“It Wouldn’t Be Worse Than What We Had”: How Marty Houston’s Accidental Experiments Rewired Northwest Arkansas Sports
“I always wanted to be in the media,” Marty Houston says. “First, as a radio DJ, I just thought making a living playing records and talking on the radio was appealing.”
He chased that dream the traditional way at first, enrolling at Arkansas State with every intention of majoring in the school’s Radio/TV program. “I enrolled at Arkansas State with the intent of majoring in the Radio TV degree that was offered,” he recalls, “but I dropped out after 1 semester because my student loans were not processed and my parents were going through a divorce and it wasn’t working out.”
The twist still makes him laugh. “Funny thing is, my buddy from Clarksville that I roomed with at ASU graduated with the degree and ended up owning BBQ restaurants in St. Louis,” Marty says. “And I drop out and spend 45 years in media work.”
Once he landed that first full‑time radio job, he learned quickly that there was no such thing as “that’s not my job.” “There was a little of everything to do,” he says. “I could pick out any job that wasn’t done, so I started doing play-by-play for Ozark High School football and basketball.”
Play‑by‑play wasn’t just a one‑off; it became his calling card. “Play by play was needed at every station I worked for,” Marty explains. “I ended up doing play by play not only in Ozark, but also in Glenwood, Mount Ida, Caddo Hills, England, Paris, and 25 years in Van Buren.” For about 15 years, he says, “Play by play was the main sports involvement I had,” but it did more than fill airtime—it put him around “a lot of great Arkansas athletes” and let him “get to know some of them as well.”
Even now, he downplays everything that came after. “I really think everything else I was along for the ride,” he says. But that “ride” included one of the most quietly influential sports shows this market has ever seen.
“Almost By Accident”: The Huddle and a New Voice for Razorback Fans
“The Huddle, as I said, was almost by accident,” Marty insists. The year was 1995, and he was program director for Fox 46, staring at a daytime lineup full of trouble. “There was very little sports talk available, believe it or not,” he says. “Not on the radio and especially not on television.”
Daytime TV was in flux. “We had a glut of Jerry Springer‑like programs in daytime that were being cancelled and leaving holes in our lineup,” he remembers. “We were scrambling to fill. Everything about programming them was to cater to your available audience, which at the time was women in day time.”
But Marty saw something else: an opening. “We had the first all-sports radio format in the state of Arkansas, and I had started a 1-hour show to fill a gap,” he says. From there, the idea was simple. “I made a suggestion to the owner, Bill Pharis, that we might be able to catch some men home at lunch if we moved a couple of cameras in the radio studio and took a few phone calls from viewers.”
He had a model in mind. “I looked at Phil Donahue, and honestly, I thought that was what he was doing,” Marty explains. “Have a guest, a subject, and run back and forth with the audience getting dialogue.” The owner wasn’t sold. “He was skeptical,” Marty says, “but I told him it wouldn’t be worse than what we had.”
So they tried it. “We started off talking about what most people on the street were talking about, Razorback sports,” he says. At that time, “there just wasn’t much of an outlet for that then. One radio station in Fayetteville had a couple of afternoon hours, but that was it.”
The timing mattered. “You have to remember at the time, football was struggling and basketball was hot, kind of like right now,” Marty says. “We had only been in the SEC for 3 years at the time, and I am seeing Arkansas fans beginning to adopt the attitude of the other fans in the SEC, which was pretty harsh.”
He contrasts it with the world he grew up in. “I grew up with Frank Broyles, then Lou Holtz and Ken Hatfield,” he says. “There was some criticism of Hatfield, but he won two Southwest Conference championships at the end, so generally there wasn’t a call to change coaches.” The SEC changed that equation. “When Arkansas joined the SEC, it was an eye-opener, and basketball was adapting better than football to the new conference,” Marty explains. “Fans were just losing interest and clamoring for more basketball, Barnhill just couldn’t hold it anymore.”
By the time The Huddle started, he was watching fan mentality harden in real time. “Fans here, I think, are starting to share the attitude of the rest of the SEC … if the coach doesn’t win, get rid of him and be vocal about it,” he says. “We were coming into the Danny Ford Era when the show started, and I just saw interest and patience running thin.”
Marty doesn’t pretend his show drove the culture; he sees it as a mirror. “I don’t think the show had any influence at all, but it was starting to give an outlet to some to voice that,” he says. “I noticed that it started becoming a little more harsh that by the time Houston Nutt got in there, that despite the enthusiasm he helped create in the program, within a couple of years, some were now vocally criticizing him.”
The “lease,” as he puts it, was short. “I believe it was more of an environment of SEC,” he says, “but the talk shows and upcoming internet portals did give fans the outlet to talk about it.”
What he does claim, carefully, is that it broke ground. “Maybe the aspect I was most proud of, it was a pioneering show,” Marty says. In a market with “very little sports talk available,” The Huddle gave Razorback fans somewhere to go—and it stayed there for 11 years.
“I Don’t Think I Can Take Any Credit”: Flooding the Market With Live Sports
When Marty talks about programming decisions, he reflexively steps back from the spotlight. “I don’t think I can take any credit for programming decisions that shaped fan consumption,” he says. “As I mentioned, The Huddle was almost an experiment, but it lasted 11 years, and it came along at a time that Fox network took the television world by storm when they acquired the NFL‑NFC package from CBS.”
That deal changed the industry. “We all became a little more sports-minded then,” he says. In that environment, he started thinking differently about what his station could offer. “At that time, there were many more sports available in syndication by the teams themselves, and I just started grabbing as much as I could,” Marty explains. “Mainly because Fox did not have as many network constraints.”
The list of teams knocking on the door is telling. “I could pick up Dallas Cowboys preseason games, the St. Louis Cardinals, Texas Rangers, and Kansas City Royals wanted to place their package of games in our market, so I would fit them in on schedule,” he says. “Our station couldn’t afford the top syndicated programs, but we could pick up these games, and our sales staff could sell them.”
Looking back, he sees how it nudged viewers into new habits. “I guess just the volume of sports I could pick up at the time changed viewing habits a little,” Marty says, “but as the number of cable channels was also growing and repeating shows, stations were investing in live sports, which was becoming unique and was picking up a more general audience as well.”
Later, his role with Nexstar and Pig Trail Nation kept him in that same lane. “My 20 years with Nexstar, I didn’t have the show, but worked a lot with Pig Trail Nation,” he says. “That brand was truly a team effort in building that I didn’t have anything to do with, but proud to be associated with it.”
Even then, his core philosophy didn’t change. “Programming I did all of the same things as before, created relationships with as many teams and programming as possible,” he explains. “Now we have three stations to work with and it makes it easier. Not sure I have had as much direct impact on it though because now everyone wants those sports rights.”
He’s adamant about this: “I am not sure I had an impact, I just loved sports, and I programmed that way because I felt it was undervalued for so long.” But the market around him followed the same realization that drove his decisions: “Super bowls and NFL were always the top-rated shows during the course of a television season,” Marty says, “but it wasn’t until Fox took NFL from CBS and ESPN got into NFL games that the TV execs began to see the true revenue that live sports could create.”
“It Was Just Time”: Retirement, Grandsons, and the Next Era of Razorback Coverage
By the time Marty finally stepped away, he’d been weighing the decision for a while. “I had been contemplating retirement for over a year,” he says. “It was just time, grandsons coming on and getting older.”
Watching their lives unfold reframed his sense of urgency. “It was one thing to see my children grow into adults,” he says, “but watching my grandson go 0 to 5 was the fastest 5 years I had ever been through.”
Retirement hasn’t dulled his desire to give back; it’s just made the path less clear. “I am always about giving back. I would love opportunities to mentor, but I am not sure where those opportunities are now,” Marty admits. “As I said, I used to do play-by-play just because there was no one else, but now most high schools stream their own games and provide their own announcers.”
That doesn’t stop him from imagining where it might start. “I would love to start support at the simplest form,” he says. “Who knows, it may be with my own grandson as he starts playing T-Ball.”
When he looks at Razorback coverage today, he sees both growth and new walls. “As far as shaping Razorback coverage, that is changing as well; there are many more barriers that schools have put up to protect their product,” Marty explains. “I understand it, but it is harder to cover. First, there is more competition for those interviews.”
The contrast with his early days is stark. “I used to be able to call Houston Nutt’s secretary and arrange for him to come on my show,” he says. “Many more layers to go through to do that now, if you can get it done at all.”
The stage itself has changed, too. “Let’s be honest, all of it has grown beyond the state of Arkansas,” Marty says. “Getting a game on TV used to be a big deal, but now fans expect every game to be televised, and local coverage has to be creative to bring fans information they want and find a way to make it unique to your audience.”
For him, that’s the heart of the next era. “I think the next Era of Razorback coverage will continue to be hard work and smart delivery,” he says, “because fans have content coming to them from a lot of different sources and you will have to find angles that reach the average fan and don’t take as much time to deliver.”
He still isn’t sure he’s truly part of Northwest Arkansas’ sports “fabric.” But the story he tells—of a dropout who filled every empty job, of a show that was “almost an experiment” and lasted 11 years, of a programmer who “just loved sports” enough to jam lineups with live games—is the story of how that fabric was woven. And somewhere in the stands at a future T‑ball game, as his grandson takes the field, you get the sense Marty Houston will be watching with the same eye he’s always had: looking for the next voice, the next angle, the next kid who might accidentally change the game.
