Craig Sager’s Will Leaves Out 3 Children From 1st Marriage

Death is difficult for most families. Sometimes complicated family ties can add to the mix. Beloved NBA broadcaster Craig Sager’s family battle has come to light following his two oldest children’s Twitter announcement that the sportscaster’s will shows that he left all of his property to his second wife, Stacy Jo Sager, and excluded the three adult children from his first marriage.

Last week, Craig Sager II tweeted that he was being “taken to court over a will that myself and my sisters are not only 100% excluded from but do not even have any interest in contesting in the first place.” Craig is the son who donated bone marrow in an attempt to save his father’s life.

His older sister, Kacy, issued a statement about the situation the following day. “We knew he left her everything. We knew his original will had been revised to exclude us,” she wrote. “And honestly? We didn’t care…. It sucks so damn hard that, after months without communication, our first ‘contact’ with Stacy was through lawyers and the poor sheriffs who had to waste their time serving us.”

Court records show that Stacy Sager filed a petition to probate Craig Sager’s will in solemn form in November.

a little more than 11 months after he died from leukemia. Unlike the comparatively simpler process of probating a will in common form, this requires that all living heirs—regardless of whether they’re named in the will, and regardless of whether they have any plans to contest it—be notified so that they can formally acknowledge the will to the court. (This generally also means that they give up their right to contest the will after a certain date; this is different from when a will is probated in common form, which means that the door for heirs to contest remains open for several years.) In Georgia, children are required to be notified as heirs, and if they don’t acknowledge the will initially, they’ll be served by the court. From what Kacy and Craig Sager II have described, that’s just what seems to have happened.

Kacy says that she and her sister Krista and brother Craig Sager II were all excluded from the family estate the day after Craig II completed an intense medical procedure called apheresis in an effort to save his father’s life during the spring of 2015.

Kacy also mentioned that Craig II was left with the hospital bills from the procedure. She blames stepmother Stacy for influencing the elder Sager to leave the children of his first marriage out of the estate despite the medical and financial sacrifice made by Craig II.

Sager and his first wife Lisa divorced in December of 2000. Craig met Stacy while he and Lisa were still married, and Stacy was a Chicago Bulls’ cheerleader.