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Today Dan Peterson turns 90, a coach, commentator and commentator who has been very popular in Italy for over forty years, despite never having dealt with football. His notoriety is partly due to the numerous and important successes in basketball, obtained decades ago, but above all to the way in which he described this and other sports.
Since the 1980s, his strong American accent and his way of coaching and communicating – direct, histrionic and passionate, sometimes “volcanic” – have made him one of the most recognizable coaches and commentators in Italy. With his commentary he created original and memorable expressions and sayings. Some entered the language of other commentators: for the sports commentator and narrator Federico Buffa, who has always been greatly inspired by him, Peterson “completely changed the narrative of sport in Italy”.
According to Buffa, Peterson was the first to talk about the “inertia of the match”, translating badly from English
Dan Peterson – according to Buffa «an unrepeatable man» – was born on January 9, 1936 in Evanston, near Chicago. He began coaching as a boy, but in baseball, a very popular sport in the city thanks to the presence of the two historic teams of the Cubs and the White Sox. The Chicago Bulls, the city’s basketball team since 1966, would only become popular in the 1980s, after the arrival of Michael Jordan.
Peterson moved on to basketball with some experiences in US universities, then from 1971 to 1973 he was coach of the Chilean national team, with good results. In Italy those years are remembered above all for an urban legend according to which Peterson was sent to Chile as an agent of the CIA (the main US foreign intelligence agency) with the mission of monitoring the government of Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in a coup d’état just a few days after Peterson had left (moving to Italy). It is talked about in almost every interview with him, but there has never been any evidence, even though the United States certainly played a role before, during and after that coup.
It is true, however, that when Peterson arrived in Italy to coach Virtus Bologna (then one of the strongest and richest teams in Europe) expectations were very low, given that he was a practically unknown coach. Yet in the end he did well for Virtus: he remained there until 1978, winning an Italian Cup and a Scudetto. It was there that he stood out for the combative way in which he managed and motivated his team, for which he was often compared to the Portuguese (football) manager José Mourinho.
In 1978 Peterson moved to Olimpia Milano, which he coached until 1987. He won four Scudetti, coaching among others Dino Meneghin, one of the strongest Italian basketball players ever. His most memorable season was 1986/87, when Milan achieved the “treble”: championship, Italian Cup and Champions Cup, at the time the main European basketball trophy. That European Cup victory was historic: in the return match of the quarter-finals against Aris Thessaloniki, Milan managed to recover the 31-point deficit suffered in the first leg in Greece by winning 83 to 49.
It was soon after that season that Peterson decided to stop coaching. He was only 51 years old, but the second and most profitable part of his career, namely television, was already taking shape.
In 1981 Peterson began doing commentary for the first NBA games broadcast in Italy (initially on Primarete Independent, and then on Mediaset channels). The NBA, the North American basketball championship, was already the most spectacular in the world and Peterson commented on it with anecdotes and stories as a great connoisseur and enthusiast, which combined history and sport and which contained expressions and phrases that many fans still remember. Among many, “not doing something stupid is like doing something intelligent” and “never bleed in front of sharks!”.
At the end of the game Peterson instead shouted “Mom, throw away the pasta!”. He said he had Italianized a phrase by Bob Elson, a baseball radio commentator from Chicago who in similar situations would say “mom, put the coffee on the stove.” Inspired by Elson, Peterson was among the first commentators in Italy – together with Sandro Piccinini – to introduce a more colloquial and lively style, less technical and less detached from the facts.
“PANDEMONIUM!” it was another one of his
This charismatic way of speaking and acting, combined with the charm of his accent, pushed Mediaset to also entrust him with the hosting and commentary of other events, such as the Oscar ceremony or the inauguration of Ronald Reagan’s presidency in 1985. In the same year he also began advertising Lipton tea, which made him extremely popular even beyond sport.
«Number one for me!»
In the 1990s Peterson did commentary on the Italian Serie A basketball and some very popular wrestling events. In 2007 he also ended up commentating on Slamball, a sport similar to basketball but with four players per team and several rubber bands on the court to make spectacular dunks.
After two seasons as a consultant for Reyer Venezia, in 2011 Peterson returned to coaching. Called to Olimpia Milano by the owner Giorgio Armani, he accepted also driven by the remorse of having abandoned his first career too soon. His second coaching career lasted only six months and did not bring any trophies, but the following year Peterson was inducted into the Italia Basketball Hall of Fame, the highest recognition of the FIP (the Italian basketball federation).
And despite having become famous in Italy for his long television career (of which commentary was only a part), Peterson remained an authoritative figure in basketball. It is no coincidence that his nickname is still “The Coach”.
At 90 he is still very active. He no longer coaches, but gives numerous interviews and often writes for Gazzetta dello Sport and he has a newsletter – it’s called “The Coach”, in fact, it’s in English and he calls it blog – in which he deals with basketball, but also with the Second World War and life in Italy: on 6 January 2026, so to speak, he wrote about the bidet.
Worth a look
