I first met Ed Daniels when I was a fledgling sports producer for Jim Henderson while at Channel 4 and he was a young sports reporter at WDSU and immediately I was in awe of a whirling dervish of activity, speed, and mental sharpness.
He was always trying to figure things out. He was always planning a step or two ahead. As I watched him progress in his career one thing became clear. Ed Daniels would never be outworked.
My former colleague and current FOX Sports commentator Chris Myers, himself no stranger to hard work, always admired Daniels and wanted badly to hire him. Again, it was all about the work effort and thoroughness.
Ed was a sports reporter and anchor but could just as easily have done a number of other things. I would not have wanted to be the attorney on the opposing side of his preparation. But, it was sports he loved. From tennis to his uncanny three-point shooting on the media basketball courts, he loved the work, the effort, the intensity.
On the air, Ed was a walking encyclopedia of local sports knowledge. But what he loved most of all was prep sports. He had a fascination with young players giving their all for the love of the sport and those who helped prepare them for their various pursuits.
Close to 35 years ago, he launched a Friday night high school sports show with J.T. Curtis and he tackled it like he tackled everything in life that mattered to him – with the highest sense of preparation and purpose. It was widely copied around the country.
Ed didn’t limit his knowledge or preparation to prep sports though. He was knowledgeable about the city’s pro teams and the college teams that surrounded the area.
Ed’s sportscasts and sports specials were chock full of information and you came out of them knowing you were completely covered on the local day’s sports.
He also did lengthy post-game shows whenever ABC Sports had a Saints or LSU game of note. Ed would routinely use “prep” coaches like J.T. Curtis and Timmy Byrd for his analysis.
While some in the local media may have scoffed at using prep coaches to dissect pro games, Ed cared about only one thing – Did they know what they were talking about? The answer, was always ‘yes,’ for if they didn’t, Ed would not have put them on.
As for those who helped him put on the shows – the producers, directors, photographers, reporters – Ed demanded a lot, but no more than he put in himself. When one of his former reporter/photogs applied for a job here, I was planning to screen for work ethic, which is a hard one to prove. When he told me he had worked more than a half dozen years for Ed, I didn’t need to hear any more.
But as much as Ed tried to put 30 hours of work into a 24-hour day, he also never forgot the humanity in people. He worked his employees hard, but he cared for them. He cared for those of us he saw out in the field.
He was always asking how the family was doing, how things were going at your respective places of work. His daily routine began with a workout and running errands for his beloved wife Robin.
He cared. He cared deeply. His only limitation was the clock. Couldn’t there be more hours in a day? More days in a week? More weeks in a year?
Ed worked hard. He played hard. He cared hard. He felt he owed his best to the audience. He rarely failed to deliver.