Here Comes Trouble
If you think dan patrick has made a lot of noise as a radio talk show host, wait until he gets to the Texas senate—and starts his campaign for governor against his new boss, David Dewhurst.
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Because the show belongs to Patrick, he can say whatever he wants. The former sportscaster is obsessed with statistics, however debatable (“more illegal aliens in federal prisons than murderers, kidnappers, and rapists combined … more abortions performed in this state annually than students graduating from Houston high schools”). The callers serve as a Greek chorus of conservative grievances. Almost all these listeners speak in the kind of flinty Texas accent you don’t hear much in Houston anymore, unless practiced by trial lawyers giving closing arguments before a jury of people with flinty Texas accents.
Patrick is also exceedingly gifted at spin. He’s long tried to attract African Americans to his program. “I’ve always said that when black Americans start voting for two parties, that’s when black Americans will have real power,” he told me. “As long as they vote as a bloc, the Democrats will take them for granted and the Republicans will ignore them.” He swaddles his border baiting in concern for Hispanic Americans. Thus, he will say on the radio, “We are going to be overrun by the masses coming here. By 2050 we could have over one hundred million people with no sense of our history, no sense of our culture, no sense of our language … Your property taxes will never go down as long as a fourteen-year-old can show up at the schoolhouse and we pay … And that student is destined to drop out anyway.” But then he adds, “I do not want to see racism raise its ugly head in America again. If we do not solve this [border] problem, there will be resentment in America.”
All of this is aimed at a narrow audience. Patrick told me his listeners are 65 percent male and 35 percent female, with the ages of the men spanning from forty to sixty, while almost all the women are over fifty. Ninety percent of them are white. “Minorities don’t listen to talk radio. Young women under forty aren’t listening,” he told me. “The nature of the audience tends to be conservative and Republican.” Then he shrugged, as if to say that his content was, then, a no-brainer.
“The typical Dan supporters are the ones wearing the crazy buttons and hats that blink on and off at political conventions,” a GOP consultant explained. “Sophisticated Republicans take their votes but don’t embrace them. Dan embraces them. He touches the lepers.” In the process, Patrick has reenergized and reengaged the base and, not coincidentally, created a constituency for himself. When an elected official charged that Patrick had only 60,000 listeners, his political consultant and chief of staff, Court Koenning, replied, “If that’s true, fifty-eight thousand of them vote in the primaries.”
A lot of people with Dan Patrick’s history might have decided that running for public office was not a good idea. “Dan’s had a lot of failures” was the way one political consultant put it delicately. Public brawls, acrimonious lawsuits, and angry creditors punctuate his life story. But what the Republican establishment doesn’t understand or chooses to ignore is that the dark days of Patrick’s life make him more, not less, appealing to his constituents.
In his office, Patrick keeps a worn flannel shirt draped over a chair. It belonged to his father, and he keeps it there as a reminder, he says, of his father’s goodness. Charles Goeb was an ex-Marine who distributed the Baltimore Sun to carriers and worked his way up to circulation manager. “He couldn’t go any farther because he didn’t have a college education,” Patrick, who would later change his name from Goeb, told me regretfully. (“I never liked the sound of Goeb,” he said.) Dan’s mother, Jean, was a bookkeeper who never made it to college either. There wasn’t a lot of money; Dannie Goeb’s childhood home, in the late fifties and early sixties, was in a blue-collar part of East Baltimore. Patrick often tears up or gets a quiver in his voice when he talks about his father, who died in 2002. He remembers his sticking up for people in the neighborhood who had less; once the elder Goeb called on a state representative when he couldn’t solve a problem himself. “I realize that I’m the guy people look up to, but in my family, I’m the least of any of them,” Patrick told me. There are lines to read between here; an idealized father, a family limited by economics and education. It’s not really surprising that Patrick, who was very bright, grew up with great ambition and a thin skin, along with an unpredictable rage toward those in authority, particularly those who would challenge him.
At twelve he was selling newspapers on the streets of the city, a job that allowed him to discover and hone a gift for persuasion. He worked his way through the University of Maryland—Baltimore County selling advertising time on a local radio station and working as a disc jockey, becoming the first member of his family to graduate from college. Patrick always knew his calling: He dreamed of hosting a game show or The Tonight Show, and in 1977 he finally talked his way into a sportscaster-weatherman job at a small television station in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He moved on to bigger jobs in Washington, D.C., and then Houston, as a sportscaster at KHOU. By then Patrick was married to Janet Lea (a brief first marriage to a high school sweetheart ended in divorce) and had become a father. The couple have two children—a son, Ryan, who is a Harris County prosecutor, and a daughter, Shane, who is headed to nursing school.
Most broadcasters succeed by smoothing their rough edges. Patrick quickly distinguished himself as a media madman; he excelled in a town where the competition included whorehouse-busting eccentric Marvin Zindler. He was a newsroom prima donna, but he also possessed remarkable talents, not the least of which was the ability to speak off the cuff indefinitely, without a teleprompter, which earned him the nickname the Silver-tongued Devil. Patrick also knew how to turn his need for attention into ratings gold: Besides painting himself blue in support of the Oilers, he did sportscasts wearing an oversized cowboy hat, rising out of a casket, and wearing a tuxedo and breaking into song. By 1983 he was the second-most-popular TV personality in Houston. Success, however, did not bring happiness. Sensing that there was more to life than reading sports scores every night, Patrick decided to change careers.
Houston was awash in oil money, and with several investors, Patrick opened Dan and Nick’s Sportsmarket, one of the first sports bars in the U.S. Located in tony Rice Village, the combination bar and restaurant was all polished brass and fine woods, full of local jocks and celebrities, TVs tuned constantly to sporting events. (Too constantly: The NFL would sue Patrick and five other bar owners in 1987 for showing blacked-out games.) For a while the business thrived, largely on the strength of Patrick’s personality, but he soon fell prey to the same financial lunacy that infected so many Houstonians in the early eighties. He bought another bar and restaurant, and then another, expanding, finally, to five. Then the oil bust hit, and in short order the man who had made $100,000 as a sportscaster closed four of his businesses, declared bankruptcy, and watched his annual income plummet to $10,000. At the age of 36, he was broke and bitter.
Trouble continued to plague him when he was assaulted at the bar by another local celebrity, an irascible, aptly named Houston Post gossip columnist, Paul Harasim. Harasim was charged with assault, and Patrick sued both the Post and Harasim for libel, claiming his reputation had been damaged by the fracas. (The man who would later champion tort reform sought $400,000 in actual damages and $1.2 million in punitive damages.) In the criminal trial, Patrick solidified his reputation as an overly emotional crackpot. “Are you in balance today?” Harasim’s lawyer, Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, asked him on the witness stand, and Patrick promptly turned red-faced and started screaming at him. The jury found Harasim not guilty. Patrick’s libel suit was dismissed with prejudice in 1993.
To make money, he bought a daily four-hour block of time at a small radio station in Tomball. Ever resourceful, Patrick built a studio in his surviving bar and started a sports talk show, selling ads to make ends meet. At first he had to recruit customers to call in from the pay phone. Eventually he got a break: The shareholders of the station were suing the owner, a Tomball podiatrist, and the station was in danger of going dark. Patrick cut a deal: He persuaded the doctor to sell the station for the price of the remaining debt owed. At the same time, he talked the shareholders into dropping the lawsuit in exchange for 50 percent of his earnings. Patrick began to run the place in 1988. Six months later, an unknown conservative New York talk show host contacted him about getting on the air; two bigger local stations had already turned him down. Patrick needed voices to fill long hours of empty airtime, and so he decided to put on Rush Limbaugh. It was a business decision, not a political one—Patrick had no thought of running for office then—but the show was a hit, and so was KSEV.
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