Overview
Daniel Patrick Pugh (born May 15, 1957), known professionally as Dan Patrick, is an American sportscaster, radio personality, and actor. He hosts The Dan Patrick Show broadcast on radio on Premiere Radio Networks and streaming on Peacock. He co-hosted NBC's Football Night in America and serves as a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He worked at ESPN for 18 years, where he often anchored the weeknight and Sunday 11 p.m. edition of SportsCenter.
Early life
Daniel Patrick Pugh was born in Zanesville, Ohio, and was raised in Mason, Ohio, in a family of six children. He was a basketball player in high school at William Mason High School, where he scored a single-game personal best of 36 points and earned AP Class AA All-Ohio third-team honors. He graduated in 1974.
He attended Eastern Kentucky University on a basketball scholarship for two years before transferring to the University of Dayton, where he majored in communications. Patrick is an alumnus of the Eta Hexaton chapter of the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity at Dayton. His father Jack worked in the computer science department at UD until he died of cancer in 1981 when Dan was 24.
Career
Before working with ESPN, Patrick was known by his surname, "Dan Pugh", as an on-air personality with the album rock-formatted WVUD and then, WTUE in Dayton, Ohio (1979–1983). Patrick was then a sports reporter for CNN (1983–89), where his assignments included the World Series, NBA Finals and Winter Olympics. Patrick explained in an interview on December 10, 2021, with Zachary Levi that his boss at CNN said to adopt his middle name, Patrick, as his on-air last name. From 1989–1995, Patrick did a daily sports segment for Bob and Brian, a syndicated Wisconsin-area morning show, and in the early 1990s, he did sports updates for the Columbus, Ohio, Rock Station WLVQ and appeared on the morning show "Wags and Elliot."
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).