University of Texas at Dallas Athletics

BILL MERCER
BROADCASTER / PA ANNOUNCER

BILL MERCER, a legendary radio broadcaster whose career has included on-air stints as diverse as the Dallas Cowboys, Texas Rangers and World Championship Wrestling, joined the UTD Athletics family in 2005 as a public address announcer and later played a major role in developing live broadcasts of UTD sporting events.
 
Mercer’s association with UTD happened purely by circumstance. In 2005, Mercer was presenting a lecture in the UTD Library about a book he had just co-authored concerning news coverage of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Afterwards, Athletic Department officials approached the retired broadcaster about becoming the public address announcer at home basketball games.
 
Within a year, Mercer and UTD officials began discussing the possibility of broadcasting games over Radio UTD, the campus’ student radio station. Using student broadcasters from both UTD and a sports broadcasting class
Mercer taught at the University of North Texas, Mercer provided expertise, mentoring and guidance as online broadcasts of UTD events was developed. 
 
A native of Muskogee, Oklahoma, Mercer’s award-winning broadcasting career began shortly after World War II. He broadcast minor league baseball games in the Dallas area throughout the 1950’s, then joined the radio team for the newly-formed Dallas Cowboys in the mid-1960s. When Major League Baseball came to the area in the early 1970s, Mercer was chosen to be part of the Texas Rangers’ broadcast crew. He later taught broadcasting classes at UNT for almost 40 years and mentored a number of well-known sportscasters, locally and statewide.
 
Mercer earned a journalism degree in 1950 from Denver University, then a master’s degree in communications from UNT in 1966. He and his wife Irene are especially proud of their four children and seven granddaughters, including Emma Tiedemann, who began broadcasting basketball games at UTD with her grandfather while in high school and is now pursuing a broadcasting career at the University of Missouri.