By JASON PUGH, Written for the LSWA
Last weekend was an interesting bookend in the ongoing career of Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame inductee John James Marshall.
As a junior quarterback at then-Jesuit High School in Shreveport in 1976, Marshall became a state champion, throwing the game-winning screen pass in the Class 3A title game at Winnfield.
That may have portended athletic greatness, but Marshall wasn’t destined for a future in football. He was an All-City third baseman for the Blue Flyers, but was not a college athlete.
He always loved sports and followed that passion to a career that has brought him innumerable awards from the Louisiana Sports Writers Association, an organization Marshall served as president of before his 30th birthday.
His writing prowess is just one of the tools in a multi-faceted toolbox that helped lead Marshall to the Distinguished Service Award in Sports Journalism and enshrinement in the Hall of Fame last Saturday night at the Natchitoches Events Center.
“I couldn’t do anything else,” Marshall said. “I spent my whole being around sports. In baseball season, it was baseball. In football season, it was football. I just loved sports. Eventually, I kept loving sports when my friends were off becoming accountants and lawyers. I missed that train. This was a logical thing, keep doing sports. I can write about it. Everything in sports, what goes into players, coaches, the intricacies, everything involved in it fascinated me.”
In an appropriate iron sharpens iron moment, Marshall and 2022 DSA awardee Teddy Allen shared the 1987 Associated Press Sports Editors national best feature award, writing about Chicago Cubs relief pitcher Lee Smith from Castor.
“A guy like J.J. will make you work an hour longer, ready a little more copy, make another phone call because you know he’s going to be that good,” Allen said.
Marshall had plans on being a “40-year newspaper veteran,” but the industry had other ideas.
Marshall pivoted as deftly as a second baseman turning a 6-4-3 double play and teamed with his brother, Ben, to launch and develop “Sports Talk with J.J. and Bonzai Ben” on Shreveport sports radio.
Thirty-four years later, the back-and-forth banter between brothers remains on the air as Louisiana’s longest-running sports talk radio show. Along the way, Marshall has served his alma mater, now Loyola College Prep, educating the next generation of journalists and becoming a part-time documentarian whose latest labor of love is a documentary about that 1976 state championship Jesuit squad, which Marshall hopes to unveil at the team’s 50th anniversary reunion in September.
“I was going to be a sports writer my entire life,” Marshall said. “In 1981, that’s what you thought. Those guys were 40-year veterans.”
But a year after his first full-time newspaper job dried up when the Shreveport Journal shut down, and a year into time on the morning newspaper staff in town, Marshall’s fledgling radio show suddenly became a full-time gig. A comment his brother made on air about the paper riled the executive editor, who presented Marshall with a choice – leave radio or get fired.
“I had to make a decision. When opportunity knocks, you answer the door. I didn’t know what it was going to lead to.”
His broadcasting career flourished and a year later, he began teaching and working at Loyola. In the last few years, he’s become an award-winning columnist and writer for the four-year-old Shreveport-Bossier Journal.
A second opportunity came knocking for Marshall’s fellow 2026 DSA winner, Gil LeBreton.
Like Marshall, LeBreton’s career started before he earned his college degree.
LeBreton was working for the Times-Picayune part time in his hometown of New Orleans while attending LSU-New Orleans.
The schedule – and LeBreton’s affinity for sports – led him to drop a couple of classes, which made him eligible for the military draft during the Vietman War and landed him a one-year stint in the combat zone.
Once he returned from his military service, LeBreton had a plan and a career path in mind.
“When I came back, I used the G.I. bill and said, ‘Now, I can finally pay my way through LSU,” he said. “I was able to get a degree in journalism, and I was able to work for (legendary LSU sports information director) Paul Manasseh for three years.”
That experienced launched a 54-year career that began in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. LeBreton joined the Fort Worth Star-Telegram staff for the final 37 years before retirement.
LeBreton’s resume includes Sports Writer of the Year awards for both Texas and Louisiana from the National Sports Media Association.
It also includes coverage of 26 Super Bowls and 16 Olympic Games – nine summer and seven winter – that were handled with the signature touch of a man whose opinions were rooted in belief and in the reflection of one of his early idols, the Times-Picayune’s Peter Finney.
“If you can give your opinion and back up what you’re saying – and if you’re fair, it works,” LeBreton said. “Most people appreciate that. I just watched the people I admired coming up. I watched Peter Finney and the gentleman he was. You don’t have to have a hot sports opinion and go for the throat. You get more done by listening and being kind.”
The respect LeBreton held for Finney came his way from figures he covered in the highly competitive Dallas-Fort Worth market, which has teams from the four major sports and big-time college football at TCU and SMU.
“Good or bad, Gil told the true and right story,” said former TCU head football coach Gary Patterson said. “He did it in a good way.”
Added Dan McDonald, a 2017 DSA winner: “It didn’t matter what the story was about or what sport it was about, if Gil’s name was at the top, I would read it.”
Contact Jason at pughj@nsula.edu