Devon Still, Leah Still, And What Actually Matters About The ESPYs

Sports, at their core, are the physical embodiment of cliche in motion. For all the possibilities outlined in a rulebook, all the infinite potential caroms of a ball in the field of play, there are really only two true outcomes: Someone wins, and someone else loses. It's this binary that draws us in as sports fans, but if we're being reductive, it's all exactly as meaningful as a coin flip.

And yet it works, and works profoundly. There are a mere seven (or so) basic plots for storytelling, and yet we seem to have handled those restrictions just fine. It's no coincidence, then, that so many of those archetypes and their canonical embodiments show up in the language we use when we talk about sports: rags to riches, overcoming the monster, voyage and return, Cinderella, Achilles, Faust. The win-lose duality may be inherently constricting, but, as in fiction, it's not where the participants stand at the end that compels us, but how they bounce off one another, and the world, that makes us watch. A graphical outlay of Odysseus' Value Over Replacement Soldier stats may tell us something about war, but without Homer doing Bob Costas duty on the voiceover, there is no emotional investment.

The producers of the ESPY Awards, which air Wednesday night on ABC, are well aware of this. The real subject of our collective obsession with sports is human beings—tragic, idiotic, fallible, and somehow, occasionally, heroic human beings. For all the actual on-the-field awards given out at the ESPYs, now in its 22nd year—Best Play (Malcolm Butler), Best Player (Tom Brady), Best Bowler (uh)—the showcase moments, the ones people actually remember five minutes after the broadcast has concluded, are the awards for exceptional achievements not in sports, but in living. Think of Stuart Scott's speech at last year's ESPY's while accepting an award named for Jim Valvano, who himself set the tone for the event in its inaugural broadcast with a heartbreaking speech of his own.

This year's honorees exemplify this broader set of values. Danielle Green, a former college basketball player who lost an arm while serving in the army in Iraq and dedicated the rest of her career to counseling other wounded veterans, for example; Leah Still, the four-year-old daughter of NFL player Devon Still whose fight against a rare form of a cancer galvanized the NFL community; and Caitlyn Jenner, whose evolution from lauded athlete to reality TV star to transgender icon we all know by now. Each will be honored on the broadcast this year, Jenner with the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, Leah and Devon Still with the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance, and Green with the Pat Tillman Award for Service.

It's very easy to be cynical about this sort of thing, if only because these are the ESPYs—an event custom-built to fill the deadest dead spot on the sports calendar the day after the MLB All-Star Game—and because of how vigorously sports programming goes about pushing these buttons. Consider the Winter Olympics' quadrennial attempts to wring 12 hours a day of ham-handed emotional resonance out of the story of a snowboarder who overcame a stubbed toe or whatever. And yet, somehow, there is something undeniable about all this. When it's real, you can feel it. And this silly, stilted awards show routinely gets it right.

This is the challenge in putting on and pulling off an event like this—balancing the frivolity and banality of the proceedings, which are essentially a sports-world circle jerk, with something meaningful and memorable enough to justify it all. The host—Joel McHale is this year's model—is there to hold down some comedy bits and keep things moving through what Connor Schell, who oversees development and production of ESPN Films and is a producer of the ESPYs, calls a "celebration of the year in sports." It works or it doesn't, but what Schell describes as the "serious awards" are the fundamental reason to watch.

It's in those emotional moments where the idea of transcending sports—a common refrain among the ESPN people I spoke to—resonates. It's the same thing that animates NBC's soapy Olympic inspiro-montages—you don't have to be a fan of sports to come away with something from these moments, just a fan of people.

Those awards, Schell says, are "where we can shine a light on individuals who have inspired people, moved people, displayed courage. [It's where] we really tell some incredible stories, educate people, and in the case of the Jimmy V award, really raise a lot of money and awareness." One of the chief reasons for the ESPYs existence, he says, is its fundraising for the V Foundation. In the last 12 years, ESPN says they've raised $23 million for cancer research.

The recipients are chosen by a team of the event's producers, including executive producer Maura Mandt, as well as ESPN executives, members of the Ashe family, Tillman Foundation, and Jimmy V Foundation. At bottom, the decision-making process, Schell says, "is very similar to what we think about in '30 for 30,' which is to try and find moments where sports intersect with culture." All of which is a long way of saying that all involved are looking for stories like that of the Still family.

"A father, fighting, alongside his daughter that—really, it has very little to do with sports," Schell says. "Devon and Leah are just incredible people, and her fight and his fight on her behalf was something that we wanted to honor. The personal sacrifice that family has gone through, I can't even imagine."

The Still family is still on that road, although Still told me that Leah has shown a lot of improvement after going through radiation treatment. Their perseverance and grace in carrying this load is, both in itself and in the way it galvanized fans and non-fans alike, something like the reason why the ESPYs exist. It's not manufactured television uplift; it simply is an uplifting story of people deciding to care.

Of all the support over the course of the last year, Still says the biggest surprise was his team, the Bengals, "letting me focus on being with my daughter, rather than focusing on what I could do on the football field." The team also donated all of the proceeds from sales of his jersey to pediatric cancer research, "which was big, because we raised over a million dollars to help a lot of families out."

The support from the city of Cincinnati stood out as well, Still says. "They embraced me through difficult times. The first tackle I made that season the whole crowd went crazy, and they kept that up all season every time I made a play."

Still and his daughter recently worked together on publishing a book, I Am Leah Strong, that recounts her struggle. "My baby is really into reading books, and we had a lot of time in the hospital when we had a lot of free time, so we thought if we wrote a book that could be a handbook for other families… When our daughter was diagnosed we didn't have a handbook, we thought we'd take our family's experience and share it with others."

Receiving an ESPY is a continuation of that work, and a meaningful thing in itself. "Not the award itself," Still says. "I don't think anybody wants to be in this position. I don't think anyone grows up wanting to win the Jimmy V award, you have to go through a lot of hardship to get there."

And yet there is a way in which, in making this moment happen, the Stills can continue to make a difference for others in the fight. Still called Scott's speech from last year's broadcast, "really inspiring, and inspired me and my family to continue to fight, no matter the diagnosis from the doctor."

Still hopes that he and his daughter will be able to look back on their appearance with similar pride someday. "I think she has an idea," he says. "I think she has an idea of the impact she's making on the world and the recognition she's getting. She has people talking to her all the time, going out in public like that with everyone wanting to take a picture with her. I think in that sense she understands. But as she gets older, she'll start to understand the impact that she's made."

And this goofy awards show, improbably, is part of all that. "I think that's what I mean by transcending sports," Schell says. "When something happens in the sports world that has [the] ability to cross over and reach people outside of it.. Make sure you're telling the right kind of story [and you won't] have to force [the] emotion."