Lucky Bastard

by Joe Buck

So much of the fun happened around ballparks. I walked to the home radio booth at Busch Stadium so often, I could do it with my eyes closed. To this day, I can do that walk in my mind: into the press box, turn right, and go into the first door on the left. That was the KMOX radio booth. It was two-tiered. In the back of the booth were two counters with two chairs at each spot. That was where guests sat. You could often find my dad’s best friend, Joe Arndt, there. If my dad was interviewing anybody on the air, they sat in one of those chairs until it was time to do the interview.

  In the front of the booth, four or five steps away, there were four seats. From left to right as you faced the field, you would see:

  A radio engineer, who would turn mics on for each half inning, time the commercial breaks, and keep track of the out-of-town scoreboard.

  My father.

  His broadcast partner, Mike Shannon.

  A fourth seat, with half a pair of canned headphones. There was no microphone—just a single earpiece you could hold up and listen to the broadcast.* That’s where I would sit for most of the games.

  I loved that seat. When I listened to that little earphone, I could hear the mix of the broadcast: the announcers mixed with the crowd mixed with the crack of the bat. It was like listening to the radio right there while they did it. I could hear the subtleties and nuance of the broadcast, and I could watch them as they did it.

  I learned the mechanics of how they did their job. A baseball radio broadcast is not like an orchestra. There is no conductor. My dad didn’t point to Mike as if to say, “OK, now it’s your turn.” They signaled that they had something to say with a subtle shift in a chair or a lean into the microphones.

  I would watch my dad say, “At the end of the fifth, the score is Cardinals 4, Pirates 2,” and control when they went into a commercial break. I saw the bullshit between innings, my dad and Mike looking through binoculars at some woman in the seats. I realized it was not a stiff existence. They were having a blast.

  Then I would see the producer, Tom Barton, holding his stopwatch and counting down so they would know when they were back on the air: “15 . . . 10 . . . 5 . . . you got it!”

  And I would watch a play unfold live and hear my dad describe it. “What a play to his right!” he would say, as Ozzie Smith robbed somebody of a single. I would think about how I would call it. I was getting father-son bonding time and professional training simultaneously every night of every summer.

  —

  As I got older, Butch Yatkeman, the clubhouse guy, let me be a batboy for the team. Butch was this little guy who was the Cardinals equipment manager forever. That’s when I got to know a lot of the players.

  Butch tried to find me uniform pants, but it wasn’t easy. The typical batboy uniform was built for a little kid, and I got my clothes from the “husky” section at Sears.* I took one look at the batboy pants and thought, “I’m not fitting into those.” I ended up wearing some player’s pants, which was so embarrassing.

  Once we got that humiliation out of the way, we moved on to another.

  “God, this hat doesn’t fit you either,” Butch said, and he was right. Even then, my head was enormous.

  Being around those players, though, and being in that atmosphere as a little kid was awesome—even though I didn’t fully appreciate it. It was just part of my life. Sometimes I’d run around and shag fly balls in the outfield before games. I have a picture of me playing catch with Dave Rader, the Cardinals catcher. I was eight years old.

  During a game in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park when I was thirteen, a player gave me chewing tobacco. I put it in my mouth and let it settle in for a minute. I thought I was cool. Then I got light-headed and threw up. I zigzagged my way out of there to pick up bats like I was trying to escape an alligator, while the players roared with laughter on the bench.

  One of my best friends at the time was Jon Simmons, whose father, Ted, was an eight-time Major League All-Star. Sometimes, while our dads were working—mine in the broadcast booth, Jon’s in the batter’s box—we would be downstairs at Busch Stadium, throwing tennis balls at each other or playing stickball.

  As much fun as I had at home games, road trips were even better. Every city was like an amusement park I would get to explore. When the Cardinals played in Los Angeles, my dad and I would leave the team after the series and fly home ourselves. That way, we could stop in Las Vegas. We stayed at the Dunes Hotel because he had a friend there who comped him.

  My dad grew up during the Depression. He loved having some “walking-around money,” as he called it, and he loved gambling. So we would get to the Dunes and eat. Then he would hand me a ten- or twenty-dollar bill and say, “Here, go to the arcade. I’m going to go roll craps. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  I’d go play Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders until I ran out of money. Then I would go up to the room. I wouldn’t see my father ’til he opened the door at 7:00 A.M. to pick me up and go to the airport. He never went to bed. He gambled all night.

  I remember one time he had a wad of hundreds, and I’d never seen him so happy. Another time he had nothing. He said, “Well, we worked for free this week, Buck. Don’t tell your mother. Let’s go.”

  —

  My dad loved baseball and loved the Cardinals, but mostly, he loved excitement. He loved being part of a scene. When celebrities came through St. Louis, they invariably wanted to go to a ball game. The Cardinals got them in, and they ended up in the broadcast booth. I met Frank Sinatra, Billy Crystal, Bill Murray, and Olympic athletes from various sports. Later, St. Louis native John Goodman came by a lot.

  Our house was kind of a communal place. My dad loved to entertain. Pro athletes would come by our house to play poker. They would drink and smoke, and I’d sit on my father’s lap and throw chips in for him. I didn’t understand poker then, and I still don’t. But I loved being around it.

  My parents attended parties where people sang and played piano, and not just any people. They were friends with Tony Bennett, and the comedian Norm Crosby, and Donald O’Connor, an actor who appeared in Singin’ in the Rain. They had the greatest time.

  My dad was the star of the family, but my mom was the soul. She is the definition of a shirt-off-her-back person who has time for everyone—a religious woman who wishes her son would go to church more. She gets great strength from reading and studying the Bible; she lives by it better than anyone I know. Yes, I know this sounds strange, considering my father was married when they met. But she became more religious during my childhood, and I’ve watched her give all she can give to person after person. She is the best example my children can have for how to live a life and do what’s right and help those who need it.

  It was not a fluke, in my opinion, that my dad’s career took off when they got married. She was a huge part of his success. She was his guide and compass—and sometimes his joke writer. She either wrote or “punched up” some of his best banquet lines—they would sit in our kitchen together and work, like a comedy team.

  And sometimes, she delivered the jokes herself. I remember a charity roast for my dad in the early eighties. My mom was one of the roasters. My half siblings were there.

  My mom stepped to the microphone and said, “Why should we roast Jack Buck, when he gets burned every month when he writes his alimony check?” My dad did a spit take on the dais. I saw it on TV and couldn’t believe what I had just heard. Considering the audience, it took some guts for her to say it. I loved it. My sister, Julie, loved it. I think even my father loved it. It was a claw back at people who were not nice to her.

  —

  When I was ten, my parents took Julie and me to New York. Julie was seven. We were staying at the Grand Hyatt. My dad was not going to let his kids get in the way of his night on the town with his wife. Before he and my mom went to dinner, he gave me a fifty-dollar bill and said, “There’s a McDonald’s a couple blocks up and ac
ross the street. Take your sister to dinner there, and come back to the room and watch TV and go to bed.”

  It’s hard for me to imagine leaving two preteen kids on their own for a night in New York. But it was the 1970s, and societal concepts of child safety were different. Most parents seemed to think that if their kids wanted to play with fire, it was OK as long as it was a small fire.

  As Julie and I walked toward McDonald’s, we saw a crowd. In the middle, a guy was moving three shells around. There was a pea under one of the shells, and as he moved the shells, you had to keep track of the pea.

  I stood in the back of the crowd. I’m sure the guy saw me immediately. I don’t know what kind of school you have to go to to be a street hustler, but I bet there is an entry-level class on how to pull a ten-year-old out of a crowd.

  The hustler kept moving shells numbers one and two. But he appeared to leave shell number three untouched.

  Like completely untouched.

  I mean, there was no way the pea could end up under shell number three.

  Then he said to another guy in the crowd, “You, sir. Which one is it under?”

  The guy in the crowd pointed to shell number three. The hustler picked it up. There was no pea. He took the money. Now only shells numbers two and three were left. And as we previously established, the hustler had not even touched shell number three! There was no way the pea could be under shell number three.

  So the hustler turned to me: “Hey, young man. I’ll match whatever money you got in your pocket if you can tell me where the pea is under one of these two shells.”

  My parents raised me well. I knew that any game had to be played honestly. So I told him the truth:

  “I only have a fifty.”

  I figured there was no way this poor guy had fifty dollars on him, and I wanted to give him a chance to walk away before I embarrassed him. But he just said, “That’s fine. Which one’s it under?”

  I pointed to the obvious answer: shell number two. He flipped it over. There was nothing there. Then he flipped over shell number three—and there was the pea! A stunning development!

  He ripped the fifty out of my hand. I looked at my sister. Good-bye, Big Mac! We hardly knew ye. Julie and I went back to the hotel and ordered room service.

  When I woke up the next morning, my dad wanted to know two things: Why was there a room-service tray outside our door? And where was the change from his fifty-dollar bill?

  So I told him what happened. Some parents would have been furious, but he loved a good story. He thought it was hilarious. He told every Cardinals player: Listen to how fucking dumb my kid is. He gets sucked into a shell game and tells the guy, “I’ve only got a fifty!” The players were killing me, just killing me.

  By the time I was a teenager, the games were an incredibly fun part of the day, but not the only fun part. I remember one off day in Los Angeles when we went to the beach in the morning with Mike Shannon, my dad’s broadcast partner, and Mike’s son, Danny. Then we went to Hollywood Park and caught five or six races. That night we went to Dodger Stadium in time for the Dodgers and Cardinals game.

  It was a little more fun than running errands and playing Atari.

  At the end of the night, we went back to the hotel and there was this carpet with all these different squares. Mike Shannon said, “Why don’t you boys count how many squares there are between here and the far wall?” We sat there and counted deliberately: one, two, three, four . . .

  When we were finished counting, we turned around. Mike and my dad were gone.

  They were right around the corner, laughing.

  At least I didn’t lose fifty dollars that time.

  —

  For most of my childhood, the Cardinals were not very good. Or at least, they were never great. They played in the 1968 World Series a few months before I was born, but they didn’t make the playoffs again until 1982.

  My dad and Mike Shannon were doing the Cardinals’ World Series games on the radio, and they moved from their regular booth to one in the football press box, down the right-field line, because the network TV people bumped them out of their regular prime location. I was in the booth with them. Tug McGraw, the longtime Mets and Phillies pitcher, was there, too. He was a friend of my dad’s. I don’t know how or why they became friends. My father was just a friend magnet.

  The World Series obviously felt a lot different from a June game in Pittsburgh. My father and Mike were excited. When the Cardinals won Game 7, my dad said, “That’s a World Series winner for the Cardinals!” He watched fans rush the field, swarming Monsanto’s famous AstroTurf, where mounted police were waiting, and said, “Those fans won’t be there for long.” He meant they would be arrested. He was wrong. Pretty soon it was mayhem, with fans all over the field. There were not enough handcuffs in St. Louis to arrest everybody who rushed the field that night.

  I had turned thirteen that year. Thirteen years old is right around the peak of fandom for most sports fans—at that age, you understand the games and you have a little perspective, but not too much perspective. But it was different for me than for all the other kids out there. I was excited the Cardinals won, but it was a different kind of excited from what most thirteen-year-old Cardinals fans felt. The Cardinals weren’t really heroes to me. They weren’t these unreachable, untouchable guys. I had already peeked behind the curtain.

  For example: When Whitey Herzog was hired to be the Cardinals manager, in the middle of the 1980 season, I watched my dad interview him in the radio booth the day he was hired. Whitey was louder than a typical radio guest, and he kind of pulled me down the steps at one point.

  I asked my dad afterward, “Was he drunk?” He said yes.

  Pitcher Dave LaPoint once playfully punched me in the shoulder, as a one-of-the-guys kind of teasing, but it hurt so bad that tears streamed down my face. He felt awful. First baseman Keith Hernandez liked my father, so he liked me. Second baseman Tommy Herr would hire my sister, Julie, as his babysitter a few years later.

  On Ozzie Smith’s first day in St. Louis, he came to our house and I played catch with him. I was probably the first kid in St. Louis to learn Ozzie was such a magician with his glove. He said, “Just throw it to my glove.” He was able to make the ball ricochet from his glove into his bare hand, without moving either one of them. It was unbelievable.

  —

  Seeing the players every day, joking before and after games, made me realize that people in sports do not view the games the same way that fans do. When I was little, I woke up in a good mood if the Cardinals won the night before and was depressed if they lost. But to players, baseball was a job. They did their best, but they understood that sometimes they would have a bad day at the office.

  They could even laugh about it. I remember the great Cardinals closer Lee Smith giving up a game-winning home run one day. On the plane ride that night, he gathered some teammates together and said, “I threw a slider . . . one side of the ball said ‘hit me,’ and the other one said ‘hard!’” They laughed. If they could handle a loss, why would I lose sleep over it?

  So at a fairly young age, I realized that while I loved sports, I was not the same kind of fan that my friends were. I wasn’t emotionally invested in teams winning or losing—I just enjoyed being around them. To this day, people ask me: Is it hard not to be a fan on the air? It’s not hard. The truth is, I lost the “fan” part of me before I was a professional broadcaster.*

  Chapter 3

  Now Playing Jack Buck . . . Jack Buck!

  Every year, my mom and I had a routine. I would sign up for Little League baseball, and she would freak out. She thought it was too dangerous. Like I was going to get killed by a batted ball or something.

  She’d say, “Hardball?” No, Mom, they replaced them with Wiffle balls this year. It became our little joke. And it’s kind of funny to think that my dad spent most of the year telling the
masses about this wonderful game of baseball, and my mom didn’t even want me to play. If they ever hold a contest for the most overprotective, worried mother of all time, she should win.

  I almost did get killed by a batted ball once, but I was in the stands when it happened. My family was in Cincinnati for a Cardinals road trip, and when we got to Riverfront, I begged my mom to buy me a Cardinals batting helmet. She didn’t want to do it. She pointed out that I had roughly seven hundred of them at home and didn’t need another. I argued that I wasn’t home, and I wanted one, so please, Mom, please, please, please! She relented and bought me one.

  We sat in our seats behind the third-base dugout. Early in the game, my mom told me to duck my head if a ball came toward us. Sure enough, the Reds’ Pete Rose came up to bat left-handed and slapped a foul ball right at us. I ducked and it hit my batting helmet, leaving a mark. The ball landed in the guy’s lap behind me.

  My dad was doing the game on the radio. He said, “Oh, a dangerous foul ball in the seats,” and he looked through his binoculars and saw my mom and me. He was terrified.

  I was fine, though. That cheap batting helmet might have saved me. I kept the helmet for years, but not the ball—the man sitting behind us refused to give it to me.*

  I guess it was appropriate that my father was working and my mother was sitting next to me when that happened. My mom was our confidant. She was our disciplinarian. She was the one who made everything OK. She supported us completely, even if it meant we might get hit in the head.

  She gave up her career when she got pregnant with me, and she never looked back. She would sing at parties, but that was it. She never tried to restart her career. She was never bitter, never upset. She just was a great wife and a great mom who filled all the holes that were there because my dad was gone so much.

  Because I was a good high school baseball player, people made the connection to my father. But whatever athletic ability I have (or had), I got from my mom’s side. She was a physical education major at Washington University in St. Louis. Her father played for the Bears. Her brother was a great high school athlete.