He’s 6-4 and we know nobody can catch him.” On the Cowboys’ 2008 signing of the oft-arrested Pacman Jones: “If character really doesn’t matter, why don’t they sign Osama bin Laden to play wide receiver? They need one. It’s the least they could do.” The line would have read well in a column, too. Hansen’s bomb bay doors opened when NBA commissioner Adam Silver kicked Donald Sterling out of the league: “It’s not the most they could do. You say, ‘Shut up, I want to hear what Dale’s saying.’” It’s almost like the camera is his stage. “He liked Bob Saget, and he was a huge fan of mine,” said Bill Engvall, a pal who starred in The Blue Collar Comedy Tour. Hansen learned to deploy them by camping out in Dallas comedy clubs. Lines were what made “Unplugged” into a phenomenon. But I gotta have something to make me go, ‘Ah, that’s pretty good!’” “I probably shouldn’t even admit to this. Any suggestion otherwise and he’d repeat a favorite line: “Read my contract.” He might read them to his Channel 8 bosses in advance, but he wouldn’t allow a single edit. He wrote them only when he was moved to, not for sweeps periods. Hansen was wearing a dark blue dress shirt, untucked at the waist, unbuttoned at the cuffs, and showing more of his chest than FCC regulations would allow.Īs his popularity grew, Hansen enforced some rules about his “Unplugged” commentaries. If you ever doubt the power of a local sportscaster, follow him into a steakhouse and watch how the waiters snap into action. We were sitting in a booth at the Palm steakhouse in downtown Dallas. You’ve got an old, fat white guy in Dallas talking about gay rights in America. You have the Southeastern Conference Defensive Player of the Year. “I think it was the perfect storm,” Hansen said. But I do understand that he’s part of mine.” On February 10, 2014, the day after Michael Sam came out, Hansen declared in an “Unplugged” commentary, “I’m not always comfortable when a man tells me he’s gay. A Dallas sportscaster looks into his teleprompter.
It was as if old and new media had settled on a single messenger, a guy who likes to say “Boom!” a lot. An Upworthy headline read: “ Old White Guy Drops a Monster Speech on Anti-Gay Football Teams.” The Huffington Post called Hansen’s commentaries “ jaw-dropping.” BuzzFeed called him “ badass.”
Just as local news audiences were shrinking, Hansen was discovered by the young’uns who search the web for awesomeness. “He’s an old, fat white guy, as he calls himself, and there ain’t much of a market for old, fat white guys.”īut Hansen’s story isn’t one of pathos.
#Dale hansen unplugged tv#
“He’s a TV dinosaur,” said Randy Galloway, a longtime sports columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and previously the Dallas Morning News. “You taught him well.”įrom one angle, Hansen is one of the last men standing of the Ron Burgundy age of local news. “You taught him well, Jim,” he told his audience. Jim Garrett had once said of the NFL, “This isn’t the Boy Scouts.” Hansen flipped the father’s words to hang the son. Hansen had dug up a quote from Jim Garrett, the 84-year-old father of Cowboys coach Jason Garrett, that he thought exposed intergenerational moral decay. When we met, Hansen was still grinning about his latest “Unplugged.” On March 18, he blasted the Cowboys for signing defensive end Greg Hardy, an alleged domestic abuser. Another time, Hansen told viewers that he was sexually assaulted on a baseball diamond at age 10, but had been too terrified and humiliated to admit it. He pilloried racists in the Dallas suburbs. Last February, his ringing defense of Michael Sam landed him on Ellen. newscast to deliver “Unplugged” commentaries that were equal parts lefty jeremiad, wicked punch line, and wrenching confession. Several years ago, he began using the 10 p.m. “The biggest name, the biggest cat down here.”īut now Hansen was becoming a moral beacon to the world. “From the time he got to Channel 8, he has been the unquestioned alpha dog over everybody and everything,” said Mike Rhyner, a sports radio host for KTCK. “Jesus,” he said.įor more than three decades, Dale Hansen has been a blustering, vainglorious, near-mythic figure in Dallas sportscasting. You give me hope.’” Hansen considered the magnitude of that sentiment. “She wrote, ‘We always hear about how bad people are from your country. In this case, the Pakistani woman meant the 66-year-old who does sports at 6 and 10 p.m. This woman is just writing about, as she put it, ‘the West.’” “I’m assuming it was from Pakistan,” Hansen said last week.
He discovered her email in his work inbox one night. After being hailed by Ellen DeGeneres, George Takei, and MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, it was probably inevitable that sportscaster Dale Hansen would find a fan in Pakistan.
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