At its best, being a diehard fan of the National Basketball Association feels a bit like belonging to a family. For the past two decades, Craig Sager—a longtime sideline reporter for Turner Sports who died on Thursday, at the age of sixty-five, after a two-year struggle with leukemia—was every hoops aficionado’s kindly favorite uncle. Sager was always a pleasure to see onscreen. He mixed a schoolboy’s unembarrassed love for basketball with a reporter’s zeal for the fresh detail or telling phrase.

Sideline reporting is an embarrassing, awkward art; almost no one does it well. The questions tend toward the banal—how, one wonders, should an athlete, wrecked on adrenaline, describe “how it feels” to have, so recently, won or lost?—and the answers are correspondingly irritated, or, as in the case of the San Antonio Spurs’ famously grouchy coach, Gregg Popovich, openly hostile. Sager—who, before beginning his journalistic career, suited up as the mascot for Northwestern University’s basketball team—embraced the absurdity of the ritual with open arms. In this, he was helped by his looks. He was blandly handsome, with big, circular eyes, a ready grin, and a shiny mound of dark hair, always parted down the left side. Before his sickness, his face was chubby and almost perfectly round—he looked permanently awestruck. His presence was slightly comic; in the way he derived obvious, giddy pleasure from applying his intelligence to a child’s game, Sager sometimes reminded me of the great actor and comedian Phil Hartman. He smiled innocently and palled around with players, letting the rare tense moment roll off his back. “How lucky we are,” he often seemed to be thinking, “to get paid to do a thing like this!”

To watch Sager was to marvel at his clothes. He was a dazzling, flamboyant dresser, and this, too, seemed like an outward hint of inner joy. He often strolled into the crowd, in search of famous or otherwise interesting fans to briefly interview, and even in a far, wide shot, you could always spot him among the throng. He’d be wearing a flamingo-pink suit with a garish paisley tie, or a metallic, brocaded number with periwinkle accessories, or a Halloween-themed ensemble with a houndstooth tie and a jet-black pocket square. Sager’s enjoyment of these outfits was genuine, no doubt, but they also had the helpful effect of disarming his interview subjects. Players—who, these days, often become media-trained robots on camera—always commented jokily on Sager’s sartorial choices, and, as if lulled by vivid color into candor, often coughed up intriguing tidbits about their teammates and opponents. Other reporters withered under Popovich’s scorn during in-game interviews; Sager made the interaction a cartoonish game of cat and mouse.

When it was revealed, in 2014, that Sager had been diagnosed with leukemia, expressions of goodwill toward him proliferated, elevating him to the status of a league-wide saint. #SagerStrong became a popular hashtag and rallying cry; players and coaches wished him well over the airwaves. As his health diminished, and his time onscreen slowly dwindled, his few appearances became occasions for basketball’s extended family of fans, announcers, and executives to shower him in appreciation. His many quiet kindnesses over the years were gradually revealed: in 1993, Sager had convinced the troubled power forward Dennis Rodman, gun in hand, not to commit suicide; after an injury cut short Charles Barkley’s final season, it was Sager who passed along a phone number for David Levy, Turner’s president, helping to jump-start Barkley’s career in broadcasting.

In November, just a month before his passing, Sager published a memoir, titled “Living Out Loud: Sports, Cancer, and the Things Worth Fighting For.” Toward the end of the book’s introduction, he quotes from the poem “Be Like the Bird,” by Victor Hugo:

Be like the bird who

Halting in his flight

On limb too slight

Feels it give way beneath him

Yet sings

Knowing he hath wings

“I am the bird,” Sager wrote, “and I will keep singing until I can’t sing any longer—and then I will sing some more.”