Yesterday (January 27, 2020) was the 19th anniversary of the 2001 plane crash that killed 10 people associated with the Oklahoma State men's basketball team, a loss of life which included OSU SID Will Hancock. This is the heart-wrenching column written by (now-retired) University of Texas assistant AD Bill Little in remembrance.
Author’s note: In the midst of the tragedy surrounding the deaths in a helicopter crash of basketball star Kobe Bryant, his daughter, college baseball coach John Altobelli and six others, I was surprised to realize that it has been exactly 19 years since I wrote this commentary about the
fatal crash of a plane carrying basketball players and staff from Oklahoma State University who were returning home from a road trip to Colorado.
This was a piece I never intended to write. It was much too close, and it hurt too much. Our basketball SID, Scott McConnell thought differently. “You have to write something for our website,” he said. And so I did.
In over 50 years of writing, including hundreds of stories and commentaries and nine books, nothing else I wrote ever elicited the response that came from this piece.
As the title says, “it touched us all.” Now seems a perfect time to revisit it. Thanks to Scott for seeing the need for it, and thanks to my longtime colleague Barb Kowal for sharing this with the CoSIDA membership of today.
Editor’s Note: Now retired after a distinguished and award-winning career in athletic communications at the University of Texas, Bill Little is a former CoSIDA president, a CoSIDA Hall of Famer and author of hundreds of stories and publications which earned CoSIDA writing awards throughout his career. Bill currently serves on the CoSIDA Special Awards Committee.
Will Hancock, the OSU men’s basketball SID, was among the 10 men who lost their lives in this crash. His father, Bill Hancock referenced here, is now the Executive Director of the College Football Playoff.
OSU Tragedy Touches Us All
by Bill Little
Texas Media Relations
Original publish date: January 28, 2001
There are times in life when you just want to reset the clock. Turn it back, change something...anything.
What do you say to a father whose son was one of the bright lights in your own profession...a young man with a new baby and a great future...who suddenly lies still in a snowy field in Colorado? How do you reach out to a colleague who watched the same young man pack his computer, his game notes, his media guides and his bags and head off to the airport on Friday?
While the world waited to celebrate the Super Bowl, those of us in college athletics, particularly those in the family of the Big XII, cried a lot today.
Throughout America, college basketball teams traveled Saturday. They played their games, got on buses and airplanes, and headed home. Oklahoma State should have been no different. A tough loss to Colorado behind them, in a couple of hours they would be home in Stillwater with their three planes carrying their team and support staff. Problem was, one of the planes didn't make it back.
An experienced team of investigators will determine what went wrong. The logic in us will appreciate that. The emotion will still cry.
Almost every phase of a college team was represented on that plane. Rick Barnes brought it home to his own team when he named two of his own players, a Texas manager, an administrator, a radio announcer, a trainer, etc. People they knew, and they understood it could have been us. The team members broke down and cried for 30 minutes. There were players, a manager, a trainer, a radio announcer, a radio engineer, the basketball operations chief who is the coaches' right hand man, and a sports information director.
And he was my friend.
Will Hancock was 31 years old. He was an SID.
There are 1,800 dues paying members of CoSIDA, the national organization of College Sports Information Directors. These are the men and women who often labor behind the scenes...always dedicated to telling the good things about their athletes, their coaches, and their program. All of us have ridden where Will was Saturday afternoon. He might have even had his laptop out, getting ready to update the statistics so he could steal a few extra moments at home before he went in Sunday to update his release and get ready for the next game.
Will was like other SIDs in some ways, yet he was unique in others. He was a second generation SID. His Dad, Bill Hancock, had started in this profession as an assistant at the University of Oklahoma. That's where we met 30 years ago. Bill would go on to his present job with the NCAA, where he basically runs the NCAA Basketball Tournament, the madness called March that runs to the Final Four. He got the job because he is competent, fair, honest and a genuinely nice person who operated with supreme class. So is his wife, and so was Will.
That was the phone call I had to make Sunday...to tell Bill Hancock there was really nothing I could say. It did not surprise me that he was worried about his other son, who was on his way to Stillwater from the northeast. That was a tough phone call, he said. And he asked how about how tough it was for Big XII commissioner Kevin Wieberg, whose nephew was the team manager who died? On a day when most folks were trying to decide which Super Bowl party to attend, Bill Hancock was trying to decide whether to go to Colorado, where bodies lay in the field, or stay with his wife, Nikki, and their daughter-in-law and three month old granddaughter.
Several months ago, the Sports Information profession lost one of its giants, a kind man named Bob Bradley. Semi-retired, Bob was in his 70s. He had seen over 500 straight Clemson football games before succumbing to a variety of diseases that took him from us. That was sad.
This was tragic.
Will Hancock and those who died with him were, for the most part, young--with the whole world in front of them.
So, along with everybody who knew him and them and even those who didn't, I have struggled to find meaning--any meaning--in this.
It would be nice to think these deaths will mean something, that we will learn something from this. But teams will have to travel. It's been 30 years since the Evansville basketball team and the Marshall and Wichita football teams went down in plane crashes. Our travel patterns changed back then, erring on the side of caution, and in time, we moved on. Men's and women's teams face high costs and tough class schedules, and getting to and from games expediently became the rule.
Maybe we will learn that nobody was at fault here--that this one will be simply a bad deal of the cards, a fact of nature that defied human creations and jolted us to reality. For whatever reason, the word "fair" isn't coming to me just now.
Sunday morning I sought some help from Gerald Mann, who is "The Preacher" to Darrell Royal and 9,000 others at Riverbend Church in Austin. He was preaching about grief, and he was preaching to me.
"The only way to deal with grief," he said, "is to replace it with gratitude."
Several years ago, a young neighbor of mine named Matthew was preparing for school. The honor student at the Christian school went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, and he never came out. His Dad found him on the floor, 15 minutes later. He was dead. No one ever knew why. His heart just stopped, and he was gone.
I will always remember what his Dad said to me that night as we all tried to help. Darrell Royal, who has lost a son and daughter to tragic deaths, will tell you that you never get over losing a child.
"Go home and hug your kids," said Matthew's dad.
I had hoped all night that I would find that Will Hancock was not aboard that ill-fated plane lying broken in Colorado. The morning paper broke my heart.
I thought of Bill, and Nikki, and called (Texas AD) DeLoss and Mary Ann Dodds, who had worked with Bill in the Big 8 office, when Will was just a boy.
And then I remembered Matthew's Dad. I wanted to find Scott McConnell, who does basketball for our SID office, and hug him. I wanted to tell Dan Ahearn, the man who handles basketball operations for Rick Barnes, how much I appreciate him. And I wanted to find my sons and daughter, and hug them.
That's the gratitude that Preacher was talking about. Sure, I am thankful that Will Hancock represented our profession so well, and I am grateful that I had a chance, though ever too brief, to know such a fine man.
But the only thing we can take from this that will mean something is to tell those we love and those we work with how much they matter.
And do it today, because tomorrow may never come.