Advice From The Master: Find Your Own Unique Voice
By Charlyne Berens
J Alumni News editor
The secret to success? Find and nurture your unique voice.
That's what Jamie Williams told journalism students during his visit to the college in November. Williams, a former professional football player and now a media entrepreneur, was one of five UNL alumni honored during Master's Week.
Each person's voice is unique, Williams told students in a variety of journalism classes, but it must be discovered and cared for. "You have to feed it - as long as it's within the rules of the game."
Those are guidelines Williams himself has lived by. They took him from childhood in Davenport, Iowa, through a Husker football career and 1983 broadcasting degree at UNL all the way to a 12-year career with the pros and now to his own production company, YMotion Media.
The first member of his family to go college, Williams came to UNL on a football scholarship and enrolled as an engineering major.
"I was a skinny black kid out of Davenport, and immediately I met a skinny white kid from Holdrege, Todd Brown," Williams said. The two became close friends and worked hard to earn their stripes from Coach Tom Osborne. It paid off: "As freshmen, we both became starters." Williams played tight end.
Success off the field was a bit harder to come by at first. Williams found himself bored by engineering courses. But when he took a speech class, one of his classmates suggested he was good at public speaking and ought to try a journalism major.
"Journalism kind of saved me," Williams said. He quickly became engaged in broadcasting courses and compares learning and applying broadcasting techniques to learning football. "You were forced to take theory and apply it. I enjoyed that - the chaos, the random order of it."
Williams was on his way to finding his own voice. He took a big leap in that direction when he proposed his own specialty show on KRNU-FM, the student-run radio station. The station was playing Top 40 tunes at the time, and Williams said he and many of his friends from the coasts wondered, "Where's the funk?"
Tom Spann, broadcasting professor, said he welcomed Williams' idea but, in keeping with departmental policy, he required Williams to come up with a written proposal for the show. The proposal had to be approved by Larry Walklin, then chair of the department.
"I thought I would get shot down. I was talking about rhythm and blues and funk," Williams remembered. But Walklin approved the show - provided Williams would supply the music.
Williams collected albums from friends on the football team to play on the air. He did promo ads and talked up the idea everywhere he went.
The football player known as The Iceman borrowed a name for his show from Eugene O'Neill: "The Iceman Cometh."
"The music would start playing, and I'd say, "The Iceman cometh," Williams recalls with a smile. "This is Jamie Williams, and I am the Iceman. I'll be with you from 10-12 on KRNU, 90.3 FM, and I will be moving the University of Nebraska and this all-American city until the wee hours. So stay tuned, cuz I'm ready."
The show was a hit. "It transcended culture," Williams said. And he realized he had found his voice.
He put that enthusiasm into everything he did in the J school, Williams said.
Spann remembers that spirit. "He was eager and interested and extremely helpful to other people" in the broadcasting classes. "Overall, he was a very good student. He was always ready to help - no complaining."
Williams' success on the Husker gridiron translated into a 12-year career as a tight end with professional teams. He earned a master's degree while he was playing for the San Francisco 49ers, then finished a doctorate in education from the University of San Francisco after retiring from football after the 1994 season.
While he was still working on the doctorate, he worked as a writer on the film "Any Given Sunday," directed by Oliver Stone. Williams continued to work with Stone until 2000 and came to an even greater appreciation of the power of the mass media.
"Sometimes the media will take leads from a film," he said. He pointed to the film "A Beautiful Mind," about schizophrenic mathematician John Nash as an example. People left the movie with a different perspective on mental illness, he said, and the mass media followed up with stories about schizophrenia that extended that new perspective.
"In film, you can go off into fantasy to make a statement about reality," Williams said. "There's some type of perceived truth, some point of view that you're hoping to get out there to help us make better choices, to understand each other better."
Williams made that part of his message to students during Master's Week. "The worst thing is to regurgitate what's already done, overstate the obvious, follow, just stay in folklore or stereotypes. That's too easy.
"What you want to do is something with a refreshing perspective, and that's your perspective, and you own that. Reach inside yourself and figure out how to play that."
Students need to be passionate about what they do, he said, and they need to master their skills - and to be well read.
"You have to understand the world and how it was pieced together. How do all the dots connect? Where are we going in the future? And what does that mean to me? Now you're getting closer to your voice."
Williams' voice is currently focused through his company, YMotion Media. "Y motion" is a football term, Williams said, describing a play in which the tight end moves before the play starts. "My company is about the tight end moving into the media."
Current projects include an animated TV series called "Renegade Hoops" being developed for Noggin, a division of Nickelodeon. Williams has also written the screenplay for "Roth," the story of Cal-Berkeley quarterback Joe Roth who died of cancer in the mid-1970s when he was one of the top players in the nation.
In his search to find and perfect his voice, Williams has returned to his academic roots in mass media.
"A lot of people remember me for playing for the Huskers - which was important," Williams said. "But one of my greatest experiences was as a student in journalism."
Spann said he's not surprised by Williams' success. "Had he not played sports, he still would have been outstanding," Spann said.
