On Sunday morning, legendary ESPN anchor Stuart Scott died at the age of 49. The Nation sports editor Dave Zirin joined Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The Reid Report on Monday to discuss Scott’s legacy. Scott was a “liberator of language,” Zirin said. “He was a…representative of a hip-hop generation and a hip-hop vernacular that a lot of America, and certainly not Bristol, Connecticut, where ESPN is headquartered, wasn’t exposed to before.”

But Scott’s influence wasn’t limited to sports media. Zirin also talked about Scott’s impact on his own experience with cancer. “I [was] in a fog of depression and self-loathing and anger. No one was reaching me,” he told Reid. “And then I watched Stuart Scott’s speech. And I listened, over and over again, to those seven words, where he said, ‘You fight cancer by how you live.’” Scott reframed the traditional cancer narrative, Zirin said—once again, changing the game.

—Naomi Gordon-Loebl