On yesterday's episode—the same one where he re-aired Stuart Scott's 1993 ESPN2 debut—Keith Olbermann decided to honor what he called Scott's "professional courage." Specifically, the time an ESPN executive, piqued by Scott's unique catchphrases, called the anchor into his office and told him he was being too black on the air.
Scott was "using language that most of the audience didn't understand, and it had to stop," Olbermann recalled the executive as saying. Scott, furious and offended, took to his column for ESPN's website (hosted on Prodigy!) to write about how honored he was that ESPN let him use certain phrases, "evocations of his cultural and racial heritage." He traced the origins of some of them, back to the streets or the church and even to the plantation. After that, no one was going to bother Stuart Scott about his catchphrases.