Mabel the dog and the sports radio talk show host in Charlotte she rescued
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- WFNZ sports radio host Travis “T-Bone” Hancock shared Mabel’s slow decline on-air.
- Adopted in 2019, Mabel the dog helped Hancock through COVID, personal crises.
- Charlotte-area listeners and shared their own dog stories in support of Hancock.
Travis Hancock had to take three days off last week due to a death in his family. He thought he could get back to work after only two days, but found out he just wasn’t ready.
“She was my life,” he said.
Who died?
Hancock’s dog, Mabel.
Known as “T-Bone” on the popular Charlotte sports radio morning show “Mac & Bone,” the on-air version of Hancock is quick-witted, caustic and often hilarious. But Mabel the rescue dog showed his soft side, and her public journey toward a final goodbye over the past two weeks prompted an outpouring of stories and support from his listeners.
There’s a universality to this, and all you need to do is scroll Hancock’s Facebook page to find it.
There are dog people everywhere. I’m one of them. But dogs’ lifespans are only a fraction of the average human lifespan. So if you live a relatively long time and love dogs (or cats, for that matter), you’re going to have to go through several wrenching days as a pet owner, when the vet tells you it’s time to let go.
If you’ve known that feeling, that pet’s name and his or her last day is forever embedded in your memory. I’ll briefly tell you my own story about that later, but first — Mabel.
Hancock adopted Mabel in 2019. He “fell in love” with her, as he said, on the basis of an online photo. In this case, Mabel really did look like her picture.
At age eight, Mabel was a senior dog already. This didn’t make her a popular choice among prospective owners. She had already been to five other rescue dog events without anyone taking her home.
A mixture of a Labrador and a terrier, Mabel was a sweet, squat, black-and-white mutt who weighed 48 pounds and barked maybe once a year. Hancock made Mabel her own Twitter account and there infused her with a personality “sort of like one of the Golden Girls, because of that name,” he said. “She had an attitude.”
Sports radio callers ‘have a soul’
By providing companionship, Mabel helped get Hancock through COVID. She became a minor celebrity, once accompanying Hancock to the swanky Knight Theater in Charlotte to judge a dog talent show. That night she had her own green room.
Mabel got paid in Wendy’s chicken nuggets every Friday. She seemed fine with the arrangement.
As dogs will do, Mabel adapted to the quirks her owner had. Foremost among them was his strange work schedule. Mabel got up around 4 a.m., when Hancock did. He would feed her and take her out before he left each morning for the show. Sometimes he knew she was dawdling when she went out to do her business in the pre-dawn hours, just to mess with him.
Hancock’s show, where he’s a co-host along WFNZ’s Chris “Mac” McClain, runs from 6-10 a.m. weekdays on 92.7 FM and is one of the highest-rated radio shows in Charlotte.
The show usually contains dozens of hot sports takes every four hours, many of them coming from listeners so loyal they have on-air nicknames themselves. Those listeners are usually mad at something — the Panthers, the Hornets, their favorite college team or something one of the co-hosts or another listener said. Outrage is the currency of choice.
Not this past week, though. When Hancock came back to work Thursday, McClain noted on the show that Mabel should get an award of some sort for calming the discourse around Charlotte sports.
“We’ve got to give her a prize because all these dudes on the text line — we’re finally seeing they have a soul,” McClain said. “They have a heart!. ... The Nobel Peace Prize?”
“The Nobel Treat Prize,” Hancock countered.
After each day’s radio show was over, Hancock came back home. He and Mabel then took a nap and then arose for the rest of the day. On Fridays, he would drive her to Wendy’s in the back seat and buy her some chicken nuggets. If he missed posting a “Mabel and the nuggets” photo one week, WFNZ listeners complained on Mabel’s behalf.
Mabel had another role, too.
“She was one of the greatest excuses you could ever have in life,” Hancock said. “I can’t tell you how many times I said, ‘I can’t be at that work meeting at noon. I’ve got to take Mabel out.’”
This was sometimes true. Hancock hasn’t always been alone in taking care of the dog, but it’s been that way for much of Mabel’s life. He was her sun and moon. Hancock, 42, is single, with no kids. He lives in Mooresville.
“I’ve been doing single-dog parenting,” he said. “I was her primary person for everything. Every meal. Every walk. Every vet trip.”
Toward the end, those vet trips always held the potential of doom. Mabel had various health problems starting in 2023, and enough of them were serious that Hancock would say to himself before each vet visit: “Can we just get a few more months?”
Mabel hung on. She got him through all of 2024, though, as Hancock went through several personal crises, including a breakup, the death of two friends and what he calls “a major anxiety crisis.”
“Mabel didn’t let me be stagnant,” he said.
A dog that chewed Legos
As Hancock and I spoke, I kept thinking back to Rose, our own rescue dog who we had to put down in August 2025. We had her for 12 years. She grew up alongside our four children.
The people who had run the rescue dog operation had warned us about her up front.
“She’s been returned once before already,” the volunteer said. She glanced at a form on a clipboard. “It says here that she barked too much and that she also chewed up too many Legos.”
Rose turned out to be just what we needed, as Mabel was for Hancock and probably your dog has been for you. In so many cases, it becomes a “who rescued who?” situation.
Rose did indeed bark at everything and acted most of the time like she had just scarfed a dozen Red Bulls, sprinting around the yard in happy circles with aerodynamics straight out of NASCAR. She was 25 pounds of white lightning. We kept the Legos hidden.
Our third child, who had been sharing a room with his older brother when we got her, was soon brave enough to move into his own room.
“As long as Rose will sleep beside me, I’ll do it,” he said, and so she did, and he did.
At age 15, Rose developed a pronounced limp in her back right leg. I took her to the vet.
The vet went down the hall to run some tests, came back and looked at me solemnly. I started crying before she said a word. It was cancer.
When we had to put Rose to sleep a few weeks later, with all the children surrounding her, we gave her some chocolate first, before the shots. Chocolate is a no-no for dogs, as most canine owners know, but by then it didn’t matter.
Rose gobbled it up, lay in my arms and not long after was at rest.
‘Mabel was getting old’
I’ve never told anybody that story outside our close friends and family. But Hancock’s very public goodbye to Mabel inspired me to do it. He let his listeners in on the toughest moments of a pet owner’s life, in real time. They responded.
“I appreciate all the people reaching out,” read one of his posts on X. “Means the world to us. Usually people only check on me when Duke loses or a chain restaurant closes.”
Hancock has played a “heel” (his word, using the wrestling term) off and on for years for WFNZ, a station where he has literally spent half his life. He started at the station at age 21, an intern from a local broadcasting school. His only previous work experience was bagging groceries at a Food Lion in Winston-Salem.
But he has the gift of gab, and people like to engage with him, and he gradually worked his way up. Hancock never did end up graduating from that broadcasting school, but he got a real-life education at the station booking guests, producing and eventually ascending to a co-hosting position alongside McClain.
Will he get another dog at some point? Maybe, Hancock said. But for now he’s going to take a break from pet ownership. The last few weeks have been understandably wrenching.
Now let’s back up for one second:
Yes, I know Mabel was not a person, and Rose wasn’t either. Losing a human being you’re close to — that’s in another category altogether. It’s far more significant in all respects. Let’s make that extremely clear.
But pets are just so uncomplicated. So easy to love. And their deaths are traumatic — just ask anyone who’s seen “Marley & Me,” “Old Yeller” or (and this one that really wrecked me when I was a kid) “Where the Red Fern Grows.”
“Every time we went to the vet, they would just tell me Mabel was getting old,” Hancock said. “And I knew on one of those trips they were going to say, ‘She’s getting too old.’ And that’s ultimately what the last visit was.”
Mabel got down to 31 pounds near the end. She had trouble walking. She died a few months short of her 15th birthday, at 4:30 p.m. last Tuesday, with Hancock holding her close.
“She was a good dog,” Hancock said.
You bet she was.
This story was originally published March 3, 2026 at 5:30 AM.
