Roots for Alan Cannon run very deep. And as the Associate Athletic Director for Media Relations at Texas A&M University and one of CoSIDA’s newest Hall of Fame inductees, they are intertwined with loyalty, commitment, wisdom and heart.
“AC”—as he has been known throughout the college sports information industry for more than 30 years—has a career that has spanned from the sandlot baseball fields of his hometown Dallas, to the hallowed halls of the Heisman Trophy room in New York City.
Along the way, he has earned a reputation as a sports information director who has combined great public relations skills with the nuts-and-bolts knowledge of his business that blends professionalism with a love of
athletics, his university, and the young men and women whose lives he has been involved with since the late 1970s.
While his first association with athletics at Texas A&M University came as a walk-on baseball player in 1981, he had experienced the SID business while still in high school in the Dallas area. There, as a participant in an intern program in his high school, he “walked on” to the media relations office at SMU. There, working with Bob Condron (who later would become the director of media services for the U.S. Olympic Committee) and Maxey Parrish (who years later retired as SID at Baylor), he got an early lesson in the profession.
But it would be after his enrollment at Texas A&M in College Station, Texas, that he would catch “the bug” of the business.
Working as a student assistant in the sports information office while headed on a career path as a marketing major, he assumed the primary responsibility for the
sport of baseball. Soon, his journey would take him to friendships and opportunities that involved some of the university’s most famous people.
While still a student, he intersected the baseball coaching careers of two Aggie legends—Tom Chandler and Mark Johnson—the two winningest diamond coaches in school history. Then, in 1983, Cannon was a student at Texas A&M when arguably the most famous Aggie of his time—Heisman Trophy Winner John David Crow—became the school’s associate athletic director. Under football coach and AD Jackie Sherrill, Crow assumed responsibilities for all sports at Texas A&M other than football.
As Cannon was finishing his collegiate studies, fortune turned positive for him, Texas A&M, and the profession of sports information in general. It was the summer of 1985, Cannon needed a job and the Aggies found themselves in need of a full-time assistant sports information director. That was when John David Crow hired Alan Cannon.
“You have to hire Alan Cannon,” a close friend at The University of Texas told Crow. “He is everything that Texas A&M stands for, and he is everything an SID should be.”
So with loyalty in his pocket and excellence on his sleeve, Cannon made a career move to the only full-time job he’s ever had.
“I figured if somebody from our biggest rival thought he was that good,” Crow would say years later, “then we darned sure should look at him. And we were right. He’s as good as there is.”
In the spring of 1989, after four years of working with primary responsibilities in baseball and men’s basketball, AC was promoted to Sports Information Director, and he started by combining down-home Texas hospitality with information efficiency. For years in the days of the old Southwest Conference, CoSIDA legends such as Jim Brock, Wilbur Evans and Jones Ramsey had earned the reputation as the ultimate hosts and goodwill representatives to the media on their campuses.
Cannon took that to a different level. Legendary television announcer Keith Jackson remembers the time that AC hustled over to a College Station barbecue place and shipped a care package—complete with a knife to cut the meat-- to Jackson and the ABC crew when they were on the air at another venue.
While bowl games and NCAA events would be frequent, Cannon would be called on to manage some of his university’s most historic moments in the years that would follow. The prelude to the sporting side came when he was part of a team at Texas A&M that helped with the planning of the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library on the College Station campus.
Then, in 2012, athletics at Texas A&M took a dramatic turn, and managing information and people became a vital part of the excursion.
Cannon had been a part of the ending of the Southwest Conference and the creation of the Big 12 Conference in the 1990s. Now, he was no longer telling folks
about history—he was walking through it.
Texas A&M elected to become a member of the Southeastern Conference in 2012, and suddenly, Cannon was blending new media outlets with those of his traditional roots. But an even bigger opportunity was about to present itself. In a red-shirt freshman quarterback named Johnny Manziel, Texas A&M found perhaps the most dynamic, and certainly the most famous, football player of the era.
High profile didn’t come close to fitting a description for Manziel. In that first year in the SEC, Manziel won big games and eventually the Heisman Trophy, launching two seasons of intense media relations and media scrutiny. Through all of that, AC maintained a steadying influence in an arena filled with potential danger zones.
And so, in the summer of 2014, Cannon, the 2002-03 CoSIDA president, will be joined by his wife Kaye - who still teaches kindergarten in College Station - and daughters Katie (19) and Macie (13) as one of CoSIDA’s newest Hall of Fame members.
He is, after all, a creature of the roots and values he has learned and nurtured. AC is a great and loyal friend, a credit to his profession and his school, and rock-solid in a business where too often steady is overlooked, and underestimated.