page_title: Craig Sager
section_title: Illness and death
hierarchical_section_title: Craig Sager / Illness and death
caption_attribution_description: Pistons at Wizards 12/16/16
context_page_description: Craig Graham Sager Sr. was an American sports reporter, covering, from 1981 until the year of his death, an array of sports for CNN and its sister stations, TBS and TNT.
  Sager is best known for his having worked as a sideline reporter who paced the floors of the National Basketball Association, as he invariably sported a specimen from his vast collection of garishly eccentric jackets and suits. He was a 2016 inductee of the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame. During the 2017 National Basketball Association All-Star game, it was announced that Sager was the 2017 recipient of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Curt Gowdy Media Award.
context_section_description: In April 2014, Sager was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and he subsequently missed the entire 2014 NBA Playoffs. His son Craig Jr. was deemed a match for bone marrow transplant, and Sager underwent the treatment, pushing his cancer into remission. On April 20, 2014, Craig Jr. did the sideline interview with San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich between the 3rd and 4th quarters of the 2014 NBA playoffs' 1st round against the Dallas Mavericks to air a special get-well message to Sager. The NBA on TNT crew did a special tribute to Sager as well, wearing suits similar to Sager's from the past. On the same day, during the between quarters interview segments, all coaches gave get-well messages to Sager.
  In late March 2015, Sager announced his leukemia had returned. It was also announced that doctors had told him that he had three to six months to live without treatment. Sager ultimately endured the process for a third time through the gift of marrow from an anonymous donor.
  Sager died on December 15, 2016, at the age of 65. He was memorialized during that evening's broadcast of a game between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Chicago Bulls on the Inside the NBA pregame show, with players of each team wearing tribute T-shirts during warmups designed to look like one of Sager's signature gaudy suits. Sager was lauded for his expertise and courage by his friendly nemesis, head coach Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs, in a statement before the Spurs' December 15 game. Popovich told the assembled media:
  To talk about [Sager] being a professional or good at what he did is a tremendous understatement. ...[B]ut he was a way better person than he was a worker, even though he was amazing in that regard. He loved people, he enjoyed pregame, during games, postgame—he loved all the people around it, and everybody felt that. ... What he's endured, and the fight that he's put up, the courage that he's displayed during this situation is beyond my comprehension. And if any of us can display half the courage he has to stay on this planet, to live every [day] as if it's his last, we'd be well off. I miss him very much. 
  On December 27, 2016, Northwestern University, Sager's alma mater, announced its football team would wear stickers on their helmets in honor of Sager in the Pinstripe Bowl game against Pittsburgh.
  On July 13, 2017, NBA Hall of Famer Dan Issel served as speaker at an event at Batavia High School's gymnasium to honor Sager. Sager and Issel were friends and basketball teammates at Batavia High School, when Sager was a freshman and Issel a senior. “To see him have the success he had on the national level was so gratifying to all of us,” said Issel.
caption: Several NBA teams wore shirts during pregame warmups in tribute to Sager following his death in 2016.