By Don Williams
As Texas Tech’s basketball coach for two decades, Gerald Myers occasionally suffered through nights in which his team was overmatched on the court. Yet, with Jack Dale calling the games on radio, Myers felt the Red Raiders were never outclassed on the air.
“I thought he was as good as anybody in college basketball,” Myers said. “We didn’t always have the best team, but we always had the best announcer.”
Dale, a Texas Tech legend and a fixture on Lubbock airwaves since 1952, died Friday evening, his son, Steve Dale, said. Jack Dale had been hospitalized since early this week, battling complications from cancer. He turned 79 on July 21.
“I always thought of Jack as a consummate professional,” Myers said. “I mean, he was a professional in every sense of the word. He was just the best is the best way to put it.
“I was always proud that he was our announcer. I thought he was head and shoulders above any other announcer that I knew, in the Southwest Conference particularly. He just added a lot to Texas Tech basketball. He added a lot to the program. He made the games exciting on radio before all the games were televised like they are now.”
Jack Dale, known for his signature descriptions such as jumps, shoots and scores!,” broadcast more than 1,300 Tech basketball games from 1952 until his retirement in 2003. He also broadcast college football for 47 years ending in 1999.
In addition, Dale started a morning sports-talk radio show in 1992 and was still on the air doing the show as recently as last week.
“I think he was a big-time talent in a smaller market and probably somewhere along the line could have moved
on somewhere else,” said John Harris, a color analyst on Tech football broadcasts since 1982. “But I think he loved doing what he was doing at Texas Tech, and I think he was loyal to the people who gave him a chance, and I think Texas Tech was better off for it.”
Dale, originally from Alma, Kan., dreamed of being a sportscaster growing up, calling imaginary games to himself as a farmboy driving a tractor. After six months at a Kansas City radio trade school, he sent letters to 113 stations in the fall of 1952 and landed a job in Lubbock that December.
“Listen, I’m telling you, all this was ordained,” Dale told The A-J in a December 2002 interview. “It was ordained for me to come to KFYO in Lubbock, Texas. I sent them a tape of a game that I did in Topeka, Kansas, that had to be the worst portrayal of a football game that anybody had ever done or anybody had ever listened to.”
He was either being modest, or he improved in a hurry.
In 2005, Dale was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, being selected to a charter group of Lone Star State media legends. He said he had “a bedroom full of plaques, but I never thought I’d get one like this.”
He went in with broadcasters Frank Fallon, Verne Lundquist and Kern Tips and writers Dave Campbell, Mickey Herskowitz, Dan Jenkins and Blackie Sherrod.
“Jack Dale was more than a sportscaster; he was a stylist,” A-J Editor Emeritus Burle Pettit said. “Anyone who followed the Red Raiders in basketball during his years as a broadcaster appreciated Jack not only for the clarity of his voice but for his knowledge of the game. And his trademark line — “He jumps, shoots and scores” — thrilled three generations of listeners.”
Pettit spent several years traveling to and covering games alongside Dale and longtime radio analyst Bob Nash.
“During all the years I knew him, Jack was a living enigma,” Pettit said. “Unlike most of the others I have known in the broadcasting craft, Jack was not driven by ego. Nash once posed a question to me that was both rhetorical and profound: ‘Reckon what Jack would be like if he knew how good he is?’ ”
Those with whom Dale worked said his religious faith and a modest nature contributed to their appreciation for him.
“He’s just a real honorable person — honest, integrity,” Myers said. “Any way you looked at him, he was just a great person. He was kind of quiet usually on road trips. Occasionally, he’d get excited and say, ‘Boy, we really played well tonight!’ or something like that. I just had a lot of respect for Jack.”
Most of the years that they covered Tech together, Harris said, he and Dale hopped aboard team charter flights to wherever the Red Raiders were playing. From time to time, however, they might fly on smaller aircraft.
“We’d be sitting there waiting to take off,” Harris said, “and I always joked that I was reading Sports Illustrated and Jack was reading the Bible. He might have known something that I didn’t know, and he was always doing that.”
While fans across the Tech network heard Dale weave his magic starting shortly before tipoff, colleagues said all the time he put in beforehand was part of what made him special.
“I learned preparation and the work that went into doing a broadcast (from Dale), where if anybody ever thought any of that was easy, they were very much mistaken,” Harris said. “People that can do it really well, like Jack, made it sound easy, but it was a lot of work.”
Dale’s wife of 60 years, Sue Dale, died in February. His survivors include two sons, Steve and David and their wives Abby and Kim; grandchildren, Stephen, Jared, Lauren and Josh; and a great-grandchild, Kaiah.
Funeral services are pending.