sports spotlight: adam hooper
Adam Hooper
By Mike Tupa
April 4, 2025
Bartlesville Area Sports Report
ADAM HOOPER
Like “Big John” of the iconic Jimmy Dean country song, Adam Hooper was a “big, big man.”
But the verdict of the weight scales didn’t tell the full story. Every pound of Hooper was heart — all heart.
His presence fully enveloped whatever room he entered, whatever sports arena he showed up at.
There was no such thing as a fast trip for Hooper from the radio broadcast booth at Bill Doenges Stadium down to the concession stand and back. It seemed that every other step up the stairs, someone got up and shook his hand wanted to chat with him like an old friend. Unless pressed for time, Hooper always obliged, sometimes sitting down to converse without seeming to have any other concerns. To put it simply, he loved people — not because he felt the obligation to be friendly because — beyond his local celebrity — he genuinely loved people.
Not that Hoop — as he was known — didn’t sometimes get momentarily mad or frustrated. But, those times were few.
Hooper’s gregarious and unfettered personality — his passion and caring and his need to love others and hunger to be respected and appreciated by others — was almost a force of nature.
A graduate of OKC’s Mount Saint Mary High School and Northwestern Oklahoma State, Hooper was 32 when he arrived in 2005 in Bartlesville to work as an assistant sports director and in other capacities for Bartlesville Radio. It was in broadcasting games — and engaging with the coaches, players, administrators and fans — Hooper found his overwhelming purpose in life.
He became the voice of sports for area schools — particularly Nowata and Dewey — for Bartlesville Radio. He also derived incredible pleasure from announcing for the Doenges Ford Indians in American Legion Baseball action, as well as Oklahoma Wesleyan University basketball teams.
The schools and communities for which he regularly announced adopted him as an honored native son.
This writer recalls a night he encountered Hooper announcing games at the Caney Valley Basketball Tournament. During a break, he told me his grandmother — to whom he had been very close — had died. Despite that crushing information and the sadness, he continued to do the job that he knew others depended on him to do.
Hooper labored a dozen years for Bartlesville Radio — including the last few weeks fighting against a persistent respiratory condition, for which he had sought medical care.
But on the morning of April 17, 2017 — less than 10 weeks after his 44th birthday — Hooper passed away in a Tulsa hospital surrounded by family and friends.
Thousands of people throughout a three-county area felt they had lost a favorite brother or a best friend.
Nowata and Dewey even named their annual football showdown as “The Adam Hooper Bowl,” which took place 2018-23. (Dewey and Nowata did not play each other in 2024.)
Even though he’s been gone more than seven years, Hooper is still affectionately remembered by friends for his unbounded sense of humor, his giant laugh, his sensitivity to their thoughts, his sincere joy at the success of the teams he covered and his fulfillment at being a broadcaster.
He was a big, big man. And it was all heart.