Norm Hitzges has been talking sports on the radio in Dallas longer than I’ve been alive. Considering the median age in North Texas is 35.6, there’s a pretty good chance that holds true for you, too. His radio run comes to an end next Friday, when the 78-year-old institution broadcasts his last show on The Ticket.
“I shall so miss the daily rush of being on the air,” Norm said during today’s announcement on the Norm and D Invasion, his 10-to-noon show with Donovan Lewis. “But after 48 consecutive years on the air in Dallas doing sports talk, it’s time to move on to the next phase of my life, whatever that may be.”
Norm has a few ideas in mind: writing, traveling with his wife, a podcast he intends to start in September. He didn’t rule out making special or fill-in appearances on the station, either. He made sure to note that his decision wasn’t related to his health, a welcome bit of news given his announcement three years ago that he was undergoing treatment for bladder cancer.
But for the most part, this is the end—of Norm as a fixture in our daily lives, and of bigger things that came with it. Norm is the radio analogue to Dale Hansen on television: the last of his era, the foremost link to the old ways. He could still tell you war stories about this market back in the ’70s. He still loves horse racing and baseball. No one has injected more sports into his job title, in breadth and depth, in a medium trending toward specialization.
His move to The Ticket in 2000 was fascinating to listen to. He’d worked for many years at 570 KLIF, doing straight-ahead sports. The Ticket crew, innovators of guy talk, regularly poked fun at him, imitating his voice and inventing a relationship between him and a stuffed panda bear Norm supposedly used to drive in HOV lanes. Norm took it in stride when he switched frequencies. He evolved some, embracing a looser style on the air, happy to talk travel alongside tackling and technical fouls. He fit in just enough to make it all feel natural, somehow managing the difficult trick of remaining the voice of a medium in this city without actually being the voice of his station. He sublimated himself to the gestalt of his new team. When you turn on The Musers or The Hardline, you hear The Ticket. When you turn on Norm, you hear Norm—on The Ticket.
Unlike Hansen, the final great—in stature, not just skill—sports anchor in this market and most others, Norm will not be the last of his kind. Far from it. There will always be more of his ilk: sports junkies who cannot be compelled to stay quiet in volume or meek in opinion, who have to research and learn and obsess and tell you about every bit of it, at considerable length, in service to you becoming smarter, entertained, and preferably both. You’ll hear his descendants. That is comforting.
But will they endure the way he did, nearly half a century, with several generations growing up on him, growing older with him, his voice only a flick of the dial away through childhood, puberty, and every stage of adulthood? Almost certainly not.
Because Norm was prolific, and Norm was excellence, but, most of all, Norm was permanence in an increasingly transient world. Just by showing up to work each day, without trying, he linked what was to what is. When I had the privilege of hopping on air with him in April to talk Clayton Kershaw, I spoke to him as the 36-year-old sports editor, but I couldn’t help hearing him as the 6-year-old in the front seat of his father’s van, listening to Norm and Leon Simon on KLIF during the morning drive to school. Leon died in September 2018, my father almost a year to the day later. Norm and I talked about both men during commercial breaks. Something about being in his presence made it easy for the past to flow into the present, those who passed feeling not so far gone.
Maybe you’ll hear his last broadcast as your inner 16-year-old, your inner 26-year-old, your inner 46-, 56-, and 66-year-olds. Maybe all of them at once. If anything could summon so many versions of yourself, it’s listening to a voice that’s transcended all of them.
And at 12:01 p.m. on Friday, June 23, has becomes had. Norm’s chair becomes someone else’s. The voice alongside Lewis, whoever it is, will sound decidedly less nasal. You’ll get used to it, perhaps long enough to love it. Long enough to mean something, to matter? Those are open questions. Norm Hitzges answered every one of them, though, apart from this: how much can we miss him?
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