Craig Sager's Will Leaves Nothing To His Children From His First Marriage

As Craig Sager’s two oldest children announced last week, the legendary 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 Tuesday, 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.” 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.”

Courthouse 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.

The will shows that Sager left all of his property to Stacy Sager, whom he married in 2001, after he separated from his first wife, Lisa Sager, in December 2000. He lists Stacy Sager’s mother, Mary Jo Strebel, as the first alternate option were Stacy unable to serve as executor of the will.

Kacy and Craig Sager II did not respond to email requests for comment.