At Dan Hicks’s next scheduled game, a new voice and a remembrance

On November 13, HeyDay News reported Hicks’s death and that he was still scheduled for the game. At that point, our report had not established who would take his place or how the broadcast would acknowledge him. Saturday supplied those answers: Benetti handled play-by-play alongside analyst Garrett, and their remembrance became part of the coverage itself.⁠26

That is a concrete development, but a limited one. Covering this game is not the same as inheriting Hicks’s place at NBC. No permanent succession decision for his Notre Dame, golf or Olympic responsibilities is established by the available reporting.⁠26⁠30

Notre Dame’s official event listing scheduled Boston College’s visit to Notre Dame Stadium for 3:30 p.m. Eastern, with coverage on NBC and Peacock. NBC’s November 11 preview confirmed that schedule. The fixture remained; the broadcast team had to change.⁠34⁠31

The difficulty of replacing Hicks begins with the breadth of what he did. He led NBC’s PGA Tour coverage beginning in 2000, called Notre Dame football and worked Olympic swimming and skiing. He was not simply a specialist whose absence would be felt on one stretch of the calendar. Audiences encountered the same voice on golf courses, beside swimming pools and on ski slopes.⁠1⁠2

Hicks covered 16 Olympics for NBC, dating back to 1992. That is a count of Games he worked, not a hosting-only total. Among his best-known moments was calling Michael Phelps’s eighth gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics—a performance that made his voice familiar to viewers who might never have followed his golf broadcasts.⁠1

Mike Tirico’s November 13 tribute on TODAY put the value of that range in plain terms. The accomplishment was not merely being assigned a succession of major events. It was finding a call that belonged to each one.⁠1

For an announcer, that is a demanding kind of praise. A great sporting moment already has its own drama; the broadcaster’s task is to recognize it without getting in its way. Tirico remembered Hicks as someone who could repeatedly meet that demand, across sports with different rhythms and different audiences.

Tiger Woods offered another perspective: that of an athlete whose achievements Hicks had narrated. In a remembrance reported by Golfweek on November 13, Woods called him “a great friend to me both on and off the course.” Golfweek reported that Hicks called 27 of Woods’s tournament victories. That remains a reported career count, not a newly verified event-by-event tally; the friendship was the heart of Woods’s tribute.⁠25

The PGA Tour likewise remembered the familiarity of Hicks’s voice in viewers’ living rooms through more than 25 years leading NBC’s golf coverage. NBC’s own statement reached beyond the calls, describing a colleague who welcomed teammates with a smile, a joke or encouragement. The public voice and the private kindness were not separate themes in these remembrances. Colleagues kept bringing them together.⁠1

Jimmy Roberts expressed the painful limit of all those tributes. “I’m just sad that he’s not here to hear all these folks saying kind things about him because he deserves it,” he said in the TODAY remembrance. It was less a career assessment than an expression of a colleague’s grief.⁠1

As we reported on November 13, Hicks died late Wednesday, November 11, in Connecticut; his family and NBC announced his death the following day. His wife, ESPN broadcaster Hannah Storm, described what happened without offering a specific medical diagnosis: “Our family is heartbroken by the sudden and unexpected passing of Dan following an acute illness.”⁠13⁠1

Storm remembered a devoted husband of more than 30 years, a loving father and a cherished friend. She and their daughters, Hannah, Ellery and Riley, survive him. The family’s description of an acute illness should not be expanded into a diagnosis it has not shared. A more precise place or time of death, and family-authorized public memorial arrangements, remain unestablished in the available material.⁠1

Some career accounting also remains unsettled. NBC’s statement gives Hicks’s tenure as 34 years; our earlier report noted another account’s 35-year description, a difference the later material does not explain. Nor does the overall Olympic total answer how many Games he specifically hosted. Those uncertainties need not be turned into false precision to convey the scale of his career.⁠1

Saturday’s broadcast answered the immediate practical question and something more human: the game could continue without treating Hicks’s absence as routine. Benetti took the assignment, and he and Garrett made time to remember their colleague. What comes next for NBC’s announcing teams remains a separate decision. What happened that afternoon was a covered assignment and a farewell—not evidence that one broadcaster’s wide-ranging place had already been permanently filled.⁠26