Jason Smith is wearing his work uniform: blue jeans and a hoodie over a Chicago Bears baseball cap. His co-host at 92.9 ESPN, John Martin, is in a Las Vegas Raiders hoodie and cap, the cap flipped backwards.

They are in their office — the “studios by the freeway,” as insiders say — and talking about old friend Tubby Smith, the deposed University of Memphis basketball coach who lasted just two years here.

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Only this time, they aren’t doing a comedic bit like they used to when Jason impersonated Tubby in a deep, somewhat lost voice in a mock recruiting call with prospect Tyler Harris. Rather, they are saying that Tubby was right about something:

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“Turns out, Tubby was ahead of his time,” Smith says on-air, adding, “I can’t imagine how tough it is to be a high school basketball coach in Memphis now. If a (player) gets too good on you, he’s going to move out of here, go to a prep school.”

Now in the seventh year of “Jason & John,” Jason Smith’s calculated gamble has paid off. He was working as the Tigers basketball beat reporter for The Commercial Appeal when he quit to take the full-time, no-guarantees, radio gig.

In some sense, he was launching a long 3-point shot because the radio business is notoriously capricious.

And, in some measure, he was again following in the patent-leather footsteps of his father, Les Smith, who for 25-plus years worked at four local TV stations doing news and sports.

For Jason to leave the relative safety, albeit the low-ceiling safety, of his newspaper job for radio was a risk.

At the time, he and his wife, Faith, had just had a baby boy. Jason was in his 13th year at The CA, sixth year on the beat, and what was once a dream job had become miserable.

Part of the misery was the money. Smith actually lost money covering the Tigers beat, he says, because he was flying places to cover games instead of filing mileage when driving to all those high schools as a preps writer.

Then-coach Josh Pastner’s consistent lukewarm success and his reactions to every team failure also played a role in his brewing dissatisfaction: “I’m covering Josh, and I’m writing the same d--- thing every time, because he’s always saying the same d--- thing.”

During basketball season, it felt like he was never home. And always, the money didn’t seem to stretch quite far enough.

“Am I going to make $52,000 for the rest of my life?” he says, recalling the tape playing in his head back then. “And I’m scared to ask for a raise because I want to keep my job.”

So when he got the call about being a host at 92.9, it was less a choice than an instinctual leap.

“That was a big jump,” Les says of Jason’s decision, adding with a laugh, “But I’ve known him all his life, and he can talk.”

Not a ‘substitute’

Brad Carson, who is the program director at the Audacy-owned station, didn’t see it as a risk for Jason or 92.9. In part because Smith, now 47, had been a frequent guest on other shows and had a deep sports-reporting background.

“It wasn’t a leap,” says Carson, who adds that he did his vetting and collected opinions on Smith. “I had a lot of confidence in Jason.”

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And in the Jason & John chemistry.

“I saw them at a pickup basketball game, just their jaw-jacking back and forth, their friendship,” Carson says. “I had a lot of confidence it would work.”

Martin, 32, was confident the partnership would work, provided they didn’t try to be anyone but themselves: “Listeners would interpret us as the genuine Memphians that we are.”

Smith also believed their friendship would help them.

“It sounds silly, but it’s more like family, like my brother,” he says. “Where with other shows, you put together two hosts that have no relationship, (and) that can be an issue.”

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Says Martin: “We have spats, disagreements, all the time. Sometimes they bleed off air, sometimes they are on air. But it’s the realness of the relationship, and we always end up working it out.”

Still, there was a built-in challenge to taking over the 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. slot at 92.9. For years, it had belonged to Chris Vernon, who left the station in a contract dispute and took his show to the Grizzlies’ Grind City Media platform.

Smith recalls that early on the station sent him and Martin to a promotional event at Memphis Botanic Garden.

“A dude from the audience yelled, ‘Bring back Verno!’ I never felt so small,” Smith says.

Les, 73, and retired in Belize — “paradise,” as he likes to say — spoke to his son about the task at hand.

“I told him, ‘It’s going to be a gamble anytime you’re coming after somebody with a following like that. You’re not substituting for Chris Vernon. You have to develop your own personality, and I know you’ve got that in you.’”

Please, call me Jason

At first, the Jason & John plan was to make the show all about the great guests they could get.

Carson, Smith says, issued a gentle warning: “It can’t just be about the guests.”

“We have spats, disagreements, all the time. Sometimes they bleed off air, sometimes they are on air. But it’s the realness of the relationship, and we always end up working it out.”

John Martin

In hindsight, Smith had a pretty good track record of establishing himself on his terms. In fact, this goes all the way back to growing up in Memphis City Schools and making a preemptive strike: He knew that at the start of each class, he had to get to the teacher before the first roll call of the semester.

“I know you got ‘Leslie Jason’ on there,” he’d say, “but when you call roll if you could just say Jason from the first day …”

Then Leslie Jason Smith could be spared some scorn. Already, he had one battle to fight: “Being mixed in a predominately Black school, oh, it would cut big-time. I get emotional thinking about it.”

He named his own son Christopher Jason — no Leslie for the new generation.

The family had moved to Memphis by way of Jefferson City, Missouri, and Fort Pierce, Florida, as Les was moving up in the TV business. Jason has fond memories of going to Tigers games when his dad was working them, but initially Jason didn’t give any thought to journalism.

He wanted to be an archaeologist.

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“Indiana Jones,” he says. “Dinosaur bones, treasures, everything. To the point I looked at the University of Chicago, because they had an archaeology department.”

Sure, he had his momentary athlete’s dream, and to this day he jokes that he “tricked” then-White Station High School basketball coach Terry Tippett, he of six state titles, into letting him on the junior varsity team as a sophomore. It didn’t last, Smith figuring out there was no future as a skinny 5-foot-11 forward.

When he graduated from White Station, he says he had the grades and test scores for a full ride to Tennessee State University.

That didn’t last, either.

“Get up there, first taste of freedom, start going to clubs, don’t go to class. End up losing my scholarship. Instead of my parents paying for second semester, they’re like, ‘No, fool, you gotta come back home.’”

Making a difference

That was winter 1994. To raise enough money to go to the University of Memphis — even with the discount he received because his late mother, Billie, was then a U of M administrator — took five years of working odd jobs. This included painting houses and working security at a warehouse at Lamar Avenue and Knight Arnold Road.

“Unarmed, 120 pounds, if somebody wanted to come steal something, it wasn’t like I could have done anything about it,” he says.

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Once he got back into school and writing for The Daily Helmsman at the U of M, he found himself in an African American literature class taught by a white professor.

“There were other Black folks in the class that had a problem with him teaching, ‘This should be a Black guy,’” Smith recalls. “And I wanted to tell this story of what he was facing, this minority in this class. I wrote it for The Helmsman, it won an award, and because it had come from my own brain, it had been acknowledged and it had my name on it, I loved it.”

He pauses, adds with a wry laugh, “I thought I could make a difference in newspapers. I bought it hook, line and sinker.”

Survive and advance

Don’t misunderstand. Smith is grateful for his 13 years at The CA. Without them, he knows, he probably never finds himself wearing a hoodie and a Chicago Bears cap on a three-hour workday and making way more than $52,000 to talk sports.

“I wasn’t their first pick,” he says. “I’m the luckiest dude in the world that they finally came around to me. It’s the work I did at The CA that got me the opportunity.”

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But now that the opportunity is here, and it continues only so long as the ratings are good enough, he can’t be who he used to be.

Although he has learned, albeit the hard way, that casting journalism fundamentals aside has its perils, too.

The hype around Penny Hardaway’s first Memphis Madness in 2018 was real and then rocketed to the stars when Smith began saying on-air, and kept saying, that Drake and Justin Timberlake would be the headliners.

Smith was so confident in his source that even when another well-placed source told him he was wrong and better walk it back, he doubled down.

“I was getting everything right (on the Tigers beat), the show’s taking off, and my head started to get big,” he says now.

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Come the night of Madness, no JT, no Drake.

Social media blew up. Gary Parrish, a colleague then hosting a show at the station that aired after “Jason & John,” and himself a former CA Tigers beat writer, had some fun at Smith’s expense. He wasn’t alone.

“That was the lowest night of my life from a professional standpoint,” Smith says. “The whole (FedExForum) is tweeting at me, Gary’s laughing … my whole 13-year-career at The CA, the first two years at the radio station and all my credibility is out the (freaking) window.

“I thought it was gonna kill me.”

Says his father, Les Smith: “What you learn is you do your own shoe leather work. It might have been embarrassing in the moment, but we’ve all had those moments. I did.”

‘That helped the show’

To be sure, Jason’s current job doesn’t have all that much in common with writing game stories and reporting — in a straightforward way — on basketball recruiting for a daily newspaper.

When Smith, who is usually more reserved than Martin, was doing the Tubby impersonation, he was flexing his Jason The Entertainer muscles.

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“I would get pushback from other brothers, like, ‘Bruh, this is funny, but Tubby’s a Hall of Famer,’” Smith says. “So I took it to heart and tried to keep it respectful.”

Now, as he goes forward, Smith is trying to find that perfect balance between his reporting roots and being a sustainable media personality. Carson was right: It can’t be all about the guests. But if the guest is a figment of your imagination making a desperate recruiting call, that can be good radio.

“That helped the show,” Smith says.

Often, the show has a special listener in Belize. In fact, when the show started, Les Smith was an occasional guest calling in from “paradise” and even making a few football picks.

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“It’s the only way I keep in touch with Memphis sports,” Les says. “I’m proud of what Jason and John do.”

So is Jason.

“I wouldn’t call what I do now journalism,” he says. “But I would call it 20 years in the game. I’m proud of that.”

Editor’s Note: John Martin regularly contributes to The Daily Memphian.