#Dale hansen unplugged retirement tv

His weekend sportscaster quit-totally unexpected. “The producer asked where I went to school and I told him, ‘Logan, Iowa.’ And he said that was the end of this conversation,” Dale told a Dallas-area magazine in 2017 (Local Profile), “and as I’m sitting there the phone rings.

#Dale hansen unplugged retirement tv

He got fired, a frequent theme in his early career, and decided to try for a job in TV news, but he didn’t have a college degree (Goodwyn, 2018). He moved into radio as a DJ before shifting to news.

It’s a career, though, that seemed destined to fail – if it ever got started in the first place.Īfter graduating from his Iowa high school, Hansen did a stint in the Navy, then some odd jobs back home.

Yet in other ways, the blunt, principled sportscaster may have been building to his viral moments for his entire career. From the outside, an aging wealthy white guy who lives on a sprawling property in the Dallas exurb of Waxahachie and never graduated from college is seemingly as far from “woke” as possible. In some ways Hansen’s turn as an unlikely ally for gay Americans, for women’s rights, and for liberal social justice (in 2018, in fact, he said he voted for the first time in 46 years ) is hard to fathom. His “Unplugged” segment about Sam, though, shaped his legacy beyond simply the games on the field and brought him notoriety in circles far afield from sports. “(The) Michael Sam commentary, I think, is the one that took people so much by surprise,” said former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, “mainly because all of us tend to put people in a box” (WFAA, 2021b).īy the time I worked with Dale at WFAA from 2006 to 2009, including for more than a year as the online sports editor, he was already a local legend. But the segment about Sam quickly went viral and introduced Hansen to viewers well beyond the Lone Star State. Hansen had done periodic commentaries, dubbed “Unplugged,” for many years at legendary ABC affiliate WFAA-TV. Hansen, who often describes himself as a “bald, fat white guy,” went from local sportscaster to applauded by Ellen DeGeneres and an unlikely gay rights hero to an often-viral moral compass (Justice, 2021). “And the courage of Michael Sam made that possible.” “I decided a long time ago my life had to be about more than ball scores and highlights,” Hansen (2020) later wrote. In 2014, Sam, an All-American defensive end at the University of Missouri announced he was gay. Then came viral moment after viral moment. He called himself a “male chauvinistic pig” in a commentary about women members at the Augusta National Golf Club (Hansen, 2012). Throughout his four-decade career in Dallas, iconic sportscaster Dale Hansen was often called bombastic and arrogant. Services including app-based rideshares (Lyft, Uber, and Wingz) taxis, peer-to-peer luxury vehicles, and limousines for hire have all been relocated from the airport's lower-level roadway to the adjacent Garage B’s Level One.A deeper look at Sportscaster Dale Hansen Aaron Chimbel To cut back curbside congestion at its terminal, Dallas Love Field has relocated the pick-up area for rideshare, app-based rides, and taxis. Dallas Love Field airport relocates rideshare area to cut congestion. 6 fastest-growing college town in the country.Ģ. A new study by university scholarship website BrokeScholar has deemed Denton the No. Dallas might be one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S., but there's one North Texas city that's outdoing it in a different category of population growth. Dallas neighbor booms as 6th fastest-growing U.S.

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