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Sadly, MySA.com confirms...
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.
I just received a text message from a legitimate source that Dan Cook has passed away tonight.
I have not confirmed this yet, but the source appears very solid.
If this is true, it is a very sad night in San Antonio.
Sadly, MySA.com confirms...
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.
Sad day for San Antonio. Godspeed, Dan.
Thoughts and Prayers with Dan and his family.
Without question, there has been no broadcaster nor columnist more legendary in San Antonio than Dan Cook.
RIP Dan
First time I read it, I thought it said Dane Cook and I literally leaped for joy.
But unfortunately, a human being who brought actual value & substance to the Earth died instead. RIP
I grew up with Dan.
God speed sports man.
I guess the fat lady has sung....
Local sports icon Dan Cook dies
Web Posted: 07/03/2008 11:05 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 ins ution.
“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-Cons ution.
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 Gian, Dani Parker and Britney Ashton.
For you "youngsters" who never had the privilege of a Dan Cook sportscast or a column (Always like the Derby columns), you missed out.
My mom just came in and reminded me of a story I had no trouble remembering.
When his book came out, she wanted to get it for me as a gift for my birthday. She went to the E-N to purchase a copy and Dan came out to give it to her. She asked if he'd sign it, he agreed and asked who he should make it out to, she mentioned my name and he remembered who I was from years before when I worked with him as an intern at KENS Sports.
I still have that book on my shelf and I read it cover to cover the day I received it.
I remember getting into a shouting match with him my first HS football season in the newsroom when I tried to get him some updated scores. We both had it out on the set, but he came in after the show and we worked it out. The stories that man told, the lessons he taught... I'll always remember those.
MySA.com has a very nice video retrospective on Dan Cook
Here it is...
http://www.mysanantonio.com/sports/s....35e7cb48.html
RIP Dan. Thanks for the memories.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/sports/c....1f11350e.html
Buck Harvey: Dan Cook – snapshot of a full life
Buck Harvey
When someone dies, Dan Cook once wrote after the passing of his father, “You race back over rarely used memory lanes, crossing avenues long ago forgotten.”
When Cook died Thursday night, my memory lanes crossed into Arkansas.
There, 35 years ago, I remember seeing Cook for the first time. Leaning on the door of his Fayetteville motel room, sure of himself, he looked like John Wayne.
He looked like John Wayne wearing only boxers. And what I remember now isn’t his attire — but how he stood then, and how others reacted to him, and how he summed up who he was in one snapshot.
Cook, given a chance today, would tell this story on himself.
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He would also tell it better than anyone else, because that’s what he was. A storyteller.
He did this from two media positions for more than 50 years. He did this with an understanding of human nature, and a confident view of right and wrong. He came at San Antonio this way in the newspaper, and at 5 and 10 every night, until no sports journalist in America was better known in his city than Cook was in his.
He wrote casually, and he didn’t care much for conventional on-air decorum, either. Maybe he had no choice; a vat of pancake makeup couldn’t have covered up those wrinkles.
Cook instead applied several layers of common sense, and his journalistic instincts were in play even when close to retirement. Then he reported Texas A&M would fire R.C. Slo and replace him with Dennis Franchione.
Franchione called the story “idiotic,” when it was the coach who proved to be.
But Cook was far more than a reporter, and he was far more than the inventor of the fat-lady catchphrase. After decades in San Antonio he became a civic touchstone, as identifiable as any landmark.
Better yet, this landmark mixed with the crowd. Those readers and viewers who liked him would have liked him even more if they had known him.
“When you went to a sporting event and you found out Dan was going to be there,” the late, great sportswriter Jim Murray once said, “you felt good.”
You felt good for a lot of reasons. Cook came with a mix of chivalry and brass and humor, and he always came with stories.
Some were easy, since he once spent breakfast with Sam Snead, lunch with Joe Louis and a day with Babe Ruth. Some were funnier, such as the time Cook interviewed a pro wrestler on live television.
The two men sat next to each other on the set when the wrestler grabbed Cook’s forehead to demonstrate a hold. The wrestler squeezed tighter and tighter until Cook felt as if he might pass out. Cook reacted the best he could — by grabbing the wrestler where the camera couldn’t see. Cook squeezed, too.
With both men in pain but not giving up, the station cut away to commercial.
Cook didn’t concede then, and he didn’t later. Then a younger employee at his television station challenged him to a sprint. Since Cook had always stayed in shape, it was no surprise Cook won as co-workers cheered.
Cook later said he acknowledged the applause, tried to act as if he had held up just beautifully — and then ducked behind a car to vomit.
That’s Cook. He ran hard. But all of it was new to me in 1973. Then working for my college newspaper, I traveled with the veteran writers on the annual Southwest Conference football tour.
We were to visit each campus, interviewing coaches and players, and the first stop that year was Arkansas. We flew in the night before, stayed at a motel and boarded a bus early the next morning.
Someone noticed Cook was absent. They wouldn’t have waited for me, or perhaps for anyone else. But the bus pulled up to Cook’s room and gave a loud blast.
Out swaggered Cook, wearing only his boxers and a crooked smile. He was coming off a late night of poker, and his peers on the bus hollered and laughed. Even to an outsider, something was clear; Cook was the center of this world.
If he wasn’t John Wayne, he was a journalistic version. He knew who he was, and he showed it with seemingly every move. That’s how he connected to his peers, and that’s how he connected to readers and viewers.
Today, using memory lanes long forgotten, I can still see Cook through the window of the bus. And I can still see his gift.
He knew how to live.
He was a good one.
RIP
[QUOTE=duncan228
He knew how to live.[/QUOTE]
He did, indeed
Son of a....
Sad sad news. Dan Cook was my favorite sports broadcaster of all time. In the age of nitwits like Stephen A. Smith and Tim Legler, Dan Cook was the consumate professional. As an added bonus, the guy knew what he was talking about, no matter the sport.
This is a sad sad day for the city of San Antonio, and maybe one day the national media will wake up and realize the loss they suffered today.
Greatest sports commentator in the history of sports.
God speed, God bless, and apparently the fat lady has sung.
We'll miss you, Dan.
Rip.
man this sucks.
godspeed dan, loved your sportscasts and columns.
RIP
on a positive note, he and his family will now be at peace.....no more suffering over his illness. Mr. Cook has now left San Antonio, the Express News, and Kens 5 for that big newspaper in the sky. I bet St. Peter and Jesus will be laughing their tales off everytime they sit next to Mr. Cook.
When I think of San Antonio Sports Coverage, there are two names that I think of first....Dan Cook and Gary D. (I can't spell his last name, so I abbreviated it). I am thankful that I was born in the mid 70s. I was able to experience both of these outstanding personalities. I had Dan in the newspaper and on the Sports at 10. I never watched the 5 oclock news, I was always busy playing or doing homework. Gary D. had the HS football broadcasts. Both had legendary voices.
Just as I was sad the day the Tom Landry dies, Jacques Cousteau died, and Dale Earnhardt died.....I am also sad today cause Dan Cook died.....Just as the other 3, with Dan Cook I missed my opportunity to meet him in person.
Thank you Mr. Cook for all the wonderful memories. Thank you for your insight, your sports coverage, your alter ego, and your awesome stories. Tonight, San Antonio lost a hero and a friend.
May God Bless you and your family always.
I'm really bummed now.
Thanks for sharing your story, JB! What a great memory.
I wanted to work with the old crew at KENS since I was a child.
Working with Chris Marrou would be my last chance, obviously, but it doesn't look like that will be happening.
Why doesn't anyone ever leave the directing positions in SA, dang it?!
Damn, we was just talking about Dan Cook in another thread yesterday.
RIP Dan Cook, what a legend this guy was, and like I said in the other thread I"m not from here and this guy is a SA Icon. I absolutely loved watching him do the sports and I enjoyed how Marrou busted his balls and did the news reels with him.
Godspeed Dan Cook, there will never be another like you.
RIP dan.
Wow. What a drag.
While, I enjoyed Dan Cook's sport segments, I most enjoyed his unscripted on-air commentary about the news that was being reported that day. When it was reported that San Antonio was #1 in obesity during a broadcast, Dan Cook made an off the cuff remark that if then-city councilman Juan Solis left town we would drop to #2.
Dan was truly a San Antonio icon.
Yeah we were just talking about Dan Cook - it's a sad day indeed. *head hanging low*
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