Sam Dick Bio
Sam Dick is a co-anchor of WKYT’s evening new newscast in the United States. Dick has worked at WKYT for half his life, and nearly every day is a different day as Sam Dick puts it. Besides being a long-standing media presenter for WKYT, Sam has always set out to help society.
He is a small business owner and entrepreneur and organizes many group activities including the Triathlon of Legacy Kids. Dick has won numerous awards including five regional Emmy Awards and two Regional Edward R. Murrow Awards. He is also an Eagle Scout.
Sam Dick Age
He was born in Lexington during the first years Central Baptist Hospital started delivering babies.
Sam Dick Family
Both his parents had small-town roots. His mother, Rose, was first-generation Italian and grew up in Centerville, Iowa. Sam’s father, David, was raised in Bourbon County, mostly in North Middletown and Paris. “As a boy, I remember coming to Central Kentucky, and visiting a small farm on Plum Lick that my father loved dearly.” Sam’s father eventually moved the family to Washington, D.C., where he started his network reporting job at CBS. Later the family moved to Atlanta,
Sam Dick Education
Sam graduated with a degree in Journalism from the University of Georgia.
Sam Dick Spouse | Wife
Dick has been married to the love of his life, Noelle, for 20- years. He and his wife have restored a century-old home near downtown Lexington.
They are also the owners of a small business called CycleYOU located on Midland Avenue. Dick is a triathlete and has competed at the world and national levels. He and his wife are members of the Central Christian Church.
Sam Dick Children
He has three grown children, Sam III, Leah, and Christina, and a grandson, Sam IV.
Sam Dick Career
After graduating from college returned to Kentucky for his first news reporting job at WKYT in 1979. He wasn’t in the news long before he made the move to the co-host of “PM Magazine.”
The 30-minute, early evening program was a big hit with Kentucky viewers every weeknight at 7. “It was an incredible experience. We did stories on white water canoeing, mountain climbing in West Va., cave exploring, the Dukes of Hazard visiting Hazard and so much more. It was a blast!”
Dick had a powerful television link and storytelling. His dad was a CBS correspondent for 19-year, so Sam was brought up observing his dad broadcasting from all over the Southeast.
“I have always enjoyed meeting new people with interesting stories to tell, and then using pictures to help tell that story.” After PM Magazine, Sam took his storytelling to New York and worked as a general assignment reporter for WCBS. Later he went to Orlando, Fla., and specialized in health, consumer, and investigative reporting at WESH.
Later on, WKYT General Manager Ralph Gabbard had an opening on the anchor desk. “I was thrilled at the opportunity. I felt like I had tasted the larger markets, but Lexington was home.”
In 1987 on labor day, Dick started his second stint at WKYT and has been here ever since. Among his favorite trips on the job: covering the Final Four trips with the Wildcats in 1996 in New York City, 1997 in Indy, 1998 in San Antonio, and 2011 in Houston and 2015 in Indianapolis.
“I also relished the trip I took with Coach Cal to Haiti. It was eye-opening to be in an already impoverished country that was now dealing with a disaster. Washing the feet of the children receiving new shoes with the Coach was a humbling experience.”
Dick says the saddest, most gut-wrenching days came when Comair Flight 5191 went down. “The phone rang at about 6:30 that morning. I just happened to be up, and it was my news director. He said very calmly, you need to come in, we think there’s been a plane crash.
I went on the air at 7 a.m. and stayed on the air most of the day and into the evening. As the hours went by, I realized it would be one of the most important stories I would report on for this community. I tried to be as honest and respectful as I could.”
Sam Dick 2019
The UK Sports Network, in collaboration with the WKYT channel, UK Athletics ‘ formal channel, aired an exclusive behind-the-scenes TV show of Kentucky’s basketball men’s road trip to Mississippi State.
As the official UK television partner, WKYT and anchor Sam Dick were granted insider access to follow along with the Cats on their road trip to Starkville, Mississippi, for the Feb 9, 2019, game against Mississippi State as the Cats edged out a close 71-67 victory over the Bulldogs.
“Beyond the Bench: On the Road with Kentucky Basketball” will provide viewers an inside look at everything that goes into making a UK road trip a successful one, including the team flight, team meals, shootaround, equipment managers prepping, locker-room access, exclusive interviews with head coach John Calipari and more.
“As I told Sam when we were doing the special, we try to make every road trip as routine as possible to prepare our kids,” UK head coach John Calipari said.
“What we maybe take for granted is how much preparation we put into each game and how focused our kids have to be for each and every game, especially when you’re everyone’s Super Bowl. When WKYT and the UK Sports Network approached us about doing this, I thought this might be a neat deal to show our fans what we do week in and week out in the SEC.”
Sam Dick faces a setback in battle with cancer
“We found something.”
Those three words from my urologist, Dr. Fred Hadley, changed my life in an instant. I sat there in the exam room stunned. Too shocked to look at my wife, Noelle. This could not be happening to me. I had no symptoms. I was in great health. I trained for triathlons. Cancer had no place in this equation.
But I should have seen this coming. My father David had fought prostate cancer for 18 years. In his final year on this Earth, he was really struggling. Determined to live, he had exhausted all medical help in Kentucky and taken the fight to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.
Cancer would eventually win in July 2010, but my father would make his last stand on the family farm, Plum Lick. My father had urged me to see a urologist before turning 50. Generally, most men can wait until the half-century mark to see a urologist and have their first PSA test for a baseline number.
But if you have a family history of prostate cancer, and I did with my dad, you should have your first PSA in your 40s. PSA stands for Prostate Specific Antigen. A simple blood test measures a protein produced by the prostate, and you are given a PSA number. Generally, a number under four is good.
Having a high PSA number does not mean you have prostate cancer, but men with a higher PSA number are more likely to have cancer. I saw my urologist every six months, and my PSA numbers ranged from 1.5 to 2.1. All good. Then in 2010, my dad’s last year, my PSA number suddenly doubled to 5.0. Red flag.
I pushed it to the back of my mind. Taking care of my dad in his final days was the priority. After my dad passed, I had another PSA test, and the number was still around 5.0. Damn. Now I had a biopsy to see if I had prostate cancer. As you know from the start of this story, I did.
My doctor told me the cancer was probably contained to the prostate. It had not moved out of the prostate. That was positive news. With cancer, you take the little victories wherever you can. Prostate cancer generally is slow-growing, but my wife and I had my dad’s long fight on our minds.
His cancer was found late in his life, and by then it was out of the barn. My cancer seemed to be confined to a place where we could fight it. We did some research and decided to remove my prostate.
I would go to a surgeon who had many years of using the da Vinci Surgical System. This allows the doctor to do the surgery through small incisions that heal quickly and speed up recovery. The robot also helps the surgeon avoid cutting too many nerves around the prostate.
Information is key. My wife and I researched different treatments and decided cancer had to go…now. You don’t want cancer getting loose in the body.
We decided to have my prostate removed by Dr. Joe Smith at Vanderbilt. He was nationally recognized for using the Da Vinci robot thousands of times and teaching other doctors how to use it. When a surgeon removes the prostate, he is trying to spare as many nerves as possible to limit side effects like impotence and incontinence.
Both of those are life-changing, and the doctors can’t guarantee you won’t have either or both to deal with. In the end, you want all of cancer removed with the prostate. You hope and pray some of cancer hasn’t moved into other areas of the body.
In my case, Dr. Smith told me the biopsy showed cancer looked like it was confined to the prostate. While modern medical technology is changing how cancer is treated, there’s a lot the doctors don’t know about cancer.
That’s what makes cancer so had to pin down. During my cancer journey, I have come to learn that what you are told about your cancer is not always exactly accurate. It’s no one’s fault. Cancer is a formidable foe. It’s evil.
The da Vinci robot in the hands of Dr. Smith will leave only small incisions, meaning a faster recovery. In fact, I would stay only one night in the hospital, be up and walking with the assistance that day and have no pain. Yes, you read that right.
They removed my prostate, and I had no pain afterward. Dr. Smith told my wife he thought he had removed all cancer and that the surgery went really well. Prayers answered. A few weeks later Dr. Smith would tell me I was cured. Within three months I was finishing a triathlon and doing just about everything I had done before.
But there were two exceptions. Remember I mentioned side effects. In the months and years to come, I would deal with leakage and a degree of impotence. The doctors will tell you that those side effects often disappear after months or years. But there is no guarantee.
In my case, eight years later, I am still dealing with the side effects. Fortunately, I have a wife who is patient and supportive. We don’t let the side effects change our lives much, and find ways to get around the post-surgery changes.
For the next two years, I had my PSA checked by my urologist. With the prostate removed there’s not a lot of the protein (PSA) being produced, so your number should be undetectable. One day, two years after surgery, my number was suddenly not undetectable. It was a tiny number, like .10.
But it was a red flag. Maybe the doctor did not remove all cancer. We did two more PSA tests in the next several months to confirm the number. Both PSA numbers came back tiny, but also not undetectable.
That meant some cancer had escaped the prostate. Fortunately, only a small amount of cancer remained. It was disheartening some cancer was still sticking around. My new cancer doctor in Lexington recommended radiation, small direct doses every day for two months.
Every weekday I would have a 1 p.m. date with my doctor, lie on a table, and watch a giant machine rotate to direct the radiation into the area where we believed cancer remained. It only took about 15 minutes, and it was painless.
The goal was to have all cancer removed and a PSA number came back at undetectable. I am happy to report I have my PSA checked every six months, and each time my urologist reports my number is undetectable.
Is all cancer gone from my body? I hope so. So what have I learned? I owe my life to my doctors, my wife, and my father. He urged me to have my first PSA in my 40’s and not wait until age 50. If you have a family history of prostate cancer, ask your doctor about a PSA test.
It gives you a baseline number so if down the road it jumps as mine did, you can have it checked out. I learned to do your homework. There are many different ways to treat prostate cancer, and new things are coming all the time. Find the surgeon who fits you.
Meet with him. You should have time to do these things. You will need the support of the family. Depend on them, and let them help you. I went public with my cancer because I thought I might be able to help other men, and to this day I have men talk to me about my experiences and decisions. But most of you are private citizens, and what you do is your business.
As my late friend, Rick Corman told me not long after my diagnosis… “Sam, I would trade places with you in a heartbeat. My cancer is not curable. Yours is…” He was unfortunately right. Rick would several years later pass away after a brave and determined fight against cancer. Prostate cancer can be treated. You can live a full, healthy life after cancer.
Sam Dick Nationality
His nationality is American.
Sam Dick Net Worth
His net worth result is under review.
Sam Dick Measurement
This information is under review.
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