Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Jon Williams
Once headed for the Razorback baseball team and interested in a life on TV, Jon Williams made a couple detours before getting on air in Northwest Arkansas
In a fast growing region, one voice has remained loud and clear for 30 years now. Radio host Jon Williams has been on air since 1993, hosting his show every weekday morning and afternoon with Derek “Deek” Kastner and serving as emcee for many of the major nonprofit benefits, such as the American Diabetes Association’s Kiss-a-Pig Gala; the American Cancer Society’s Suits and Sneakers Gala; the American Heart Association’s Paint the Town Red and many more.
Over the last decade and a half, he’s also become a fixture of Arkansas Razorbacks sporting events. He’s on the court, announcing the plays. He’s down on the field, hyping up fans. And it works — because he loves the Razorbacks just as much as the audience does, and he has energy to match each sport.
“Jon is very outgoing, bubbly, inviting … nice, kind, funny, engaging,” said Jimmy Sanchez, director of marketing for Razorback Athletics. “I knew from our first meetings that he’s got ‘it.’ I hadn’t even seen it in action, but I knew he would do a great job because of his persona.”
Williams is the on-field emcee for Arkansas Razorbacks football, on-court for Razorback men’s basketball and also the PA announcer for Razorback baseball, Razorback women’s basketball and Razorback gymnastics.
Sanchez describes Williams as a talented guy who does more than what meets the eye, treating the emcee job like a career and doing everything in his power to make it the best he possibly can, which makes him a deeper part of the Razorback family. In his radio job, Williams is on air, providing content, building the station’s strategies and playlists, doing all kinds of tasks from top to bottom, that “translates a lot to what he does for us,” Sanchez said.
At games, “he’s reading what we provide, but he puts his own spin on it. While he goes off script, he does it in a way that I would have told him or wanted him to
“I’ve taken very big risks in my career betting on myself and it has not always worked, but I’m grateful I’ve had the opportunity to take those chances. I wouldn’t be where I am were I not.”
— Jon Williams, radio host and on-field emcee for Arkansas Razorbacks football
do. We’re on the same wavelength. He’s a jack of all trades,” Sanchez said.
In addition, Williams and Kastner host Hog Town, the official Razorback tailgate before each Razorback football game. Now they also host the Razorback Recap on 92.1 The Ticket, the flagship station for the Hogs, following every Razorback football and basketball game.
As busy as it keeps him, it seems he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“It’s exciting, such a rush,” Williams said while taking a break at 94.9 Radio Jon/Deek, where he is co-host and sales director. “I’ve been a Razorback fan my entire life and to able to work with the Razorbacks was exhilarating, still is. I love getting to do everything with the Razorbacks.”
At times, Williams thinks about his grandparents’ deep love for the Hogs and learning about the Razorbacks from them when he would stay at their house as a child. Then he imagines them seeing him in these roles, and it gives him an enormous source of pride.
COLORADO HEART, ARKANSAS BLOOD
Jon Williams was born the middle child of three boys, wedged firmly between older brother Jason and younger brother Justin.
“We were a family of entertainers, so to speak, always trying to cut up, crack each other up at the dinner table,” said Justin Williams. They grew up watching George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, David Letterman and “Saturday Night Live” and kept perfecting the zingers they were lobbing at each other every night. But Justin knew Jon was there for the real stuff and came to his older brother for advice often. “Coming home, whatever was going on at school, whatever grade with all the drama, I relied on him to help me navigate a variety of things.”
Jon’s love of sports came naturally and early. He and his brothers were big Kansas City Royals fans, and so the memory of living in Kansas City is filed in his mind under that time he lived close to where George Brett lived.
The family moved a lot because their father was a traveling shoe salesman — a charismatic, gregarious, charming guy who still works now at 85. By the age of 5, Jon had lived in five towns, but by age 6 they settled in Longmont, Colo., just outside of Boulder and Denver. Once in Colorado, they were all about the Denver Broncos.
When Jon visited his grandparents, who lived in El Dorado, he was surrounded by Razorbacks. The whole house was decorated around that theme.
“I loved Sidney Moncrief and the Razorbacks of the late ’70s,” Jon Williams said. “Grandma was a fanatic for those teams.”
Rather than living by traditional seasons, Williams marked what time of year it was by the sport. Instead of summer, there was baseball. In place of fall was golf, and basketball instead of winter. In spring it was back to baseball, his first love, then he’d do the whole routine over again.
One thing Jon did constantly in those days was practice his pitching, Justin Williams said. If it was too cold or dark, he’d do it in the shotgun basement, sending Nerf balls toward the gigantic TV with a Wiffle ball bat. Throwing at the TV was the strike zone.
When Jon wasn’t pitching, he was swinging a golf club, launching footballs or shooting hoops in the front yard or at the basketball courts of Hover Park behind their house. It all eventually paid off when he made the Colorado All State Baseball Team and toured Australia with them, the highlight of his young life.
That deep love of sports brought with it a love of journalism.
“Denver has always been a huge media market, and I absolutely idolized the guys on radio and TV as far back as I can remember,” Williams said. “I remember all the morning shows and sports anchors. I wanted to be like them … Radio guys,
they were a big deal to me growing up.”
Ron Zappolo, longtime Denver TV anchor, especially had a big influence on young Jon. In high school, Williams became sports editor of the Trojan News and was on the yearbook team too, heavily involved in all the activities.
For college, Williams chose the University of Arkansas, where he walked on the baseball team then coached by Norm DeBriyn, but quickly realized it was not for him.
“I was completely out of my depth,” he recalls and lasted only a week. Coach DeBriyn encouraged Williams to stick around anyway, try his hand at being a manager, but Jon decided against it. He turned his focus to getting into broadcasting and started with KUAF.
About a year into college, Williams began dating a girl who then moved back to her hometown of Baltimore. Because they spent a solid year racking up phone bills with all those long distance calls, the girl’s mother suggested that Jon move in with them on the East Coast and get some experience, perhaps at CSPAN or one of the big network affiliates nearby in Washington, D.C.
He landed an internship at Channel 2 WMAR-TV, the affiliate for the Baltimore Orioles, and soon found himself packing his bags for Maryland.
WIDE EYED
Jon Williams was the intern for the Orioles when Cal Ripken was playing for Baltimore and Jon Miller was the play-by-play announcer. Williams got to learn from the guy who would later land in the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame and the Radio Hall of Fame.
“Talk about falling into an incredible situation,” Williams said. “I got to hang out on the field with Cal Ripken Jr., Kirby Puckett and George Brett, all these players who came through. Talk about a kid in a candy store.”
That summer, at 21 years old, Jon walked around Camden Yards stadium completely wide eyed, thinking “How is this happening to me?” he said. “It was a dream come true, and it solidified how badly I wanted to be in broadcasting.”
Williams initially wanted to be on TV, but at the end of the internship, a reporter who knew that gave him a crucial piece of advice. If he trained his voice, learned to enunciate and went into radio, he could go further in his career long term. He took it to heart. When he returned to Northwest Arkansas the summer of 1992, he looked to the direction of KUAF’s Rick Stockdell, Kyle Kellams and Simon Lee. He was “surrounded by incredible journalists” and was soon running the board for beloved NPR shows such as “Whad’ Ya Know?” “Car Talk” and the local “Ozarks at Large.”
“It took no one by surprise when he got on the local radio’s midnight to 6 a.m. shift,” Justin Williams said. It made sense to the family, though at first they assumed he would be on a format more directly sports driven, like ESPN or anchoring local sports. “We were all pretty hopeful, but not floored by his choice of vocation or his success in it.”
KUAF was the launching pad for his career. Then at the next radio group he worked for, he had to choose an alias. The station encouraged all the on-air personalities to choose one for their own safety, the female ones especially, but Jon’s case was a special one. Kix 104 already had a host with the name of Jon and their sister station one with the last name of Williams.
“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny to use one of the names of the guys I played baseball with?’” Jon Williams said. “I thought it would be hilarious. I’ll send the tapes to my friend back home in Colorado, and they’ll get the biggest kick out of that.”
At first, Greg Daniels was his catcher. Then for the first two years of Jon’s career, it was his persona. When he moved on to another station, they insisted he change his name. It could be anything but Greg Daniels. His first instinct was to search the baseball team roster again, but then he slept on it.
“I thought, ‘I really just want to be me,’” Williams said. “I wanted to use my own name and to brand myself, and it was one of the smartest decisions I’ve ever made in my career, just by being Jon Williams because that’s my name. I’m glad I got the chance to be myself on the radio.”
Along with the change back to his own name came a change of personality. The formats he had been on up until that point were light rock, and Greg Daniels had worked for a female-leading audience. So when he got on KKEG FM 92.1, a station with a primarily male audience, they wanted a completely different brand. His show would focus more on sports and other things that so many guys liked.
In 1995, Derek “Deek” Kastner joined KKEG part time and would sit and watch Williams do his show. At first, Jon would have him incorporate stunt bits like “Torture Tuesday” dares, such as sending Kastner to campus to shake up finals week by having kids call the Hogs from their classroom on the UA campus.
“We clicked on our passion for radio,” Kastner said. “We both like what we do.”
Derek learned from Jon at first because he was the intern, but continued to pick up things from the many years since, like how to network, which is Williams’ strong suit.
“I always wondered why he would stay in Arkansas, but he always stuck to his guns,” Kastner said. When it comes to radio, “he’s the guy. I’m still in radio in Tulsa. It worked.”
Jon and Deek’s dynamic solidified from their differences. While Jon is approachable, friendly and good at making everybody feel like he likes them and that they’re part of the family, Derek can’t hide his emotions.
“He lets me do my thing,” Kastner said. “Any partnership, it’s best when someone lets you be yourself. That’s why the show is a success. We play to our strengths.”
What audiences hear on this show is not contrived, Williams said. Rather it’s genuine conversations between two best friends in real time.
CHANGIN’
Williams radio career has been through many phases and evolutions. In its earliest, from the mid-1990s to 2001, he was on a rock format. But when the general manager presented him with a challenge — turn around a top 40 station that wasn’t doing well — Jon took him up on it.
“We went from playing a lot of AC/DC, male-oriented rock, and I did a 180 and started playing top 40 overnight,” Williams said of his four year stretch from 2001 to 2005 on Hot Mix 101.9.
In the three years that followed, during five of the next six ratings periods, the station won when they never had before. He lost a lot of his previous audience, but gained a whole new one. Jon was proud of the ability to change his presentation and the show’s content and still do well.
“I take opportunities that — as they say in the movie ‘Say Anything,’ a ‘dare-to-be-great situation,’” Williams said. “I saw that, and I leapt at it. I’ve taken very big risks in my career betting on myself, and it has not always worked, but I’m grateful I’ve had the opportunity to take those chances. I wouldn’t be where I am were I not.”
Among the early experiences that solidified radio as his choice was conducting his show remotely at Shadow Lake in Noel, Mo., one Labor Day. Williams stepped up on stage late on a Friday night, and it was chaos. It was the first time he’d had that kind of reaction from a live audience to the Jon/ Deek Show.
Getting noticed on the street and at restaurants changed his perception of his work and made him feel like it was really taking off. But the most fun he ever had was hosting Family Fest in Little Rock with O Town and Lionel Richie in front of an enormous crowd that was somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000. Somewhat jokingly, Williams tried to get the crowd to chant their names and when they did, he was blown away.
He tapped into more of that live-crowd energy when he had his first foray as an emcee in 2002 for what was then known as AT&T Fan Zone and has since evolved into Hog Town. And again as he served as the PA voice of the Northwest Arkansas Naturals from 2007-2021.
Once he got on the field with the Razorbacks, things just clicked. Williams fed off the energy of interacting with thousands of people through leading them in the cha-cha slide, conducting giveaways and playing off the Razorback Marching Band.
“When I started doing stuff with the Razorbacks, it was intoxicating to see all the passion of these Razorback fans playing along with you in a setting where you have them as an audience,” Williams said. “It’s a blast. You’re live without a net, on the wire, you’re there in front of all these people, you’ve got them fired up for the game, you’ve got to get them fired up for that quarter and you’ve got to get in and out in 60-90 seconds.
“I love that time … it never gets old.”