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Any student who's ever listened to a Chicago White Sox, Texas Rangers or Dallas Cowboys game may recognize the name Bill Mercer. He's one broadcaster who has covered a lot of ground in over 60 years.
Mercer visited UTD on Sept. 5 to talk about his latest book, "Play-by-Play," a chronicle of radio history and his personal work in sports journalism.
The book was a project inspired by Jeanette Harris, a woman who encouraged Bob Huffaker to write "When the News Went Live," a book co-written by Mercer, George Phenix and Wes Wise, about their experiences as reporters covering the John F. Kennedy assassination. Harris told Mercer he should write a book about his work in the broadcasting field.
"I said, 'I don't want to write a memoir, I don't want to write, "I did this, I was this, I was so great,"' and she said, 'Well, don't write it that way. Write it as a history and put in a little bit of history about radio and how it started and how it evolved with sports.' So that's what I tried to do," Mercer said.
Mercer's fascination for sports and radio began as a child.
"Growing up as a kid in the Depression in the 1930s, I listened to radio all the time," Mercer said. "My dad and I would listen to every sport we could pick up then - there weren't many - but we'd listen to every play-by-play in it. And I remember one time saying, 'I think I could do that.'"
But getting into broadcasting was difficult for Mercer.
"I didn't have a professor like me teaching in North Texas," Mercer said. "I just went out to the university and did it. I learned how to make a spotting board and I learned how to try to call the plays. And so when I got my first real job out of college, that's all the experience I had."
Mercer's first professional job was announcing for a baseball team - something he had never done before. But afterwards, Mercer settled into what is arguably his most famous career as a play-by-play announcer for professional wrestling.
"In 1951, I also didn't plan on being a wrestling announcer, but the radio station management at KMUS in Muskogee said it came with the sports broadcasting package of baseball, football, boxing and basketball," Mercer wrote in "Play by Play". "This was my first 'big' job as a sportscaster, so why not?"
However, having little experience in wrestling didn't hold Mercer back.
"I stayed there three years and a friend of mine got me an audition at KRLD in Dallas to do wrestling," Mercer said. "I got the job in 1953 and I was on television for the first time, which was a traumatic experience. It took me a while to relax and they stayed with me fortunately, but nobody ever told you anything."
Despite a lack of instruction or critical feedback, Mercer said it was an interesting experience to be a sportscaster in the early days of the field.
"It was an amazing time," Mercer said. "We did everything in TV live in the studio. So it was a totally different time, but it was a lot of fun."
His first experience with live news began at KRLD with the JFK assassination.
"We were all concerned that somebody was going to insult the president when he came to town," Mercer said. "We were doing an interview program called 'Comment' and we'd have a lot of people on who ranted about the communists leading the Kennedy's and that kind of stuff."
But on Nov. 22, 1963, Mercer and his colleagues were utterly shocked when President Kennedy was fatally injured from a gunshot wound to the head while touring downtown Dallas in the presidential limousine.
"Nobody thought Kennedy would be physically harmed," Mercer said. "We thought somebody would throw eggs at him or signs would be held up- "Kennedy's a communist" or something like that, but we never thought of the physical part."
At the time of the shooting, while most of his colleagues were covering Kennedy's visit, Mercer was broadcasting the news.
"I came across the street and whoosh! - All hell broke loose because he'd been shot," Mercer said.
The KRLD news team took action. When they knew JFK's supposed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been caught and was being taken to the police station, the engineering department put a camera on the third floor of the station, running a cable to a KRLD remote truck and transmitting the signal to their antenna.
"They brought [the transmission] into the station, videotaped it (and we'd just had videotapes for a short time) and then sent it up along the line to CBS in New York," Mercer said. "And that was really, for us, when the news went live. We had never done that."
Mercer said Huffaker - lead author of "When the News Went Live" - took over the assignment and was at police headquarters on Nov. 24 when Jack Ruby shot Oswald.
"It was just absolute craziness," Mercer said.
Mercer's turbulent career came to another high point in 1980, when he became the play-by-play announcer for the internationally syndicated wrestling promotion, World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW). During his career at the WCCW, Mercer interviewed several famous wrestlers including the members of the Von Erich family and his friend, Chris Adams.
As an announcer for UNT, Mercer has also called games involving Kevin Adkisson and Steve Williams, before they took on their professional wrestling names as Kevin Von Erich and Stone Cold Steve Austin.
Mercer continues to teach broadcast journalism at UNT while commentating for the Frisco RoughRiders. He was inducted into the Texas Radio Hall of Fame in 2002.
For fans of sports, the JFK assassination or just journalism in general, Mercer tells all that he knows in his books.
"I think 'When the News Went Live' is the kind of book you keep for history on your shelf for the next generation," Mercer said. "And then the sports book is for people interested in play-by-play and [sports broadcasting]. It really tells you how hard it is, how you need people to believe in you, and how hard you have to work to succeed in radio in particular."
Signed copies of Mercer's books, "Play-by-Play" and "When the News Went Live," are available in the UTD Bookstore.
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