The unpublished works of my whimsical pal.
By Dave Zeitlin
I was on a family vacation in Charleston, South Carolina, in December when my phone buzzed with a text from longtime friend Dan McQuade C’04.
For anyone else, it would have been an unusual message.
Alongside a pair of photos—one of his two-year-old son, the other of a side character from a justly forgotten movie, both eating a sandwich from the top instead of the side—he wrote: “He’s eating a sandwich like Jackee in the soccer classic Ladybugs.”
Naturally I stopped what I was doing to fire back a text. “Hahaha. Time to show him that movie,” I joked about his son Simon.
Dan replied just as quickly. “That movie should be rated ‘no one admitted until 67.’”
I can’t remember exactly how it started, this running joke about an “NC-67” soccer movie from 1992. It may have been when the Philadelphia Union screened it on the stadium jumbotron during a kiddie campout more than a decade ago. (“It is NOT appropriate,” Dan mused, though he allowed, “I guess there just aren’t that many American soccer movies to show.”) The premise of Ladybugs has not aged well: a man angling for a job promotion dresses his fiancée’s son as a girl to help his company’s girls’ soccer team. Alongside the lazy sports underdog tropes and gender-stereotype humor, there are also, as Dan was wont to point out, multiple jokes that turn on child molestation. And the main character, mystifyingly, was played by a 70-year-old Rodney Dangerfield. “Like the role was written for a much younger guy??” Dan texted me once.
I’ll miss laughing with my friend about a lousy movie from three decades ago.
After Dan—a well-regarded writer, blogger, and video editor—died, at 43, in late January of neuroendocrine cancer [“Obituaries,” Mar|Apr 2026], I’ve found myself digging through our old texts to remember his quirky humor and cope with the tragedy of a life cut way too short. I haven’t been the only one. Many journalists and Philadelphians who liked his distinctive writing style have been rereading some of the best articles he wrote on sports and culture. (I’ve hit those archives too.) But those of us who were lucky enough to call Dan a friend had something even more special: a treasure trove of unpublished works from a writer who, as one online tribute put it, “collected absurdities the way others collect baseball cards or coins.”
Dan’s texting topics were as diverse as his friendships: malls, sneakers, bootleg merch, diners, dive bars, and the innumerable idiosyncrasies of his beloved hometown of Philadelphia. Between the two of us, Ladybugs loomed amusingly large—as well as the Air Bud sequels Dan loved to playfully chide. (After he died, I wrote in a Facebook post, “No one could hilariously recall and write about bad movies and TV shows like D-Mac.” His mom, in the early stages of her grief, left a comment: “‘Hey, Coach, how’d you like my spin move?’ Blue Chips.”)
There were many other things. Penn basketball. Philadelphia Union soccer. The articles we were both working on. He’d randomly text me a photo of the 2001–02 La Salle men’s basketball media guide, whose cover depicted players sitting around a conference table with the line “We Mean Business.” I’d text him a weirdly framed Daily Mail headline about Fran McCaffery W’82 getting hired to coach the Penn basketball team: “Caitlin Clark’s potential father-in-law to coach Trump’s alma mater.” We talked about college basketball stats, vintage Penn memorabilia he liked to collect, and inside jokes from college, when we took road trips for the Daily Pennsylvanian and once bet on a little kids’ basketball game during halftime of Penn–Yale in New Haven. (Dan wrote about this formative memory multiple times. He regarded little kid basketball the best halftime show because “every shot gets cheered like it’s a game winner.” He also boasted how he won that bet against me.)
Dan wasn’t always filled with joy. In college he wrote a column about battling depression. He talked to me about his insecurities related to getting denied media credentials at certain events. Maybe that’s why he always sought out humor wherever he could find it. And for all the enjoyment he got from laughing at bad movies, headlines, or ledes, Dan was incredibly humble and kindhearted. As our friend Sebastian Stockman C’01 put it in his own tribute, which focused on their mutual love for cringeworthy journalistic openers, “Unstated but almost always present in our shared laughter at these foibles was an empathy for the writer. Sometimes you try to do too much! It happens to everyone!”
My friendship with Dan actually predated texting. I didn’t even have a cell phone yet when we met as Daily Pennsylvanian sportswriters, and after graduation we mostly kept up over Gmail, making plans to hang out at the Palestra, our apartments, or neighborhood Philly bars. He did over email what he’d later do so well over text, sending out-of-the-blue messages just to recall and revive jokes from our DP days.
Over time, as it happens, we saw each other less frequently. I only met his wife a few times and never got to meet his young son, despite our frequent attempts to make plans. When it comes to close friendships, texting should never replace seeing each other or even talking on the phone. I know this. But with Dan, somehow, the texting felt special. He had an uncanny ability to brighten people’s days with long and thoughtful messages that were impeccably curated to his and their shared interests. And he managed to do this, it seemed, with hundreds of people.
Given our relationship, perhaps it’s not surprising that he first shared his cancer diagnosis via text. After explaining his rare condition and daunting treatment plan, he ended by writing, “I am scared but not all that worried. I got this.” So we continued on. I’d check in on him and invite him to join me at the Palestra. He’d send photos of his son, pointing out the humor and unexpected joys of fatherhood. (He had always taken an interest in my own son, jeering Princeton with him during an Ivy basketball tournament game three years ago and once interviewing him for an article he wrote about Lionel Messi playing against the Union.) Things felt as they always had.
Then, three weeks after his December Ladybugs message, he knocked the wind out of me with the most brutal text I’ve ever received: “My treatments have failed. I have weeks to months, probably on the shorter end. I remember so many great things from college and after. Wherever I am in the end, I know I’ll miss you. <3.” Less than two weeks after that, his mom called to tell me that Dan had died.
Since then, through the tears and the grief, I’ve felt urges to text my friend. There would have been plenty of reasons to do so. I wanted to text him about who I saw at his own funeral and the post-cemetery pub hang with a motley crew of old DP pals. I wanted to text him about weird moments from the Winter Olympics, like the Norwegian biathlete who revealed that he’d cheated on his girlfriend during a live post-win interview. I wanted to text him about the Penn student who took a full windup on a short putt on the Palestra floor during a game-break promotion and later when Quaker standout TJ Power (who Dan had texted me in December “sometimes looks like the best player they’ve had in forever”) dropped a whopping 44 points on Yale to send Penn to the NCAA tournament. I especially wanted to tell him how cool it was that Christine Nangle C’02 and Matt Selman C’93 [“Stewarding The Simpsons,” May|Jun 2025] included his likeness in a background shot of The Simpsons’ 800th episode, set in Philadelphia. I watched that episode with my kids, pausing the TV when cartoon Dan popped up behind the Phillie Phanatic during a concert. He would have loved that episode so much.
At his funeral, Dan’s mother, wearing a Penn scarf, told me how she lamented not being able to send him a text complaining about the Sixers trading away promising young guard Jared McCain the previous day. At a “Remembering Dan” event at Philadelphia’s Pen & Pencil Club in early March, one journalist remarked that she’s in a group chat of people devoted to sending texts about eccentric things they see that Dan would have loved. I thought about how watching the World Cup this summer won’t be the same without seeing his name pop up on my phone during USA games.
My stream of text messages, and that of anyone else who knew him, will forever feel less colorful and more predictable.
How does such a hole get filled? It doesn’t really, not exactly. I’ll do my best to break up the mundanity of daily carpooling and logistical texts by reaching out to friends, randomly, when a funny memory or thought pops into my head. I hope to keep up with old DP colleagues whom I’ve talked to more since Dan’s death, and to make new friends as he did so well. I’ll try to be more curious, to notice life’s absurdities, to understand what Dan intuitively knew: that while there will always be milestones to rejoice and news stories that will make you feel angry or sad, finding a way to laugh at something offbeat and silly is an underrated way to stay connected to the people you love.
And just now, as I’m writing this, I’m rewatching Ladybugs, smiling through gritted teeth at Rodney Dangerfield’s crude jokes and misguided quest to coach a winning soccer team. Spoiler alert: I still can’t believe he got that promotion.
Dave Zeitlin C’03 is an associate editor at the Pennsylvania Gazette and a former sports editor of the Daily Pennsylvanian, just before Dan McQuade held the same position.
