Dan Hicks’ forever lessons

Editor's Note: Bill Fields, a longtime editor with Golf Digest and Golf World, earned the PGA of America lifetime achievement in journalism award in 2020. Since 2017, he worked alongside Dan Hicks at Golf Channel/NBC and in 2026, posed next to him in the above photo with other TV colleagues at the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills.

Golf writers, no surprise, watch a lot of golf on television. Hoofing it around a course, especially late on a Sunday afternoon, is a luxury if the leaderboard is crowded or a deadline is looming. I watched plenty of golf when I wasn’t working, too. The people calling the action, narrating a game in which we invest so much, become as familiar as actors in a favorite sitcom.

Over a couple of decades, because Dan Hicks has been the host of NBC Sports’ golf broadcasts since 2000, I got to know his work. During the last nine years, as a researcher in the NBC booth, I got to know him. My life is richer as a result.

Dan’s unexpected death this week, at 64, has been hard to digest. A tragedy for his wife, Hannah, their three daughters, and the rest of his family, it is a heavy punch landing on friends and colleagues—indeed to anyone he touched. As 2023 Open champion Brian Harman told Golf Channel, “Dan was a real one.”

He was caring when my mother died in 2019, concerned when I suffered a detached retina in 2022. Dan rarely flew private, but twice when he did, he invited me to tag along. One of those trips, returning home from the 2021 Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits, is my all-time commute: The show was over at 6 p.m. EDT, we flew from Sheboygan to White Plains and I was home in Connecticut by 9:30. When I encounter a travel snarl, that’s a good memory.

Dan was one of the best and most versatile broadcasters, operating in the rare air of his profession, but I never saw him big-time anyone. He was smart and funny and kind. When things heated up, he stayed calm and slowed down, not unlike the best athletes who avoid panicking in a crucial moment. If he made an error—and that wasn’t often—he moved on. It’s live TV, and that’s what you must do.

Given that NBC Sports does a dozen or so tournaments annually, I worked more than 100 of them with Dan since starting my gig at the 2017 BMW Championship. That’s small potatoes compared to several folks in the booth. Dan’s right-hand man, editorial adviser/statistician Gil Capps, and engineer Jorge Acker were with him for a quarter century. Stage manager Kathy Noce became part of the traveling circus not long after Gil and Jorge did. Researcher Harrison Root, who formerly worked in a tower with Gary Koch, joined us a few years ago. It’s a family of its own, and Dan was its anchor.

I wouldn’t trade the long days in the booth with my friends for anything, despite the puddles on the floor in Palm Beach Gardens, the air conditioning going out in Memphis, the shivering early mornings in Paris.

Some of the best hours with Dan were before shows, before our headsets were on, when conversations would meander. He didn’t have to be the hero of his stories.

Once, when we were talking more formally for a magazine article, he recounted his inauspicious start as a weekend TV sports anchor at KVOA in his hometown of Tucson, Ariz., in 1986. “A Saturday night,” Dan remembered. “I’m hauling ass all over the station, putting graphics in, writing my leads, and as I’m walking to the set I realize I didn’t have any makeup on. I thought, I’ll be alright. Then when it’s time for sports, I say two words and the teleprompter goes down. So, I stumbled around, barely got through it. I thought I was so bad I might be fired. First person I talked to was my mom. She said, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that bad, but you looked like you hadn’t slept in two weeks.’ Rough start, and I looked like Dracula.”

Dan not only had a great voice but a great laugh. On one of those pre-show mornings, I caused the latter by sending him a picture of me as a budding announcer doing the sports in high school. I’m wearing an ugly plaid sport coat and a shirt with a collar the size of Cessna wings. Of course, Dan sent it to the truck so everyone could see it during rehearsal.

I saw plenty of my own background in Dan, who had been a sports-loving kid with an early fascination with those who called the games on radio or television. “If I wasn’t going to be able to make a living playing sports, the next best thing was to have the best seat in the house,” he told me. “I knew I had a God-given ability to sound pretty good on radio and TV. I thought I had to run with that.”

By the time I gave Dan my first large index card of information, he was nearly a decade removed from his most memorable golf call, the “Expect anything different!” perfect punctuation of Tiger Woods’ must-make putt on the 72nd hole of the 2008 U.S. Open. Over my years with Dan, I saw up close the effort that built his excellence. Echoing the ethos of his longtime producer and close friend Tommy Roy, he never mailed it in. There is nothing like the excitement of a final round, when those of us working on the production try to raise our games the way the golfers do—the way Ryan Fox did this summer in The Open, in what unbelievably turned out to be Dan’s last major—but Dan wanted to excel on a random Thursday afternoon too.

A Journalism major at Arizona, Dan roamed the range, texted coaches and family members, and relied on a close reading of pre-tournament research materials. The information I provided, to help him frame what was going on, augmented his own knowledge. How strange it will be not to hear Roy say, “Let’s personalize him, Danny,” about someone in the lead late in the day. Dan was gifted in how he weaved revealing nuggets at the right time to enhance what viewers were watching.

Dan’s virtuosity was underpinned by innate talent, powered by a work ethic and enhanced by broad experience. “All hell can be breaking loose, and he’s going to come through time after time with the proper coverage,” Roy said in 2024 of Dan. “We’ve done so many hours of television together. That’s why there’s trust—he comes through every single time.”

Going through some Tucson newspapers, I found a story from 1989, when Dan was leaving Arizona to work at CNN, his home for several years prior to joining NBC.

“He’s exceptional,” said KVOA general manager Jon Ruby. “He’s just a lovely guy. We’re going to miss him.”

The truth then, achingly so now.