Athletic greatness comes in all shapes and all sizes.

It doesn't come naturally, but is achieved from hard work, diligence, and adversity.

Along the journey, there's opportunity and there's always struggle.

There is triumph and there is defeat.

And there is always a story behind the glory.

In Louisiana sports media.

Few have worn as many hats or warn them, as well as John James Marshall.

Marshall began writing for print at just 15 years old.

More than five decades later, his career has spanned nearly every facet of sports media.

Since I was little and could read, I've read what my dad has written.

Some of my core memories are at a high school football basketball, baseball game.

He's not a man of many spoken words, but when he writes, it's just a different side of him that you get to see.

He has become the definition of a journalist who didn't just adapt to change.

He embraced it.

So when I look at your career and it's been excellent in several areas, I see a Renaissance journalist.

I see somebody who started, like many of us did at our age, in print.

And you wouldn't dare.

You wouldn't dare swerve over into something else.

So.

But, but but I mean that with the greatest respect, a Renaissance person.

And not everybody can adapt.

I if you told me when I left Louisiana Tech, I would have thought I'd be a sportswriter for 50 years.

I didn't see any other path to it.

And I stayed on that path and stayed on that path and just loved it.

And all of a sudden, boom.

The Shreveport Journal folds, and the rug just came out from under me.

And I was kind of like, what do I do now?

I mean, how do I how do I stay in my comfort zone?

And then begin taking on different forms?

I went to the times for a while, and then radio became an opportunity, because this was a time in which sports radio became a big deal.

And I kind of put my hand up and said, hey, I'll, let's try that.

So do a couple of people.

And sure, they were willing to try anything back in those days on radio.

I'm curious though, and it may be a sore subject.

I'm curious because when you started the radio side of your career, you were still working for Shreveport Times and Shreveport Times made you make a decision.

It's got to be this, or it's got to be that.

It cannot be both.

Yeah, that was probably top three moments in my career.

What am I going to do?

And what what soul searching did you do?

I thought, well, I'm going to do what I love.

And I loved that.

And I thought the potential for that was going to be a lot better, you know.

To be honest, I didn't.

I'd worked for a family owned paper for 10 or 15 years.

When I went to the times, it was a corporate paper, and it was just not me.

And I didn't feel I never got my feet on the ground there.

And so going to radio, which was at the time the station was owned locally, I just felt a lot more at home and I thought, I can grow this, I can make this work.

And so I stuck it out on my own with, you know, three young children.

But I thought, let's give this a shot.

And in reality, it didn't like everything else in media.

It never really works out like you think it's going to.

It's always going to take a different path.

But it's it was looking back on it.

Boy, I made the right decision because I sure wouldn't be a sportswriter daily at the newspaper anymore, like I used to be.

He has moved seamlessly from print to radio, from the press box to the PA booth, from documentary filmmaking to television, play by play.

I, like J.J.

will make you work an hour longer.

Read a little more.

Copy out a little bit more.

Make another phone call because you know he's going to be good.

He co-founded Sports Talk with Jay, Jay and Bonzai Ben, the longest running radio show of its kind in the state of Louisiana.

And I've been fired only three times or four, I think.

Three.

But that's just that's once every 7 or 8 years.

That's not bad.

Let's acquaint our audience who's not not familiar with you, the audience around the state or other states with with how this is evolved.

What, what all what was the chain of command like as you you grew the show and and it became so much more prominent and so much more listened to.

Well, the key to the key to the whole thing was getting somebody else to be with me.

And you had somebody pretty close.

I had right.

We were my brother and I were driving to the Cotton Bowl, Texas A&M and Notre Dame, Cotton Bowl in 1993.

It was ice storm snowstorm ever.

And I said, well, I got a ski trip with my family coming up.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do to get somebody to fill in for me.

Right.

And I just assumed you were still solo at this point, so low at the time.

For 4 or 5 months I'd been solo, and he looked at me and said, I can do it.

And I said, well, you're a lawyer and you're my brother.

I mean, how's that going to go over?

I mean, what are you going to have your cousin on next?

I mean, how are you going to work that?

And I thought he's got the personality for it.

So how did the name Bonsai Bend come about?

Because we thought we can't just say you got to have somebody else.

I mean, you can't just say, I got I got to have my brother on.

I mean, I thought that would lose credibility.

Okay.

And so we came up with something and he said, let's make it alliterative.

Ten minutes before he went on the air, the first time, we had nothing.

And he goes, let's go with that.

I said, let's do it.

That's the way it works.

So he disguised the fact that he was my brother, right?

And he'd come out with all these crazy takes.

Why?

Dale Brown's not a good coach.

Why the Cowboys or know this, all this stuff, and and it just blew up.

His work has earned a four LSU Prep Writer of the year awards and two columnist of the year awards alongside his brother Ben.

He also has twice won the W. A's Best Radio Show contest.

This was a leap of faith for you, though.

Oh yeah.

With a young family and going from a steady paycheck at the three four times into unknown right at that time, especially unknown.

Correct.

What sort of internal angst did you.

I had a lot of it.

And when I realized it reached this point, when I realized, oh, I got a place self-employment tax, and I thought, I need to get a regular job, a real job.

So I wandered around in this for about 2 or 3 years.

It was it was great.

It was fun.

I could play golf a lot.

I could show up.

And it was a two hour show at the time, and we were getting sponsors and so on.

It was doing pretty well.

And then it just, I thought, I've not made for this.

I'm not a salesman necessarily.

I wanted to keep doing this as long as I could, but I knew I needed to get a steady more for the good of everyone, a steady job.

That steady job would appear in the form of a serendipitous, full circle moment to Marshall's career.

Today, he returns to the halls of his alma mater, Shreveport storied Jesuit High School, now known as Loyola College Prep, where he shapes the next generation of storytellers.

As an instructor of media arts, I thought about a lot of things other about selling cars, selling insurance, those kind of things, but that's not me, so I just follow.

Again, little corny, but kind of follow my heart.

And I thought, well, my heart was where I spent four of the greatest years of my life and had great memories.

And I thought, okay, I still know a bunch of people there.

So I called up Loyola College Prep, formerly Jesuit, and said, hey, y'all got anything?

Well, yeah, we do.

The person.

We just had somebody resign yesterday and it just fell into place.

And how fortuitous was that?

Yeah.

Well, I you talk about a God thing.

That was a good thing to me.

I have never met someone who is able to connect with so many different types of people.

He has a way of highlighting the good components of everyone, and he's really able to teach that to our students.

It's a whole lot more than just being able to use a camera.

It's being able to craft the story.

I'm not a science teacher, English teacher.

I don't teach all of the basics, but the electives, which again, this is an ever changing field in education, is video.

And I do the yearbook.

I do so there's print things involved with the yearbook, and there is video with video production class that I teach as well.

And so there are all sorts of things like that that I can fill that void with.

I do a photography class in the last couple of years as well.

So those things all tie together and their best, just an extension of what I was around the Shreveport Journal in the 1980s.

And I've got kids at LSU, worked for Tiger TV.

I've got it.

I got them at TCU, I've got them and Ole Miss at Mississippi State, just putting them into the field.

I mean, maybe one a year or maybe two a year.

We'll go into this field.

But they all say, you know I couldn't have done it without the without the base information I got that you taught us.

And again, it all comes back to storytelling.

Learn how to tell a story.

Now they do things such as Instagram posts.

One of them is the in stadium person on the scoreboard goes around in between innings and things like that.

So it's not your writing, your bylines and things like that, like when I was doing it, but it all falls into the same category.

I get a tremendous, tremendous satisfaction out of them saying, hey, thanks for the thanks for the foundation that you gave me.

And I've been able to take with us.

We've been doing this, this project for about 15 years now.

He's an old school journalist.

He's still able to take those basic elements that used to be so important and teach those to students and also convey them in the videos that we put out, because everything that the students consume is video and understanding that medium, and then the importance of being able to be detailed and tell a story within that medium becomes even more important today than it ever has been.

Marshall's career is a reminder that while the tools of sports journalism may evolve, the purpose remains the same to capture the moments, preserve the memories, and give a voice to the communities at the heart of the game.

And he's always going to do the right thing, whether that's right, a story about something that maybe is difficult to write or have a strong opinion or any of those things, and that's something he teaches his students, is to do the right thing.

As we take a look at our venue today, the universe we live in, in terms of what we're talking about, I see more and more in for journalists to become Renaissance people, to have skills in two or 3 or 4 areas.

It dilutes the market.

As you do that, it drives you nuts working, you know, 18, 20 hours a day on, on, on many occasions.

And I'm fearful for the, the, the impact or lack of impact that this congealing of journalism is having.

Well, yes, I agree with you because part of that also is it seems like anybody can appear to be a journalist.

True.

Whereas we all went to school for that and, and learn how to do that and the ethics involved and so on and so forth.

Now, you know, it's all citizen journalism, so to speak.

And that bugs me a lot.

I mean, not necessarily the grammar part of it, but the credibility part of it.

I can go back into old newspaper clippings and think, who does this anymore?

This is there's no there's no record.

No, there's no way to look up.

I mean, I mean, look at the bits I didn't realize.

I mean, every day I find something that is historical significance to me.

But there comes a point ten years ago, five years ago, in which that stopped happening.

And so how are people going to look back?

I mean, it's almost we're going to be history.

A lot of history is going to be lost because there were these places where their historical videos, records, audio, whatever it is.

I mean, it's just that's sad to me.

So it tells many stories that we can right now to put them on record.

That means everything.