Friends remember Detroit sports media mainstay Jamie Samuelsen

Reality set in earlier this week, when some of Jamie Samuelsen’s closest friends stopped by to say goodbye.

Samuelsen, 19 months removed from a colon cancer diagnosis he kept private, was fading. He was not in pain but his energy was drained. On Monday morning, Samuelsen told his longtime listening audience on the “Jamie and Stoney” show on WXYT-FM (97.1).

The next day, his friends who had long since known about his diagnosis came by his house.

[ Tigers remember Jamie Samuelsen with moment of silence on Sunday ]

“It was beautiful,” Fox 2 sports director Dan Miller, who worked with Samuelson since 1997, said on WXYT on Sunday afternoon. “I hadn’t seen him in some time and as we began to see what the finality of this was and where this was headed, I think it was just so meaningful to be able to sit with a group of his friends and be able to talk to him one final time."

Samuelsen, the longtime Detroit sports media voice for more than 25 years, died on Saturday afternoon. He was 48 years old.

“It wasn’t dark, it was beautiful," Miller said radio host Pat Caputo during the Tigers' rain delay. "And just as I’ll always remember everything about Jamie, I’ll remember that as being the final time. But in many ways, that was just another time, because he was Jamie and that was a beautiful thing.”

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Along with Miller, a pair of Samuelsen’s longtime radio partners — Mike Stone and Detroit News columnist Bob Wojnowski — and longtime WXYT producer Evan Jankens, the group found closure in their friendships with Samuelsen and the struggles he faced since his diagnosis in January 2019.

“One of the greatest human beings I’ve ever known,” Stone said on WXYT, clearly still dealing with the emotions of a day earlier, when he spent time at Wojnowski’s house after receiving the news. “Everybody was so correct: He was just one of a kind.”

Both Miller and Stone said that the sudden nature of Samuelsen’s death came as a surprise, given how strong he had looked and sounded throughout the process.

“He never let on, never,” said Stone, Samuelsen's radio partner in morning drive the last four years. “It wasn’t until two weeks ago that he let us know that it was really, really serious, but that’s the way he wanted it to be. It was tough and what I didn’t realize is that even through the COVID stuff, I never knew until the end how much of a struggle it was for him to do four hours on the radio.”

During the coronavirus pandemic, Samuelsen had been broadcasting from his basement, which Stone thinks was a blessing.

“He didn’t know if he’d be able to drive to work and he never let us know that. We never knew that until the very end.”

Samuelsen, who grew up in Northern California and graduated from Northwestern, introduced himself to the Detroit market in the mid-1990’s. He has been a mainstay on the radio, working for WXYT, WDFN, WRIF and WCSX. He was a consistent contributor to Fox 2 television and has written a weekly blog for Freep.com for the past decade. But, as evident in the social media reaction following his death, while Samuelsen was most known for his public persona, those close to him remember his private persona.

“Jamie was one of the most genuine guys I’ve ever met,” former WXYT on-air personality Mike Sullivan said. “One thing that always stood out to me was simply how he treated other people.”

Sullivan met Samuelsen in 2013 as an intern at WXYT.

“He has obviously gone through a lot lately in his battle, yet amidst everything, he still somehow took time two weeks ago to send me a beautiful message wishing luck in my next chapter,” Sullivan said. “It’s just the guy he was. He cared. And he always treated everyone around him with respect. I’ll always remember him bringing his kids into work and seeing first-hand how great of a father he was too. Jamie will be deeply, deeply missed.”

Contact Anthony Fenech at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @anthonyfenech. Read more on the Detroit Tigers and sign up for our Tigers newsletter.