Longtime sports broadcaster Dan Patrick, host of the nationally-syndicated “Dan Patrick Show” radio and TV program, is making his way to the University of Arizona campus this weekend to promote his book at the Tucson Festival of Books.
Patrick, known among sports fans for decades for his iconic turns hosting ESPN’s “SportsCenter” and Football Night in America and the Olympic games on NBC, will appear twice at the Festival in part to discuss his book, “The Occasionally Accurate Annals of Football: The NFL’s Greatest Players, Plays, Scandals, and Screw-Ups (Plus Stuff We Totally Made Up).”
Patrick appears Saturday at 1 p.m. as part of the “Fun With Football” panel, then Sunday at 4 p.m. for an in-person interview titled “Meet Dan Patrick.”
Patrick recently joined The Wildcast Podcast to talk about his book, Arizona basketball and his sports broadcasting career. The full interview can be viewed via Tucson.com, or heard on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Here are a few questions from the interview with Patrick:
Throughout his iconic sports broadcasting career, Dan Patrick has worked for CNN and ESPN, as well as been host of NBC’s “Football Night in America,” NBC’s coverage of the Olympic Games, and the nationally syndicated “Dan Patrick Show.”
The co-author of the book is comedian and screenwriter Joel Cohen, how did you two team up for this project?
A: “Well, Joel writes for “The Simpsons,” and that caught my eye because obviously that’s as well-written as any show, and it’s been on the air for such a long period of time. He’s very creative. And when we first talked, he wanted to have me on to play the role of an announcer with a rock-skipping contest with Homer Simpson. And I thought, ‘OK, I think I could do that.’
“And then the more we talked, the more he had sports questions, football-related questions. And we probably spent 30 minutes talking to one another. Next thing I know, he said, ‘You know, maybe we should write a book.’ And then I go, ‘Yeah, sure.’ I didn’t even think about it. And then he came back and he said, I got some notes here. And then I wrote some notes back to him. And then he wrote some notes. And I wrote some notes. And all of a sudden, he said, ‘I think we can make this into a book.’ I said, ‘Well, good luck.’ ... So we just sort of said, ‘If you have something, you want to have fun, come on in. If it’s accurate, great. If not, that’s OK. We can still have some fun at the expense of the NFL.’”
How much of the book is ‘totally made up?’
A: “There are things that are written and I don’t know if they’re true or not. But they certainly sound like they could be true. I mean, we have fun (and) there’s some obvious ones that (are made up). We talked about Kenny Stabler’s breakfast that he would eat, the former Raider quarterback. Obviously he didn’t have that kind of breakfast, but we do poke fun at some players, some teams. And it’s meant to be light-hearted. Most most of your NFL books are very serious. It’s about the gladiators, the masters of intimidation, all of that stuff. And we’re like, ‘Ehh, let’s have some fun at this, because after all, it is entertainment.’ We take it way too serious, but we had some fun at the expense of those kinds of fans.”
Comedian Adam Sandler makes a drive to the bucket while playing in a pickup basketball game on the McKale Center court before the start of the Arizona Wildcats' game against Colorado on Jan. 4 in Tucson.
Actor and comedian Adam Sandler has frequently visited his sister, Valerie Sandler, in Tucson recently. You’ve appeared in several of his movies. How did that relationship come to fruition?
A: “It kind of happened by accident. I was at a Knicks game and I ended up running into him and he was talking about me being in a movie. I said, ‘Look, if you ever need somebody to be in a movie from ESPN, you let me know.’ He said, you’re going to be in my next movie. Well, it’s next movie was ‘Little Nicky.’ Then the movie after that was ‘The Longest Yard.’
“Then he said, ‘You’re gonna be in my next movie, you’re going to be a police officer, and you’re gonna have a mustache.’ And I was a police officer with a mustache in ‘The Longest Yard.’ I’m at the beginning of the movie where I tried to arrest him for stealing his girlfriend’s car, Courtney Cox. Then after that, sand man put me in (more movies). I think I’ve been in 20 movies, but he always writes a little cameo for me and I carve out a couple of days to visit him on set, play some basketball and shoot a scene. He’s become a very good friend, and very generous when it comes to handing out movie roles.”
When you hear Tucson, what comes to mind?
A: “Probably basketball. ... (The Arizona Wildcats) always have frustrated me. I viewed them as sort of like the Chargers in the NFL. Like, I always go, ‘This is the year. I’m picking them this year.’ And then all of a sudden they bow out. I go, ‘I’m not doing it again.’ U of A could be undefeated, I’d still not going to pick them until they prove me wrong, because I would always buy in. I’d be the East Coast guy who’s watching West Coast basketball. I wanted to make sure that I was watching, so I didn’t go, ‘I don’t know how good that team is.’ But I was watching. ‘They got bigs, they got me, they have all this stuff.’ And then they always would find the banana peel usually early in the tournament.
“All those years, I would buy in and be like, ‘This is the year,’ and then all of a sudden, I’d be like, ‘Nope, this is not the year.’”
Who was your biggest source of inspiration to become a sportscaster?
A: “I always appreciated Keith Jackson calling college football games because he sounded like the sport. Vin Scully, that voice, that was baseball. I’m into the audio portion of all of this is. That’s why I love radio. I was never big on TV. I love radio. ... All I wanted to do was try to be professional, try to have a long shelf life didn’t want to be gimmicky, didn’t want to have a stick, didn’t want to do hot takes, any of that. I wanted to do this for a career. I tell my students that you can be flavor of the month, you can be somebody popular for a year or two, but have staying-power. I’ve been doing this for over 40 years, but I set out to do this. I didn’t have a plan B. That’s another thing, sometimes your best motivator is you because I didn’t know what I was going to do if I didn’t do this. There were no other options. This was it. And therefore I was going to succeed.”
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