Long before Dan Hicks and Tommy Roy shared a brain, they shared a rivalry.
“I’m not sure if you know this, but we both came from Tucson, Arizona,” Roy says, shooting a glance in Hicks’ direction. “We were both at the University of Arizona.”
“We were in rival fraternities. The two best fraternities on campus,” Hicks replies with a smirk. “But we never met. Tommy was actually starting to work at NBC Sports before he left school. And so he was on the road, so I never had a chance to meet him.”
But even after Roy left Fiji’s friendly confines for his first full-time TV producing job, he couldn’t escape the precocious Sig Ep underclassman.
“The funny thing is when I got hired full-time at NBC, my mom, she was living in Tucson, she called me,” Roy remembers. “She goes, ‘yeah, there’s this Dan Hicks guy on KVOA, you’ve got to see him!’”
A few years later, the dam finally broke … in a hallway 6,000 miles from home. As Roy remembers it, he was in the International Broadcast Center at the Barcelona Olympics when he spotted an unfamiliar face walking down the hall. It was Hicks, a rising on-air star who’d just been hired away from CNN.
“My first Olympics, my first time out of the country,” Hicks picks up the story. “A lot going on and finally I saw Tommy standing there.”
“Little did I know that I’d be attached at the hip to him for the next 30 years,” he says.
“Amazing,” Roy says, his eyes now showing a hint of wistfulness.
