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UPDATE: Local sports icon Dan Cook dies
Web Posted: 07/03/2008 11:43 PM CDT
San Antonio Express-News
Dan Cook, a San Antonio legend whose career as a sports columnist and broadcaster spanned more than a half-century, died Thursday after a long illness. He was 81.
Insightful, humorous, colorful and brutally honest, Cook spent 57 years in the newspaper business — 51 of those at the San Antonio Express-News — interviewing sports’ greatest legends, from Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey to Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Paul “Bear” Bryant and Tom Landry.
Cook joined the Express-News on Aug. 14, 1952, as a copy editor and writer, and became an award-winning columnist and sports editor for the Evening News.
He was executive sports editor of the Express-News from 1960-75, when he became a full-time columnist.
In addition to print journalism, Cook worked as a sportscaster at KENS-TV for 44 years, from 1956-2000. It was there in 1978 that Cook uttered the famous phrase, “The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” which is listed in Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations.” He later said he first used the phrase in a column about two years before.
More coverage
• Dan Cook, a retrospective
The two jobs helped to create a macho, yet fatherly image that, coupled with his folksy, shoot-from-the-hip style, made him a South Texas institution.
“When they write the final history of San Antonio newspapering, his name will be up at the top,” said Frank A. Bennack Jr., CEO of the Hearst Corp., vice chairman of the board of directors and chairman of the executive committee.
Bennack was editor and publisher of the San Antonio Light from 1967-75, during an era when there were two daily newspapers in town. He said he made frequent efforts to recruit Cook from the Express-News because of the loyal following Cook enjoyed all across South Texas.
“I finally had to buy the (Express-News) to get him,” Bennack quipped. “Readers loved him. Audiences loved him. He was the genuine article.”
Former Express-News editor and publisher Charles Kilpatrick, who knew Cook for more than 50 years, said his good friend exuded authority.
“People believed that if Dan Cook said it, it must be true,” Kilpatrick said. “And he wrote in such a way that everyone understood what he was talking about.”
Cook’s pseudonymous Benjamin P. Broadhind character, a fast-talking, barroom bettor who served as Cook’s alter ego, became a reader favorite. Kilpatrick said Cook made Broadhind so lifelike, many people thought he was a real person.
Cook’s opinions often would get him into trouble. He didn’t always say or write what was politically correct. As a result, especially in his early years at the paper, he often received hate mail accusing him of being a racist.
Kilpatrick said he never tried to censor Cook, who came to represent the voice of the common man and average fan.
And Cook wasn’t afraid to criticize. In a column during Roger Maris’ quest to break Babe Ruth’s home-run record in 1961, he ripped the New York Yankees slugger as “a brooding, immature crybaby who would have been run out of baseball by the sharp-tongued bench jockeys of Ruth’s day.”
Cook had no explanation for his longevity.
“I’ve never figured it out,” he once said. “All I know is I outworked a lot of people. I thought they’d fire me after about three years, and probably should have.”
A book, “The Best of Dan Cook: Collected Columns from 1956 to 1990,” was published in 2001. The first printing of 5,280 copies sold out in less than a month.
Cook’s work habits still are the stuff of legend around the Express-News Sports Department. Former sports editor Barry Robinson, now the newsroom’s director of administration and recruitment, was hired by Cook in July 1969.
Then, Cook was writing six columns a week, delivering two sportscasts a day at KENS-TV (in those days the TV station was owned by the newspaper and KENS stood for Express-News Station) and doing two daily radio commentaries, in addition to his duties as sports editor.
Robinson marveled at Cook’s output, calling it “nearly super human.”
As for Cook’s popularity, Robinson had a simple explanation.
“He was going to be the same around Darrell Royal as he was the beer vendor at the ballpark,” Robinson said, referring to the legendary former football coach of the Texas Longhorns. “Everybody loved Dan.”
Cook had a chance to go to Chicago and be a syndicated columnist, Robinson recalls, but stayed because of the “love affair” he had with the public in San Antonio.
“I think Dan knew it was a special relationship,” Robinson said, “one that could never happen anywhere else.”
The stories about Cook — as well as Cook’s stories — are as legendary as the man himself.
Blackie Sherrod, who retired in 2003 as sports columnist at the Dallas Morning News after 60 years in journalism, was perhaps Cook’s best friend in the business. He and Cook were part of a breed of sportswriter that lived for the big game and big event, then went to their favorite watering hole afterward to relive it all.
They helped to form the “Geezers Club” that met once a year in Dallas and included such newspaper icons as Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald and Furman Bisher of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Sherrod said Cook was always the life of the party and his keen wit never failed to make him laugh.
One of his favorite Cook stories came when the two were covering the Kentucky Derby one year. He said prior to the race, a friend of theirs approached Cook, an avid bettor, and asked him about one of his daughters. She wanted to know where he planned to send her to college.
“It all depends on who wins this race,” Cook said.
Cook is survived by his wife, Katy; daughter Marie Gian and her husband, Mike, of Rockport; son Danny Cook and his wife, Laura, of San Antonio; daughter Alice Ann Ashton and her fiancé, Doug Beauchamp, of San Antonio; and three grandchildren, Brad Bates, Dani Parker and Britney Ashton. Arrangements for public services are pending at Sunset Memorial Funeral Home, 1701 Austin Highway.
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