It was hard not to be mesmerized driving down the curvy road. There were green fields for miles on each side, and every so often, horses and cows would pop up. Waxahachie felt like a world removed from Dallas and its bustling skyscrapers.
The GPS said I had arrived at Dale Hansen’s house, but all that appeared was the pasture with horses and longhorns moseying around. A gate off to the left caught my attention; I entered and made the slow drive on gravel approaching a house initially tucked behind some trees. Standing in the doorway sporting an orange tropical shirt was Hansen, enjoying the last few days of vacation before his annual trip to Oxnard for Cowboys training camp. It almost seemed paradoxical: Perhaps the most bombastic and polarizing local sportscaster in America, who sprung to internet fame for his views on race, class and sexual orientation, living so far removed from the noise.
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He greeted me with a smile as I made my way up the porch, and then he opened the door. Immediately, we were swarmed by three dogs. We made the short trip to the living room and sat on the couch. Hansen started talking, interrupted every now and then by a cough.
“I’m allergic to dog hair, and we have five dogs,” Hansen said. “Makes no sense.”
Maybe it didn’t make sense, but that didn’t stop Hansen. It’s a recurring theme throughout his 71 years of life thus far, full of highs and lows and, most of all, stories.
The one with Carroll’s last conversation
Hansen has alluded to being in the Navy during the Vietnam War, something that was just part of the American obligation during his young adult years. He did clear up a common misconception, though: He wasn’t actually in Vietnam during the war. In fact, he joined the Navy in hopes that he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam because he was strongly opposed to the war.
Hansen ended up in Patuxent River, Md., on a ship bound for the Caribbean. His overall experience in the military was pretty tame, especially compared to that of his best friend, Carroll Meier, who was drafted to the Army and killed in Vietnam.
“I’ve never gotten over that,” Hansen said, his eyes welling up. “I used to say — it was somewhat true but it was probably somewhat to justify my own lifestyle — I really do feel that I lived two lives. I live for me and I live for him. I worked twice as hard as some people did for a long time. I sure as hell partied twice as hard because I had to party for him.”
Down the hall in Hansen’s man cave, he has multiple pictures of Meier that he still takes in on a daily basis. He goes in there to work and pay bills. When he does, he always looks up and touches Meier’s face. One of them is a painting presented to him by Collin County Jail employee and part-time artist Colin Kimball on the WFAA set last year. He unabashedly admits it brought him to tears.
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But it’s their final conversation in their shared hometown of Logan, Ia. that resonates even more.
“The last night I saw him, he came to my house, knocked on my window of the basement bedroom. He taps on my window and we were going to sit in the driveway and drink beer,” Hansen recalled. “The last thing he said to me, I’ll never forget it. ‘If I can’t outrun a base hit to right field, I sure as hell can’t outrun a bullet in Vietnam.’
“And he told me, he said he’d never see me again. He said, ‘This is it for us.’ I was kind of like, ‘Oh, hell, we’ll come back and we’ll manage the Little League baseball team. You’ll be the hitting coach and I’ll be the manager. We’ll be back.’ He looked right at me, and that was the last thing he said: ‘If I can’t outrun a base hit to right field, I sure as hell can’t outrun a bullet in Vietnam.’”
Six weeks into Meier’s service in Vietnam, he was shot and killed. He’ll be 18 years old forever.
The one with Carroll’s memories
Hansen and Meier were best friends from the start, right around the age of 5. They grew up together. Before he ever dreamed of making a career out of sports, it was sports that provided Hansen one of his most impactful friendships.
“He was the slowest man on the Planet Earth,” Hansen said, his tone shifting from somber remembrance to youthful joy. “He hit about .500, like most great hitters in high school do, but he hit like .500 and the right fielder threw him out a dozen times. He hit the ball so hard and he was so slow that the right fielder would literally pick it up and throw him out.
“He was incredible, I mean, just incredible. He played third base about 75-80 feet down the line because he knew if he played the normal third base position, they’d just bunt and we’d never get anybody out so he would stand 10 feet inside the bag.”
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Hansen played catcher on the same team. Their squad at Logan High School was dominant. Batters didn’t make much contact, but on the rare occasion he heard the crack of the bat, his first thought was always hoping the ball was headed to third base.
“The greatest third baseman to ever play the game,” Hansen said.
Toward the end of his high school days, much to Meier’s disdain, Hansen quit baseball. He says his father burned him out. Before he did, though, Meier and Hansen had made a bet about who would have the highest batting average and who would steal the most bases. Meier talked Hansen into returning for the last few games of the season, and the competition was in full force. As Hansen recalls, Meier was hitting around .490 while he was at .410; that part of the bet was over. But the stolen bases tally was tied heading into the final game of the season.
As usual, Hansen and Meier’s team won in a rout. But with the game well in hand, Hansen got a base hit and then went on to steal second. The stolen bases bet was his. Most of the crowd and some of the team was confused, but Meier was in the dugout laughing uncontrollably.
“God, I loved those days. I just have never gotten over those days,” Hansen said. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s good or bad. … That’s about as good as my life has ever been.”
Dale Hansen (center, in jacket) on his youth baseball team. Photo by Saad Yousuf
The one with the roots and racism
Hansen calls Logan, Iowa, then a town of about 1,000 people, “the Mayberry of the Midwest,” in reference to “The Andy Griffith Show.” It was a small, quiet town where doors were hardly ever locked. When Hansen grew older and wanted to borrow the family car to head downtown, he just opened the unlocked door to find the keys already in the ignition. His childhood consisted of swimming at the river, late dance nights and walking home after 10 p.m., sometimes even pushing midnight.
“It was a hell of an upbringing, a hell of a place to grow up,” Hansen said. “In many ways, I think it’s a part of America that’s gone.”
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Hansen has fond memories of his youth, but as he’s grown older, he’s come to understand the full picture.
“I loved growing up there,” he said. “I mean, it was a racist town in many ways, but I wasn’t even aware of it at that time.”
It would take years for Hansen to grasp the implications of how his only black classmate was treated. As he recalls, the schoolmate never had a homecoming date, never went to prom and never had carefree nights staying out late in town. At that time in society, that just seemed like normalcy rather than discrimination.
“Kevin Blackistone wrote this line one time and I wish I had thought of it first: He said, ‘Sometimes the good ole days weren’t all that good for some of us,’” he said. “I never really thought about it at the time, which is kind of amazingly stupid on my part. That hit me like a ton of bricks when I got older. How could I have been so ignorant?”
Reflecting on those times and accepting them for what they were played a major role in the tune Hansen has sung in favor of social justice for the better part of 50 years.
The one with the problematic letter
For as many good ideas and progressive values Hansen possesses, there’s one reason why he jokingly states he could never run for president.
During his senior year of high school, Hansen wrote a speech in English class titled, “Let’s face the facts: Negroes are just plain troublemakers.” The class assignment was about civil rights so the whole class had produced similar work. Hansen’s classmates — even his father — often used the derogatory “n” word very casually, something Hansen insists he never did. His paper instead used the formal terminology in common usage at the time: “Negro.”
The speech was centered on James Meredith, whose application in 1962 to the University of Mississippi prompted social unrest. Hansen’s attitude wasn’t as much aggressively racist as it was, “Just find another school, what the hell?”
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“The arguments made sense if you were 17 years old and a moron living in basically an all-white community,” Hansen continued. “The arguments, as stupid as they were, quite honestly were not a lot different than some of the arguments made by some of our so-called leaders today.”
Hansen presented the speech to the class. His English teacher, Frank Weiland, a significant influence in Hansen’s life, gave him an honest accounting of a speech that clearly failed to grasp the importance a seminal moment in the nation’s civil rights movement.
“Mr. Hansen, that might be the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever heard,” the English teacher said. “I’m giving you an A- because of the writing, because of the presentation, because of the arguments but I hope you learn some day. I hope you grow up.”
The one where the barrier broke
Weiland challenged Hansen to grow up when Hansen was on the verge of completing high school. Joining the Navy will help a kid do that in expedited fashion.
In Patuxent River, Hansen and his five white cohorts were all sitting in a bar. The group was intoxicated, playing music loudly, flirting with the waitress, screaming and hollering, doing shots and being obnoxious. Right around then, a group of six or seven black men walked in and took a seat at the other side of the bar.
One of Hansen’s friends turned to Hansen and said, “Look at those sons of bitches” with a few other words thrown in.
Hansen responded in confusion, “What? What’s the problem?”
Hansen’s friend said, “They’re loud, they’re obnoxious, they’re flirting with the waitress, they’re doing shots, they’re playing their music louder than shit.”
“I swear to God, I looked at my buddy and I went, ‘You mean, like us,’” Hansen said.
Hansen left his friends, walked across the bar and asked the group of black guys if he could join. After some initial hesitation as to why a white guy would want to join them, the group welcomed Hansen. They listened to Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Ray Charles and James Brown. From that moment on, Hansen became known around his base as the “N-word lover.”
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That was just the start.
As Hansen explains it, he never disliked black people before enlisting. He just had never been exposed to diversity before joining the Navy. It didn’t take him long to realize friends could come from many other backgrounds besides the one he knew. Why should race be a barrier?
He’d done as Weiland asked of him. Dale Hansen had grown up.
Hansen’s childhood best friend, Carroll Meier. Photo by Saad Yousuf.
The one with the best night ever
Nowadays, diversity is not something Hansen simply embraces; he actively pursues it. People’s differences are what fascinate Hansen and keep him interested in their stories.
As we sat in the living room, Hansen turned to his right to the patio, where his pool is located. He started talking about a party he once hosted that he now calls “the best night of his life.”
The characters from that night featured two guys from Finland, a man from Cuba, a woman from Lithuania, a black judge who graduated from Harvard, the judge’s girlfriend from Malaysia, two friends from Lancaster who were “rednecks from hell” as well as Hansen and his wife, Chris.
“Holy shit. We said we had a little mini United Nations conference going on here,” Hansen said. “The gal from Lithuania is telling about her lifestyle. The guys from Finland were telling about the socialist aspects of they don’t pay for medical, they don’t pay for college and my buddy’s about swallowing his tongue. A buddy tells about how his family escaped from Cuba when he was a boy. God almighty, we stayed there until the sun came up. It was just the most fascinating thing.”
Hansen doesn’t have prerequisites; he simply likes people. That includes the people he doesn’t like, until they cross over to a point of no return.
“One of my best friends, I don’t really like anything about him,” Hansen said. “He’s a good man, if you dig away all of the shit. Somewhere down there, there’s a really good, caring man. But I disagree with basically everything he believes — everything he believes. But he’s one of my favorite people.
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“He’s kind of like, ‘Fox News is too damn liberal.’ I love the guy, I just happen to disagree with everything he believes.”
The one with the commentaries
Every time Hansen stands on the set at WFAA and the red light comes on to indicate he’s live, he hopes to earn the attention of viewers in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area.
Their approval? That, he’s not really worried about.
“It drives people nuts but at the end of the day, I do have an obligation to generate some interest,” Hansen said. “It’s perceived as arrogance, it’s perceived as cocky or however you want to describe it. To me, it’s just perceived as doing the job as I understand it and how it’s defined.
“I can’t come on TV at 10:20 p.m. tonight and go, ‘I don’t mean to interrupt, I hope you don’t mind if I’m in your living room or in your bedroom right now talking to you because I really want you to watch me for the next 20 minutes on a Sunday night’ or whatever,” Hansen said. “Really? No! It’s got to be me. It’s got to be, ‘Hey, thank God you tuned in tonight because I got some shit to tell you, and you’re going to like this or you might hate it but you’re going to talk about this at the office tomorrow.’”
A few times a year — only when he deems it appropriate and necessary — Hansen does a short segment that has come to be known as “Unplugged.” In these segments, Hansen provides commentary about his beliefs on a particular topic that may be polarizing. They’ve become a phenomenon, and among the first to go viral and capture national attention was his commentary on Michael Sam, the first openly gay player to be drafted into the NFL. Sam was a unanimous All-American selection his last season at Missouri, but it was widely speculated he tumbled down the draft boards due to his sexual orientation.
Hansen questioned the premise, especially in the wake of the NFL’s questionable acceptance of players and coaches who’ve committed acts of domestic violence, been caught doing illegal drugs or other criminal offenses. The outcome was just as Hansen had anticipated when he wrote the script: Half of the people agreed, the other half disagreed. The bottom line: Everyone was talking about it. The commentary even caught the attention of Ellen DeGeneres, who invited Hansen to appear on “The Ellen Show” on Feb. 14, 2014.
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Since then, Hansen has done many more influential monologues, addressing things like the sexual assault scandal at Baylor University and Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem before NFL games.
“Whether you agree or disagree, I don’t really care,” Hansen said. “There was a poll years ago, like 1978 or 1979, in some magazine, and it was, ‘Who is the best sportscaster in America and who is the worst sportscaster in America?’ Howard Cosell won both, and I thought, ‘Man, that’s brilliant. … Man, you have arrived.’”
Hansen has achieved the same distinction in Dallas.
“If Jesus Christ came back, he’d only get 64 percent of the vote,” Hansen joked. “Maybe not even that much in today’s climate. Once he started talking about feeding the hungry and sheltering the poor, we’d vote against him.
“If the supposed perfect man can only get 64 percent of the vote — and I don’t think he could — well, who the hell am I to worry about a little bit of criticism? I just don’t.”
The one where the games don’t matter
Hansen’s infatuation with the human side of things makes him a rare figure in sports media. He doesn’t care much about the scores or how many games a team wins or anything else attached to a numerical value.
He cares about the individuals driving the action, and he cares about the impact that action has on people enjoying it.
“I like the entertainment, but what I really like is how people respond and deal with all of the bullshit,” Hansen said. “I love how Dak Prescott takes the criticism and keeps on going. I’m intrigued by whether or not Ezekiel Elliott is going to get his life straightened out to where he’s not always constantly in trouble. I love how Dirk Nowitzki can be a megastar and yet be one of the most down-to-earth human beings I’ve ever met in my life; Mike Modano, the same way.
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“I’m fascinated by personalities and by how they deal with the pressures of dealing with this fame and fortune and being a mega-millionaire at 23. God almighty, I would have been dead at 27, without question.”
But Hansen nevertheless grew up a sports fan, just like everyone else in his hometown. There wasn’t a professional team to root for in Logan, so he forged temporary allegiances throughout the country and bounced around from team to team — especially with baseball, his favorite sport. He was a fan of the 1959 Chicago White Sox and went to then-Kansas City Athletics games with his dad, but his favorite team was the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates. That Pirates team beat the Yankees in the World Series despite New York outscoring Pittsburgh by a large margin. Nebraska football was also something Hansen was hooked on through his teenage years.
But even with all of that, he was more a fan of the people; Willie Mays, Bob Gibson, Jim Brown, Bill Russell and his all-time favorite, Oscar Robertson.
“When I played high school ball, I used to shoot my free throws like Oscar Robertson,” Hansen said. “I mean, I liked the Jerry Wests and the Bill Bradleys or whoever, but Oscar was better.”
Nobody was better than Oscar.
The one with coworkers
Hansen has had 11 jobs in his life. By his count, he was fired from eight of them and left two. He went through those 10 jobs early in his life and landed at WFAA in 1984 at the age of 36. Over the ensuing 35 years, he has welcomed scores of new colleagues and outlasted plenty of others.
One of his favorites came aboard in June 2005. Pete Delkus forged a close friendship with Hansen almost as soon as he arrived at WFAA. But the chief meteorologist still remembers his first impression of Hansen on air.
“The first time I watched him walk into the studio, it was this big personality that walked in just spewing all of this stuff and I thought, ‘My gosh, this guy is hilarious but he’s so full of crap. Surely, he doesn’t believe all of this stuff,’” Delkus said.
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Delkus, who spent six years as a minor-league pitcher in the Minnesota Twins organization, was intrigued. He thought working with Hansen would take him back to the days of giving teammates a hard time in the dugout. So one night on live television, Delkus started messing with Hansen in a conversation that went something like this:
Delkus: “Man, you say all of this stuff; do you believe all of that? You’re so full of it, it’s hilarious to me.”
Hansen: “Hey, what did you say?”
Delkus: “You heard what I said. You just walk in here, it’s like you own the studio. You’re just so full of it. I just think it’s hilarious.”
Hansen, laughing: “We’re going to talk when we go to a commercial break.”
During the break, the two did just that, with Delkus expressing how much he enjoyed the banter and that he hoped it didn’t anger Hansen.
“Delkus, if it would have pissed me off, you would have been the first to know,” Hansen responded. “I think we’re going to get along just fine.”
Ever since, the two have sustained a deep friendship that includes jabs on social media and plenty of love.
While Delkus, 53, is nearly two decades younger than Hansen, Hansen’s teammate, Mike Leslie, is a full four decades his junior at age 31. Still, Hansen quickly took a liking to Leslie when he arrived at WFAA in the spring of 2015.
“There’s just something about you that reminds me of me,” Hansen told him on multiple occasions early on.
In turn, Leslie embraced Hansen as both a friend and a mentor. While maintaining his own flair, Leslie has also modeled some of his work after Hansen’s, particularly the legendary “Unplugged” segments. Leslie has spoken out critically about the abhorrent actions of former USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar and in favor of issues revolving around the United States women’s national soccer team, such as pay equality and celebrations after scoring goals.
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Hansen coaches him in turn. He’s taught Leslie about the importance of gravitas and earning the viewer’s trust. If one of Leslie’s segments doesn’t pick up the same national traction as “Unplugged,” Hansen talks about his own ascent and how long it took for him to build the massive platform his name now carries. Hansen also has a way of mentoring Leslie without being intimidating.
If anything, it’s quite the opposite.
“I think there’s an element of that for a lot of people who work at WFAA, like, ‘Wow, that’s Dale Hansen,’” Leslie said. “On the same token, treating him like that is probably not the way to go. He is much more inclined to respect you and where you’re coming from if you’re inclined to bust his chops and have some fun with him.”
And while so much of the conversation in media revolves around younger generations leaving their elders in the dust, Hansen continues to flip the script into his 70s.
“He has, in a lot of ways, revolutionized the concept of what we do,” Leslie said.
The view from Dale Hansen’s driveway. He says he’s not quite ready to stay home every day to enjoy it, though. Photo by Saad Youssuf
The one about retirement
Hansen has great appreciation for WFAA and the atmosphere he works under. He obviously has to do the sportscasts when they are scheduled but aside from that, he has the liberty to come in later than what would usually be accepted, so long as he’s on air when he needs to be. He writes his own content and nobody changes his script unless there is something in question legally, such as libel (which Hansen says happened only once, inadvertently).
That relaxed work environment is a big reason retirement isn’t on Hansen’s mind. It was something Hansen thought about when he was just becoming an established voice in the industry. He even saw a financial planner when he landed his first big contract at 43 years old who told Hansen everything he needed to do in order to retire rich by 65.
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“I looked at him and said, ‘If I do this, I won’t be able to live large now, and I have no desire to be rich at 65 if I can’t live large at 43,’” Hansen said.
Ten days ago, Hansen celebrated his 71st birthday. He is still living large.
“I still feel mentally as good as I’ve ever felt,” Hansen said. “I still feel in many ways that I’m 29 and just getting started and then when I try to roll out of bed and my back hurts like hell, I think, no, I’m 106.”
Hansen admits he has lived frivolously for much of his life and staying employed does help him maintain his lifestyle. He has some financial freedom but if he can have a job he enjoys, with people he likes working with and gets paid to do it all, why walk away from it?
“I started thinking about retirement in my 50s, to be quite honest, just because it seemed like the kind of thing to think about,” Hansen said. “What would I retire to? There are still some things I think that need to be said. I think there’s a possibility I could easily go another three or four years. … I think my goal right now is to finish a commentary and die.”
(Photo Courtesy: WFAA)
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