into Jocks and instantly spotted my dream girl—a down-to-earth goddess, a statuesque blond beauty, just as Larry had described. The image of a striking European model in stark contrast to the jersey-and jean-clad hockey crowd was remarkable. I knew she had to be the one Larry had been telling me about. After a few introductory pleasantries, we talked about her time as a dancer for the Chicago Bulls’ Luvabulls, and we connected over a love of basketball and sports. Since she came from a family with four boys, she wasn’t afraid to mix it up, either. On top of that, she had a biology pre-med degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was beauty and brains.
After some friendly and flirtatious exchanges, I was done. Done.
“I am already falling in love with you,” I told Stacy, and I asked her to come with me in the morning to San Antonio for the bowl game, which I still planned to attend.
“No, I just met you!” she protested.
I guess she had a point, considering that the game was the next day.
We went to the original Jocks & Jills, at Tenth Street and Peachtree, for a nightcap, and as she left I kissed her goodbye and literally gave her the shirt off my back. It was a souvenir I had bought after walking over a bridge in Sydney, Australia, a few months prior when I was covering the Olympic Games—a bridge that, ironically, she had walked across a year earlier. In return, she gave me her phone number, which I literally wore out the next day when I finally did arrive in San Antonio. During my trip, Stacy was all I could think about. She was funny, intelligent, caring, and stunning, and she knew how to have a good time.
When I returned to Atlanta on New Year’s Day, I had a lunch meeting with my friend and business partner Doc Rivers, and I invited Stacy to join us. Doc was impressed with Stacy’s well-informed input on a myriad of subjects, not to mention her gorgeous looks, and gave me a wink of approval, as if to say, “She’s a keeper—don’t blow it!”
After lunch, Stacy told me that she would be back at Jocks & Jills in Brookhaven later that evening for a friend’s birthday party, and I coyly told her I might be there as well.
That night I would not let her out of my sight, and when the bar closed, I offered to walk her back to her nearby apartment. She invited me i
n but soon said it was time to go home.
“I don’t have a home,” I replied, and in the spirit of honesty, it was true. My home was on the road.
“Well, you can’t stay here, but you can call me tomorrow,” she said.
As I walked aimlessly down Peachtree Street at 2:15 a.m., I realized that the opening was there, and after walking to the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead to secure a room for the night, I decided I couldn’t wait to see her again. The words of the Lila McCann song “I Wanna Fall in Love” were ringing in my head: “I wanna fall in love, I want to feel that rush.”
I called her the next morning and asked her out on a date and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I put on the full-court press. And we have been together ever since. I am actually closer to her mother’s age than hers, and Aaliyah’s song “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number,” about a young girl falling for an older man, became our anthem.
On one of our early dates, we were sitting on the patio at—where else—Jocks & Jills when I did a typical Sager thing.
“Let’s go to Vegas,” I said. “Right now.”
Stacy looked at me funny, like I was probably joking but she was not sure.
“Let’s go,” I said. “No bags. Right now.”
When she was convinced I was 100 percent serious, she … agreed.
We took MARTA, Atlanta’s public rail system, down to the airport. Before we got on the plane, Stacy had one request.
Although she was twenty-eight, she was still the youngest, and the only girl, among the five Strebel children, and after losing her father at age ten, she and her mom had developed and maintained a trusting and close relationship.
