Doggedness, relentlessness defined longtime broadcaster Ed Daniels like few others

“Beyond a shadow of a doubt, he’s the hardest worker I’ve seen,” said Ken Trahan, who met Daniels at the age of 15 and became his best friend. “He’s just out of sight when it comes to hard work. He doesn’t have any substitute for that. He goes above and beyond; he’s like an NFL coach, stay up late at night and early in the morning doing things, and that’s just the way he is. He took pride in what he did and trying to do it right and trying to do it well. He’d challenge me and push me in that regard, too, and I really adopted that and appreciated that.”

But that doesn’t come close to encompassing the totality of Daniels, who graduated from Archbishop Rummel in 1975 and after stints as a sports director in Lake Charles (1980-81) and a sports reporter and weekend anchor at WDSU in New Orleans, found his permanent professional home a WGNO-TV, where he became sports director in 1992.

There was a sense of humor and sensitivity, masked by the stern look that gave off an impression of perpetual seriousness and tunnel vision.

“He always had this front of being gruff and humorless,” said Ro Brown, who worked with Daniels in Lake Charles and in New Orleans at WDSU. “But he was just funny; god, he was funny. He used to have us rolling with laughter all the time. He had this gruff thing, and then five minutes later, he’d take me in a corner and come whisper, worrying about somebody that he’d just been gruff with, or acted gruff with.

“When my mom passed away in 2010, I called him to tell him. He and Robin were on vacation. The funeral comes about, and they were at the funeral. It wasn’t like it was the next day, but I’m thinking to myself and I asked him, ‘Did you cut your vacation short to come back for mama’s funeral?’ He said, ‘No, no, we were back.’

“To this day, and I told him, he was lying. He came back. And even if he wasn’t lying, that tells you something that I believe he was lying. But I really think he cut his vacation short to come back. I really believe that.”

That side of Daniels, who sang in his church choir and faithfully attended Mass, was another layer not everyone knew intimately, but often received glimpses of.