Daniel McQuade, a former editor and writer at The Daily Pennsylvanian, died on Wednesday of neuroendocrine cancer. He was 43.
Before becoming widely known for charting Rocky’s absurdly long training montage run, posting a video that helped lead to Bill Cosby’s downfall, and poignantly documenting his fight against a rare cancer, McQuade — a 2004 College graduate — spent his formative years at the DP.
McQuade was a prolific sportswriter, columnist, DP Sports editor, and managing editor at 34th Street Magazine. D-Mac, as he was known at Penn, won back-to-back Michael A. Silver Writing Awards and was the DP’s Editor of the Year in 2002. He was a constant uplifting and joyous presence in the DP office and on road trips.
Since his passing, tributes from friends and family have poured in, honoring the impact he had on those closest to him and his work for Philadelphia Magazine, Deadspin, Defector, and others.
His colleagues from the DP complied their favorite memories and stories in honor of his memory.
2003 College graduate Dave Zeitlin, DP Sports editor on the 117th Board
D-Mac and I came up together as sportswriters at the DP, covering some outstanding Penn basketball and football teams. While getting to sit on press row together at the Palestra and Franklin Field was awesome, the best parts were the random ways we’d make each other laugh on road trips. For the next 20-plus years, we still talked about the overly intense Lafayette football player and the Brown football coach who stormed out of his own press conference; the time we were late to the 2002 playoff game for the Ivy hoops championship at Lafayette (Penn crushed Yale to make the NCAA tourney!) because a photog had to use the bathroom en route; the little kids’ basketball game we bet on at a Penn-Yale game in New Haven, Conn., which D-Mac wrote about multiple times since; and other moments that D-Mac had an uncanny ability to recall and relive through out-of-the-blue emails and texts, just so we could share another laugh. (The fact that I’ll never get another one of those texts, or hear his amazingly loud laugh, is hard to accept.)
D-Mac and I remained close after college, hanging out at Philadelphia bars to play Quizzo, watch World Cup games, and of course go to the Palestra together. He had so many unique interests, curiosities, and passions that he shared with so many different friends, but for us it was our love of college hoops that was the glue to our friendship. When he wasn’t texting me about ridiculous parts from the “Air Bud” movies or “Ladybugs,” or recent sweet updates on his two-year-old son (he seemed so proud to be a new dad), he was sending live updates of Penn hoops games, photos of antique Quaker memorabilia, or stats about Penn’s insanely high three-point proficiency from the early 1990s and early 2000s (led by his favorite player, classmate, and 2004 College graduate Jeff Schiffner).
Recently, we went back to Abner’s just before it closed for good to reminisce about the few times Penn reached 100 points and fans rushed across campus to get a free cheesesteak. And he joined my then nine-year-old son and me to watch Penn play Princeton in the 2023 Ivy League tournament. (My son loved sitting next to him at Jadwin Gymnasium, and also getting interviewed by him later that year for an article D-Mac wrote on Messi playing against the Philadelphia Union.) The Quakers lost a tough one to their hated rivals and getting in and out of the Princeton parking lot was a mess. But we still enjoyed ourselves as always, especially watching another halftime game between little kids! I’ll be forever grateful for one last basketball road trip together.
Oh, and one more thing: the next day, D-Mac sent me an article he wrote about his day going to the Ivy tournament followed by a trip to Atlantic City, N.J. for the MAAC tournament with another friend. (I told you the man loved his college hoops!) “I got some stuff in there about how bad Princeton’s gym smelled,” he texted me then, and which I’m including here now, because I think he’d appreciate getting one last funny dig in at Princeton.
2004 College graduate Amy Potter, executive editor on the 119th Board
It’s hard to pinpoint a single, distinct memory of D-Mac because he was the background soundtrack of my entire college experience. His staccato laughter, enthusiastic and boisterous storytelling, and encyclopedic knowledge of everything sports and Philadelphia were my everyday.
We started as sports reporters together and then moved up the ranks, first as DP Sports editors and then onto leading the DP and Street. I spent more time with Dan than probably anybody else in college. We shared thousands of late nights rewriting headlines and wrangling unhurried reporters (you know who you are!). We traveled up and down the East Coast to cover games, and D-Mac entertained me with his hilarious reflections and insights in the car or train, on press row, and at postgame press conferences. His humor was inimitable and highly entertaining. D-Mac had a way of narrowing in on (what might seem like an irrelevant) detail in a story and irreverently making it the main character.
Perhaps most importantly, he was my personal tour guide to Philadelphia. I naively moved to Philadelphia for college from New Mexico without any prior knowledge or connection to the city and was lucky enough to befriend Dan in the first few months. Dan helped me pull out of deep homesickness my freshman year at Penn. D-Mac subsisted on a diet of primarily cheese pizza, soft pretzels, and french fries in college, so we went to diners across the city, often very late at night after putting the paper to bed. I am pretty sure I went to my first Phillies game with him (at the Vet!) and he made sure I knew about cultural institutions, like The Gallery mall and Wing Bowl.
Dan gave it to you straight and was unambiguous with his opinions. At the core, D-Mac loved and cared for the people in his orbit; I was lucky enough to be one. My email and text history is littered with quick notes from Dan with a link to a story, and a remark on why he thought of me while reading it. I will miss him so much, and I hope to never, ever forget his laugh.
2001 College graduate Sebastian Stockman, summer DP Sports editor in 2000
We shared a love for the bad lede.
You know the kind: the tortured metaphor that died on the rack, the analogy that doesn’t quite match up, the writer who’s trying to do too much. Dan McQuade loved to reference my first-ever story for the DP (written when he was still in high school):
“The lyrics of the Bob Dylan song ‘Rainy Day Women’ are totally unrelated to track and field. The title, however, fittingly describes the Penn women’s track team as it attempts to repeat last year’s performance this weekend.”
Yeah, that’s the stuff.
Our 20-plus years of email and text correspondence are full of links to and snippets of what, one hopes, were absent-minded or hastily written ledes. We loved the absurd solemnity with which they were rendered and the seeming obliviousness — did you even read it out loud? — of the writer. Unstated but always present was an empathy for the writer. Sometimes you try to do too much! Happens to everyone!
My mental picture of Dan bears little resemblance to the pictures going around. Yes, of course, those pictures are what he looked like. But, as happens sometimes, the headshot in my mental file for Dan is fixed to the time I met him: a fresh-faced, short-haired, rail-thin rookie DP sportswriter. I was a veteran. We should have barely overlapped. I should have graduated just as he was getting his feet wet. But I didn’t (ever, if we’re going to get technical), and he became my editor, yet another who had to be trained that, in my lexicon, “deadline” meant “suggestion.”
We bonded over our love for Philadelphia characters (though my outsider’s appreciation couldn’t approach his bone-deep, born-here empathy). We attended at least one of those now-defunct orgies of bad taste and light blasphemy known as Wing Bowl. He always liked a story I’d written about Kenn Kweder the (still?!) Tuesday night headliner at Smokes’ who had and missed his big time shot in the ’70s. As recently as a year or so ago, he sent me a video of Kweder playing at a grocery store (?) on the day of the Super Bowl.
When I saw that the Philadelphia 76ers had (rightly) held a moment of silence for one of Philadelphia’s great chroniclers and champions — with Dan’s face up on the Jumbotron next to a still-not-believable span of years — I texted several old colleagues, “Dan would have both thought this was ridiculous and deeply loved it, which is perfect because it's how he felt about the city.”
2006 College graduate Jonathan Tannenwald, senior DP Sports reporter on the 121st Board
Dan McQuade was my first editor at the DP, in the Sports section in the fall of 2002. For nearly a quarter-century afterward, he was so much more than that.
Dan was, and remains, one of my journalism idols. He knew it because I told him, and I told him because I wanted him to know it. He appreciated it, one of the many compliments he gave me that meant so much.
For all the things he wrote about over the years, he was a brilliant sportswriter. He was as good at it a quarter-century ago, writing about Ugonna Onyekwe and Mike Mitchell, as he would go on to be about everything else. Some of us will always hold him as a sportswriter at heart.
Now the rafters of his beloved Palestra rafters have a new ghost.
Above all, Dan was the most joyous kind of professional cynic, as we call this job, and as we call it ever less now because so few people do it with a conscience anymore.
This time has been searingly painful for so many people. I can’t imagine how it's been for his wife and young son.
He would have told me to shut up by now, as he did often when I was being too nice to him. Alas, I will not; nor, I suspect, will anyone else who knew him.
2005 College graduate John Carroll, Street editor on the 120th Board
I worked at Street all four years at Penn. I knew D-Mac from high school, but we became closer during his time as managing editor at Street. Two memories from our time at DP:
1. When the second “Matrix” movie came out, I was in charge of the film section. I was a bit surprised when D-Mac insisted on running two reviews of the movie — mine and his. Did he not trust me? We had never done this before. Well, fast forward to the week of publication and my heart drops when I read D-Mac’s rebuttal to my review, which began: “John, you ignorant slut!” Yes, I had no idea at the time that Dan was referencing a famous “Weekend Update” bit from SNL. But when I saw him next, he was joyous: “I’ve been waiting months to use that line in print!” And then it all made sense: yes, it was a big film, but Dan had a big laugh in mind to justify it all.
2. D-Mac was a year ahead of me, and when he was graduating I was interested in taking over his position as managing editor. The one problem is that there were more qualified candidates with more experience throughout the paper. D-Mac, though, encouraged me to apply, walking me through the process and prepping me for the interview with the editorial board. And it was a great experience … up until, as I expected, I didn’t get the gig. I dreaded seeing him after that. I thought I had disappointed him. We went to the same high school, I long admired him and tried to follow in his footsteps, he helped me … and I failed. I managed to avoid him until the end of year banquet, when he cornered as I tried to sneak out early. This is so ridiculous to think now, but I had that childhood sense of “oh no, I’m in trouble,” the type of conversation I doubt D-Mac ever had with anyone. And instead, he just wanted to tell me he was proud of me. A bit surprised, I asked him why, and he said he saw that I had signed up to return as a section editor. He thought it was the right thing to do, and he didn’t know he would do it if he was in my shoes. And the thing is, in recollecting this, everything Dan did was great advice. I got valuable experience, and I didn’t let a loss stop me from doing what I loved. But he was doing all of this at 21 years old! I feel like this is perspective many of us don’t have for years after college. He was wise beyond his years, which is why I always looked up to him and why I was proud to become his friend.
2003 College graduate Tristan Schweiger, managing editor on the 118th Board
Most of my favorite memories of Dan from our DP days relate to how much he loved Philadelphia and all its storied institutions — like the Philadelphia Daily News, where his dad worked for many years. And Dan loved a good tabloid headline. At some point during the year when we were both on the editorial board, we took to amusing ourselves late at night after the next day’s paper had been put to bed (or, honestly, when we should have been working on getting the paper put to bed) by mocking up fake DP front pages in the style of the Daily News, complete with a red box that read “The Student Paper” where the real DN of course is “The People Paper.” The best were based on deranged voicemail “tips” we would get at the office. It’s the kind of thing that’s funny mainly to the people making the joke, but it’s one of my favorite memories of Dan and very much reflects how much he loved that city.
2006 College graduate David Burrick, executive editor on the 121st Board
D-Mac was my first editor and, in many ways, was responsible for my love of the DP and greater Philadelphia. He taught me many of the basics of writing — how to construct a story, how to ask the right questions of coaches, and how to cut extraneous information. As I matured, he taught me other important traditions of working at the DP, including traveling together to the paper’s fateful final visit to Chicken Hutch in scenic Nashua, N.H. Prior to going to Penn, I had never really spent any time in Philadelphia. D-Mac provided an education on all the local traditions, such as the best places to get a cheesesteak and what time you had to arrive to get tickets to the Wing Bowl. After Penn, I would keep in touch with him through his amazing writing. His annual review of the T-shirts on the Wildwood Boardwalk was pitch perfect. The last time I reached out to him was several months ago to compliment him on his incredible piece on his battle with cancer. He will be dearly missed.
2004 College graduate Steve Brauntuch, editorial page editor on the 119th Board
Most of my memories with D-Mac come from outside the Pink Palace — Sunday afternoons at Shula’s/Top Dog watching football, trips to the Vet for dollar hot dog night to watch the Phillies lose to whoever was in town, and then watching him eat nothing but pizza for an entire year when we lived together senior year on Chestnut Street.
But what I always remember and love about D-Mac was his desire to make himself and everyone else laugh. Nobody loved a meme more than him, and nobody went deep on inanity and nonsense more than him. The “Rocky” article was one of so many where he found something that was insanely dumb and taught a master course in picking it apart just because it made him laugh. The clip we shared between each other so many times was the “Family Guy” spoof on Madden and Summerall announcing a football game where Madden just screams “FOOTBALL!!!!” at the top of his lungs and scared Pat out of the booth. That’s the stuff I’ll miss most — the creativity, the sense of humor, and the desire to share those ridiculous moments with everyone he knew to make them laugh as much as he did.
2004 College graduate Lauren (Karp) Brooks, photo editor on the 118th Board
One summer in college, D-Mac, Angie Louie, Jarrod Ballou and I randomly drove to Wildwood, N.J. I think we borrowed my mother’s car, but I can’t recall. Angie says it was an unusually cold summer day, but the details are hazy in my mind. What I do remember is the feeling of our friendship — Dan was always a willing companion for an adventure. We spent time driving around his neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia. We went to movies. We walked around the city. We spent countless hours on the gravel topped roof of the DP. The banal became enchanting when Dan was there to notice the quirks and inconsistencies of people, places, and life. Sadly, I haven’t spoken to Dan in over 20 years, but when I read his article about having cancer, the sound of his voice was palpable — I could hear him reading along — the cadence of his voice, the inflections where his voice would have risen, and the burst of his laughter. The world is quieter and less interesting without D-Mac’s voice.
