Everybody's Got Something (22 page)

A
lthough I could hardly imagine it when I was crawling down that hospital room corridor, little by little, I began to get better. I was still on a part-time schedule at
GMA
, appearing two to three times a week. When I wasn’t working, I rested. I took my medicine. My trainer, Angel, adjusted my workouts according to my strength and endurance. And I finally began to gain weight. As my body got stronger, so did my spirit. By summer, things had begun to come full circle. The summer of 2012 had been such a rope-a-dope.

Do you remember the Rumble in the Jungle with Muhammad Ali and George Foreman? The year was 1974 and the two greatest boxers in the world were set to fight in what was then known as Zaire, now called the Democratic Republic of Congo. Foreman was favored to win because of his powerful punching ability, but Ali had secretly been perfecting a technique, where he would lean against the ropes of the boxing ring and while it looked like Foreman was just pulverizing him, the ropes were actually absorbing the majority of the blows.

The summer I was diagnosed with MDS was full of so many punches, I didn’t know how I was ever going to stand up tall in the ring again. You know what I was up against. I announced my diagnosis and began pre-treatment. My mom suffered a stroke, and the ravages of aging began to take her down. My sister Sally-Ann was a perfect match for me, and that saved my life. My sister Dorothy ran point on the care of our aging mother. My mother died in my arms, then just a week later I began the most aggressive, brutal regimen of chemotherapy I had ever known. Then I had a bone marrow transplant—and began the count of a hundred days. Every day ahead of me brought with it the risk of an infection that could kill me. Every day behind me meant that like a newborn baby in her first few weeks of life, I was getting stronger. Somehow I made it. It might have looked as if life was beating me senseless with challenges and tragedies and loss, but God was holding me the whole time. He was the ropes that took the brunt of the blows. As the poet Nikki Giovanni so powerfully wrote, “Not more than we can bear…more than we should have to.”

When I got the news that ESPN, my old home team of esteemed and beloved colleagues, had decided to award me the Arthur Ashe Award for courage, the first thing I did was thank God. Thank God that he had given me, bit by bit, the strength and the courage and the good fortune to be a thriver, more than a survivor, of a terrible disease once more. The second thing I did was pick out a beautiful red dress, a dress that to me said with its vibrant color, “I celebrate life!” The third thing I did was up my time in the gym with Angel, so that I could look good in said dress, designed by Wes Gordon. It was June 2013, and the award show would be held in Los Angeles in July, just a few weeks away.

It’s called the ESPYs, and the acronym stands for Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly award. In the world of sports, it is the equivalent of the Oscars. Everybody gets dressed up and comes to see who will be named the best female athlete, the best male athlete, the coach of the year, the top paralympic athletes and the most outstanding in the collegiate ranks. The men and women in the room have pulled off so many awe-inspiring acts of physical greatness. World-class athletes that we’re used to seeing in uniform are now in their Sunday best. Movie stars share the stage, and the audience is filled with musicians and luminaries of the sports world. It’s my favorite kind of crowd: brilliant, eclectic and diverse.

For me, it’s always a thrill just being at the ESPYs, in a room with the world’s premier athletes. But this past year, I wasn’t there to observe or even to present, which is always an honor as well. I was there to receive the Arthur Ashe courage award. Arthur Ashe was a dear, dear friend of mine. He taught me the importance of using the platform we’ve been blessed to be given to be of service to others. He showed all of us that by his selfless acts off the court. The award spoke to what my momma always said: Make your mess your message. Find the meaning behind whatever you’re going through, because everybody’s got something.

Michelle Obama sent her regards to me by videotape, her beauty and sincerity radiating from the big screen. Tom Cruise narrated the video tribute to me. LeBron James introduced me to the crowd: “I just want us to think about one thing, as all athletes here—male and female. When there’s a time that we’re working out or…when we feel like we have adversity that hits us, and we start to think, ‘I can’t.’…Let us just think about this moment. This is an unbelievable woman and I’m honored to be in this position. I’m honored to present the Arthur Ashe Award for courage to the most beautiful, strong woman I’ve ever been around, Ms. Robin Roberts.”

Even before I got on the stage, I was blown away by the star power in that venue. How did I get here? I’m just a little girl from Mississippi, sitting here with my siblings and Amber, and I’m just grateful to be alive. My knees were knocking. I’d love to say I was sitting there all calm, cool and collected, but my heart was pounding. Arthur was such an important person in my life. I was at the press conference with him announcing this very award. Fast-forward twenty years, I’m standing there holding it. So many things were flashing through my mind. I knew that in two more commercial breaks, I’d be up. And I was thinking, “How am I going to navigate the stairs in this dress?” Luckily, my studly
GMA
cohort Josh was such a gentleman and escorted me to the stage.

I thanked Michelle Obama for her warm words, then I thanked LeBron James for graciously adding to this immense honor. My momma was from Akron, Ohio, and she loved herself some King James. I knew she was smiling down on us at that moment. Then I looked out to the crowd and I spoke from the heart:

Throughout the ceremony, whenever the camera panned to my sister, she pointed to the sky as if to remind us that she wanted no praise, but to give it all to the Lord. In the weeks and months after the awards, sister Sally pointing skyward became an image and a touch point that people referred to again and again.

But other than my family taking selfies with celebs on the red carpet, the most hilarious moment involved my sister Dorothy. The night before the ESPYs, ESPN treated my family and friends to a big steak dinner. Dorothy had declared, more than once, that the steak was delicious and ginormous. I didn’t realize that she took her leftovers back to the hotel and put it in the fridge in her room. Then the next day, on the flight from LA back to Mississippi, she boarded the plane with those leftovers. When we spoke on the phone, Dorothy proudly said, “I ate off of that steak for four days.” That’s my family: From walking the red carpet to praising the Lord onstage with LeBron James to eating cross-country leftovers, we know how to have a good time and we always keep it real.

The day after the awards, I received a very special gift from Tom Cruise. He arranged for me to fly a P-51 Mustang, the exact same type of plane that my beloved father had flown in World War II. It was as if my friend who arranged this experience had cast an invisible lasso to my past that tied me palpably and memorably to my father’s career as a fighter pilot, at a time when men like him were still treated like second-class citizens the moment their feet hit the ground.

About ten years ago,
Good Morning America
did a fantasy segment and invited all of our on-air team to live their wildest dreams: Mine was to fly a plane like my father had, to fly—not walk—in his shoes, as he had in the 1940s. My wish was granted. The producers arranged for me to have eight hours of training at Moton Field in Tuskegee, where my father and his fellow soldiers had trained. And as I made my way down that tarmac toward the plane, I could literally feel the spirits of all those brave young men who had walked this road before me. They were called the Tuskegee Airmen, but at eighteen, nineteen, many were barely old enough to shave. Young men who couldn’t vote, couldn’t attend the same schools or even drink from the same water fountains as the white recruits, and yet they saved thousands of lives without regard to race. My father and his fellow Airmen broke the color line in the sky decades before they could break it on the ground.

My father was still alive when we taped that segment, and I had been doing TV for a good long time. He was not easily impressed by the bells and whistles of fame and he remained, throughout his entire life, the strong and silent type. The day that I taped my
Good Morning America
fantasy segment was a different story. Dad, who was usually reserved, was ablaze with energy and conversation that morning. He wore his red blazer because that was what the Airmen wore. When that old AT-6 aircraft came chugging down the runway, it was hard to tell who was more excited, me or Dad. Then when I got into the plane and put my hands on the gear, shifting the nose upward, and the plane took off from the ground, I will never forget the expression on my father’s face. He had lived to see me fly a plane the way he had as a young man. I had always been a daddy’s girl, but that moment cinched it forever.

My father passed away the next year, suddenly and unexpectedly. This year will mark ten years without him, and I still miss him every day. Lawrence Roberts retired as a full bird colonel from the military, and while it’s a funny term—“full bird colonel”—it’s fitting for my dad. He was an eagle: proud, strong, with wings that were strong enough to carry our entire family all the way around the world then safely back home. Because my dad was a pilot, an eagle, there’s nowhere I feel closer to him than when I’m in the sky. I’m never nervous flying, even when it’s a turbulent ride, because I know that no matter what, the spirit of Daddy is near.

I was already on cloud nine after the ESPYs, but the next day when I went out to the airport to receive Tom’s gift, the opportunity to fly a genuine Tuskegee Airmen plane, I was beside myself. In the
Good Morning America
fantasy segment, I had flown an AT-6, which was the plane my father had trained on before the war. But this plane, the one that Tom owns and keeps in meticulous condition, was a P-51 Mustang, and it was
exactly
the same as Dad’s, right down to the red-painted tail that had made the Tuskegee Airmen famous.