NBC Sports Broadcaster Dan Hicks Dies at 64 After Sudden Illness

Dan Hicks, the longtime voice of NBC Sports’ golf coverage, has died at 64 after an acute illness, his wife Hannah Storm announced Thursday.

“Our family is heartbroken by the sudden and unexpected passing of Dan following an acute illness,” Storm wrote on social media. “He was a devoted husband of over 30 years, loving father to our three daughters, and cherished friend to so many.” Storm did not say what illness Hicks had or when he became ill.

Hicks spent 34 years at NBC Sports, and he was the network’s lead voice on golf for the last 26 of them. He covered 16 Olympic Games, starting with the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, calling swimming and skiing as well as golf. He also called Notre Dame football, the NBA and the NFL, and he was the lead play-by-play announcer for Notre Dame football in 2024.

A voice across golf and the Olympics

Hicks called many of golf’s most famous moments, including Tiger Woods’ putt to force a playoff at the 2008 U.S. Open, when he asked, “Expect anything different?” He took home a Sports Emmy in 2024 as part of NBC’s coverage of the Paris Olympics.

He was set to call the Notre Dame-Boston College football game on Saturday in South Bend, Indiana, for NBC and Peacock. He had recently attended the Chicago Marathon on October 11 to support his daughter Riley, who completed the race.

Tributes came in through the morning from colleagues. Golf Channel’s Jimmy Roberts, who shared the news with co-anchor Rich Lerner live in the studio on Thursday morning, said Hicks was talented, hard working and generous, and that he thought Hicks was underappreciated. “Dan never made it about himself,” Roberts said. “I don’t know that he ever got the credit that he deserves.”

Former golfer and broadcaster Roger Maltbie, who phoned into Golf Channel’s broadcast on Thursday morning, called Hicks a close friend. “This is not losing a colleague and a nice guy, this is losing a pal,” Maltbie said, recalling that he, Roberts and Hicks called themselves “The Supper Club” after years of dinners together on the road.

NBC Sports said in a statement that Hicks was “an exceptional storyteller and caller of games and events who elevated some of the biggest moments in sports history” and “a better person who welcomed teammates with a smile, a joke, or a word of encouragement.”

Hicks is survived by Storm and their three daughters, Hannah, Ellery and Riley. Before joining NBC in 1992, he worked as a sports anchor at CNN and held sports anchoring and reporting jobs at radio and television stations in Tucson, Arizona.

Reporting based on coverage by the New York Post and the Daily Caller.