Dale Hansen was breaking news and making waves in Texas well before taking on the NFL’s bigots.
Before welcoming Dale Hansen to the stage, Ellen DeGeneres played the two-minute video segment in which he condemned anonymous critics of Michael Sam's manhood and asked viewers — even, and perhaps especially, those who found the idea of a gay relationship unusual — to treat Sam with love and respect. Those 356 words had made Hansen nationally famous. Then she beckoned him out: "From Dallas, Texas, please welcome sports anchor Dale Hansen."
Hansen moved briskly as DeGeneres and a hospitable studio audience gave him a warm welcome. Then he paused for a second, momentarily taking in the applause. It might have felt as if the 65-year-old Iowa native, who's been leading sports coverage at WFAA-TV in Dallas since 1983, had finally arrived. Thing is, Hansen has been a big deal for quite a while. It's just that everyone else has finally caught up.
Hansen, the longtime sports anchor for WFAA-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth, first made a name for himself and the station nearly 30 years ago when he broke a story involving a Southern Methodist University slush fund for under-the-table payments to football players. Since then he's tangled with the area's sports icons — Tom Landry, Jerry Jones, and Barry Switzer, to name a few — and several times turned down big-money offers from stations and networks in larger media markets. His defense of child victims in the wake of the Penn State sex abuse scandal hinted at a deep reservoir of empathy. And yes, in a metro area where 11 of the 12 congressional representatives are Republicans, he is an unapologetic champion of liberal politics.
"I'm a liberal guy. My bosses hate it on the occasions when I say it," Hansen said. "I once wrote about Obamacare and all I said was, 'I don't know if it's the right answer for the country, but we need to sit down and talk about it and find the right answer.' Every redneck son of a bitch came out of the woodworks and wanted to blow me up."
Hansen got his first media job in 1974 at a radio station in Newton, Iowa, an old coal mining town of about 15,000. (Yes, coal mining in Iowa.) Within a year, his muckraking had earned him an award as the state's Associated Press investigative reporter of the year. "It was one of the most corrupt towns I've ever been in my life," he said. "It was amazing the stories that I stumbled into."
Hansen moved from there to Omaha and then to Dallas, where he started with WFAA in the mid-1980s. He was only a few years into his WFAA gig when he broke open one of the biggest stories in college football history. On Nov. 12, 1986, Hansen aired a 40-minute special revealing SMU was paying — or rather still paying — its football players. SMU, which had already been placed on probation five times between 1974 and 1985 for similar violations, had continued giving some of its players "thousand-dollar signing bonuses, rent-free apartments, and $750-per-month allowances in some cases." Hansen's report included an on-air admission from one of the players, linebacker David Stanley, and a live interview with the school's athletic director, head football coach, and recruiting coordinator. The interview was later immortalized in the ESPN documentary Pony Excess.