From John Daniel Hicks, native son of Tucson, we expected and looked forward to so many more years and so many more calls.
More Players Championships, where he masterfully set the stage for Sunday-afternoon Stadium Course gut checks.
More U.S. Opens, where at Oakmont two years ago all that stood between J.J. Spaun and his first major title was a two-putt from 64 feet. “Don’t need to make . . . just cozy it up . . . two putts,” Hicks said, dapper as ever in a light-gray suit vest and teal tie. When Spaun required just a single swipe, Hicks leaned into his desk and bellowed, “How . . . ah-BOUT . . . ONE!”
More alpine skiing; more Notre Dame football (he was slated to call the Boston College game on Saturday); more Olympic swimming, the sport that spawned one of Hicks’s all-timers, at the 2008 Games in Beijing. When U.S. swimmer Jason Lezak stormed back in the final leg of the 400-meter relay to overtake the legendary French swimmer Alain Bernard and win gold for the Americans, Hicks, like millions watching across the globe, could hardly contain himself:
Can the veteran chase him down and pull off a shocker here?… Bernard is losing some ground! Here comes Lezak! Unbelievable at the end! He’s done it! The U.S. has done it!
We expected so many more Hicks calls, because . . . well, why wouldn’t we? Like Nantz and Tirico and Eagle and Breen and Buck, Hicks was not only a comforting and authoritative voice but also a permanent one, as if he’d always been here and always would be. He was youthful, too, both in appearance and energy.
When the news of his death broke Thursday morning, if you were a sports fan and especially a golf fan, it took your breath away. It’s hard for news to do that in 2026, but this announcement did — Dan Hicks, dead at 64 — by way of a social-media post from Hicks’ wife of 32 years, ESPN anchor Hannah Storm.
Hicks with wife Hannah Storm in 2025.
getty images
“Our family is heartbroken by the sudden and unexpected passing of Dan,” Storm wrote. She and Hicks met in 1989 while working on the sports desk at CNN. Within a year they were dating. Within five years they were hitched. They’d eventually settle in Greenwich, Conn. They had three girls, Hannah, Ellery and Riley. Last month he was in Illinois to root on Riley in the Chicago Marathon. Not long before that he was on Long Island, jamming to the Avett Brothers and Willie Nelson at Jones Beach Theater. He played his golf at Winged Foot. Life was good.
“When he walked into a room, he brought the energy, the laughter and the people together,” Storm continued in her statement. “He was endlessly kind, thoughtful and funny, and he made everyone feel like they mattered.”
I didn’t know Hicks but I did interview him in 2011 for a fledgling (and short-lived) podcast I hosted. He was gracious with his time and insights, but the best lens I got into his thoughtfulness came years later when he swung through our New York City office. I can’t recall why he was there, but when I reintroduced myself, he greeted me like an old friend and thanked me for having him on the pod, as if I had somehow done him a favor and not the other way around.
That was Hicks, according to the avalanche of remembrances Thursday. Warm. Inclusive. More interested in promoting others than himself, which is what you want from a lead announcer. Tee it up and get out of the way. Let Johnny, Zinger, Kiz, whoever, shine. “A great quarterback, a point guard,” Roger Maltbie, Hicks’s longtime NBC colleague, told AP golf writer Doug Ferguson. ”If you listen to his broadcast, to me he was terrific at passing the ball around. He always had a question. He always got you engaged. That’s a big part of the job.”
Telling stories is, too, the kind that reveal something about golfers that their scorecards and club selections cannot. As Spaun — a player with whom many casual fans would not have been familiar — walked up the 72nd hole at Oakmont in 2025, Hicks referenced Spaun’s opening 66 that week and how in years past such a hot start at a major would have left Spaun running scared.
“This is a kind of psychological turnaround that J.J. Spaun has made,” Hicks said, as the broadcast cut to a shot of Spaun’s family. “And you have that support system. There’s his wife, Melody. He’s got his two girls here, Emerson and Violet.”
Then came the setup, the baton pass.
“We alluded to it earlier, Kiz. You had a little bit of a heart-to-heart with J.J. Spaun earlier in his career, said he was beating himself up too much…”
Which led Kisner to share a story about how he’d helped embolden Spaun with a locker-room pep talk. Moments later, with that context still fresh in viewers’ minds, Spaun buried one of the most dramatic putts in U.S. Open history.
“I always remind myself, and I remind young broadcasters coming up, you’ve got to make the people that the audience is watching, you’ve got to make them care about those people,” Hicks said on a recent podcast appearance, according to the L.A. Times. “And how do you do that? You’ve got to tell some personal stories. You’ve got to introduce the audience to, who is this person? Why are they here? What was their journey like to get here? And so, if you use that element, the numbers game doesn’t matter. If you care about somebody, then you are invested in the telecast.”
Hicks made you care. At Bay Hill and Sawgrass. In the Bear Trap and the Snake Pit. At our Open and The Open. Some Sundays are less memorable than others, some winning moments less rich than others. But sometimes, some glorious times, everything comes together in a script that would get you laughed out of Hollywood.
For Hicks, that moment came at the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines. No setup required here, because the sequence is burned into the golf world’s collective memory bank: Tiger on a broken leg, staring down a 15-footer to force a playoff with Rocco Mediate.
Two beats after the putt disappeared, with Woods still exalting with clenched fists, Hicks captured the mood with three perfect words.
“Expect anything different?”
From Tiger, no, and the same could be said of Hicks.
