Lucky Bastard

by Joe Buck

  My dad wasn’t a great athlete. He was kind of awkward. He loved to play golf, but he never got good at it. My mom is the one who taught me how to play baseball, even though she didn’t want me to play. Our house shared a driveway with the house next door, and there was this little grassy area in the middle of it, and my mom taught me how to throw a baseball and hit a baseball there. We would play catch, and she would sling it to me sidearm, so that was how I threw, too. Eventually, I was playing catch with Major Leaguers when I was hanging around Busch Stadium.

  I never really played catch with my dad. We’d play on the beach in spring training. But I was so deathly afraid of overthrowing him because then he’d have to go chase it down the beach, and I didn’t want to make him do that.

  One time we had Bruce Bochy over to our house—he was a catcher in the National League, and even though he never played for the Cardinals, he and my dad were friends. My father said, “You’ve got to see my wife punt a football. She can punt a football over this house.” That was true. He was in awe of my mom’s ability to punt.

  Then my dad said, “You know, I used to kick a little bit.” He spun the ball to get it in the right position, then tried to kick it. It hit the side of his foot and he drilled Bochy right in the nuts. He was rolling around on the ground. My dad was mortified. He should have left the punting to my mom.

  —

  The first time I saw my dad on TV, I cried. I thought he was stuck in there.* Then I got used to it—so used to it, in fact, that I assumed everybody else’s father was often in a TV, too.

  At times, it seemed like my life would have been easier if everybody else’s father was in the TV. Then they would have left mine alone. But all of my friends thought it was cool that they knew Jack Buck. They remember stories about him that I’ve long since forgotten. To me, it was just something my dad said, but to them, it came out of the mouth of Jack Buck.

  I came to understand that “Jack Buck” was not just his name. It was the part he played for most of his adult life. He was the Cardinals’ radio play-by-play announcer when that meant even more than it does today. For much of his career, there was no cable TV. A lot of Cardinals games weren’t even televised. Entertainment options were limited. If you lived in St. Louis, Jack Buck was the sound track of your summers.

  Playing the part of Jack Buck meant that when somebody asked you to speak at a function, you spoke. It didn’t matter if it was the Kiwanis club, a high school awards banquet, or a luncheon for local police. He would speak at three or four events a week in the off-season.

  I know I’m biased, but thousands of St. Louisans will tell you he was the best after-dinner speaker they ever heard in their lives. There was nobody you’d rather listen to between the rubber chicken and dry chocolate cake.

  He would tell the crowd he was “a proud father of eight children—all boys, except for five.” When people applauded, he would say, “Don’t applaud. It took me a total of forty minutes to make that happen—and that includes the conversation.”

  I think he enjoyed making people laugh during those speeches as much as he enjoyed broadcasting games. Maybe more. It was a chance for him to show more of his personality, more of his talent.

  I think that explains why, at the height of his Cardinals career, he quit.

  —

  The year was 1975. He left the Cardinals for a chance to host a new NBC studio highlight show from New York called Grandstand. NBC wanted Grandstand to be a sports wraparound show to compete with ABC’s Wide World of Sports. My dad would get to stretch creative muscles he never used during a baseball game.

  I was six at the time. When the Cardinals announced over the Busch Stadium loudspeakers that my dad was leaving the team, I was in the booth with him. The fans stood and applauded. My dad looked out at the crowd and gave a six-shooter salute back, then turned away and wept.

  I can still see him weeping. When you’re a little boy and you see your father cry, you don’t forget it.

  Back then, I didn’t understand why he would leave a job he loved, or why he would be willing to commute (and possibly move) to New York when we loved St. Louis so much. But now I see why he did it. I’m sure money was a factor, but I think he also wanted to let people know he was more than a play-by-play announcer. Being part of a national TV studio show was a huge professional opportunity.

  He had an innate sense of timing and a wicked, cutting sense of humor. He also had a worldview that went beyond sports. I always read the sports section of the newspaper first. He started with the front section, which I use to start fires. He had a sense of history and read biographies. I can’t even spell biographies without spell-check.

  He was enamored of the human condition and was a terrific interviewer—always listening to an answer, because it usually led to his next question. If there were one person in an otherwise empty bar, he would sit next to that person and begin an interrogation. He had an incredible thirst to learn about people, whether it was Andrew Jackson or Reggie Jackson.

  Grandstand was a ratings and critical disappointment. I don’t remember the show at all, but from what I’ve heard, it was a mess. It did launch somebody’s career as a national TV star, but that somebody was not Jack Buck. It was his cohost, a young man named Bryant Gumbel, who became one of the faces of NBC.

  I have been told that the banter between my dad and Bryant during breaks was more interesting than what they said on the air. I’ve also heard that some of my dad’s funniest lines during those breaks magically came out of Bryant’s mouth once the red light went on. That could be bullshit—Buck family revisionism—but anyway, it was not the biggest issue.

  Gumbel is terrific at television. I remember meeting him when I was a kid, and I could tell, even then, that he was the alpha in the situation. He was the young, brash upstart, and he was great. He just upstaged my father. My dad had done radio for so long and so well, and he never quite figured out how to be great on TV.

  In 1976, he came home from a trip to New York on a Sunday night and told my mom, “They tied a can to me.” I had never heard that before, but I soon learned what it meant. He had been fired.

  He was disappointed, of course. But the Cardinals gladly took him back, and he quickly resumed his career as one of the most popular men in town.

  —

  Almost everybody in St. Louis seemed to think of my dad as family. I had to share him with the city. It could be hard to differentiate between the public role of Jack Buck and the private man who helped raise me.

  In high school, I was scared to drink a beer at a party because I didn’t want it to reflect poorly on him. When we went out to dinner, it felt like we were meeting up with everybody in St. Louis. It was no secret that our family meeting place was Cunetto House of Pasta, or as everybody calls it, Cunetto’s. It’s on a hill not far from my dad’s first home when he moved to St. Louis. Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola were from the same neighborhood. My dad knew the Cunetto brothers, Vince and Joe, when they ran a pharmacy. The brothers opened a restaurant in 1974. I was five years old.

  One morning, my father mentioned it on a radio call-in show he was hosting: “I had the best meal last night at this great new restaurant, Cunetto’s. . . .” From that night on, there was a line out the door to get in the place.

  So they always loved my dad, and he wasn’t lying: He really did love that place. And every time we had a big family dinner, we did it at Cunetto’s. We never said, “OK, let’s really do something special,” or “Let’s find the nicest restaurant in town,” or “Let’s try this new, hot place,” or “Isn’t anybody sick of pasta? We’ve been eating it for thirteen years!”

  We always went to Cunetto’s. There really wasn’t any other place on our list. I don’t know if they gave my dad a discount, or if he paid full price. I never asked. But that was where we went.

  And when we got there, people saw my father and acted like he was a memb
er of their family. He never shooed them away. It didn’t matter who they were, or where we were sitting, or if we were in the middle of dinner. If people walked to our table, he would talk to them. Sometimes he’d even pull out a chair.

  Some guy would say, “Hey, Jack, I met you at a Kiwanis club back in ’68.”

  I’d think, “Yeah, whatever.”

  And my dad would say, “Hey, didn’t you have a mom who was a chef?”

  And the guy would say, “Yes!”

  His memory for that kind of stuff was astonishing. I see why everybody in St. Louis loved him. But I loved him more. And as a boy, I thought: “He is my dad, not theirs.” I felt like we were getting intruded upon. I would think, “Come on. I’ve been waiting for him to get home for two weeks.” We didn’t have cell phones then. It’s not like he was checking in every minute, calling and texting us. Long-distance calls from a hotel room were expensive. When he was gone, he was gone. His time at home was valuable to me. I didn’t want to share him with strangers. But I had no choice. He was always throwing out the welcome mat.

  This is something I should probably discuss with a psychologist, but I’m going to share it with readers instead.* Anyway, I think my father was such a people person—and such a people pleaser, really—that it took some of the uniqueness away from Julie’s and my relationship with him. He was available to everybody. It was like we shared him with the entire city. And for my half brothers and half sisters, that was really the case. They just never got to spend the time with him that I did.

  In other cities, my dad was probably just another announcer. In St. Louis, he was this odd mix of royalty and politician—people revered him, and he was always happy to shake a few hands.

  —

  If you are an American of my generation, you probably remember a TV show called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. It was hosted by this British guy named Robin Leach, who would go around the world showing you that rich and famous people had enormous, diamond-studded rooms where they would have servants wax their toe hairs. It was like an early version of MTV Cribs. As I learned, my dad would have been half-qualified for Leach’s show:

  He was famous. But he wasn’t rich.

  And he was always very conscious of that.

  A lot of times, when we went to Cunetto’s, he would take out a black Bic felt-tip pen and calculate his net worth. He would write on a napkin that would tear a bit when he wrote on it. And when he did it, he counted everything: his retirement plan, his bank account, equity in his house, the value of his car, and if he had a contract that he had signed, money he hadn’t even been paid yet—everything but the furniture in our house. Then he’d subtract the taxes he owed.

  He knew exactly where his pennies were. I think that’s probably natural coming from a kid who grew up in the Depression and had nothing, and all of a sudden had found . . . not riches, but something. He always wanted to make sure he had enough money. He never said no to any work. He just did it.

  He was obsessed with having a net worth of $1 million. It was weird, because he was really terrible with money in many ways. He never stood up for himself and asked for raises. He didn’t really look into retirement accounts and other ways he could have improved his financial situation. He left a lot of money on the table in negotiations because he didn’t hire an aggressive, high-powered agent. (Some of those nights in Vegas did not help his bottom line either.)

  But that was his life’s goal, getting to the other side of that second comma: $1,000,000. So he would pull out that felt-tip pen in Cunetto’s, and I would think: “We’re doing this again? We just did this a few months ago.” But if something else came in—a new broadcasting gig, or a contract to do Anheuser-Busch commercials, anything that added to his income—he would start a new tally.

  Eventually, my sister and I would get up and walk around the parking lot while he calculated his net worth. He’d stay with my mom and do the math. Julie and I would be walking around in the middle of a hill in a slanted parking lot, dodging death. When we got back to the table, we would often find other people standing there, ready to chat with my dad for a few more minutes.

  —

  My dad had sent all his older kids to public school, with no reservations. He was more than happy with the public schools in little Ladue, Missouri. But my mom had gone to John Burroughs, a private school, and she wanted me to go to private school. She won the vote, 1–0.

  I started going to Country Day in fifth grade. Country Day was a school for rich kids. Kids who would go on to own the Cardinals or run businesses in St. Louis went to Country Day. People who spent their weekends at country clubs went to Country Day.

  We were not rich. My father was writing checks from a much smaller bank account than the other parents. We certainly never wanted for anything, but he felt real financial pressure, with a divorce and a lot of kids to support. He was constantly scrambling, taking every job he could get—Cardinals radio, NFL football on CBS, Monday Night Football on the radio, sports director at KMOX, a morning call-in show at KMOX, call-in shows at night.

  I don’t know where he found the energy to do so many different jobs. But add them all together and he could afford to send me to private school . . . barely. I think he was paying five grand a year back then for me to go, and it was stressful for him. With every passing year, as tuition went up, he got more stressed.

  Thankfully for him, I paid him back getting straight As.

  Wait, did I say As? I meant Bs.

  I got Bs because getting Bs was easy. I never really tried to get As, and never was lazy enough to get many Cs.

  Country Day was a little prep school—we had sixty-some boys in my graduating class, and the majority of us had been together since fifth grade. It was the same cliques, the same groups the whole way. I was never in the “cool” group, but I had friends because I was pretty athletic and I could be funny. Those are still some of my best friends.

  We had all male teachers, and if you messed up, some of them would paddle you, rap your knuckles, or throw erasers at you. These days, if a teacher did that, he would get sent to Guantanamo Bay and CNN would cover it. But back then we accepted it as part of life.

  Even though we didn’t have many students, our sports teams were usually pretty good. In my class (the class of ’87) we had guys on our football team who went to Division I college football programs, like my friend Turner Baur, who played at Stanford and got drafted by the Patriots. We had a guy who went to Air Force and a few who played in the Ivy League.

  I played football as well. I pitched for the baseball team, so you would think that I could have played quarterback, but I had two problems that kept me from playing quarterback. In order, my problems were:

  Fat.

  Slow.

  You know where they put the fat, slow guys: on the line. I played on the C team as a freshman, I played on the B team sophomore year, and then by my junior year, I was part of the varsity team. I was not an integral part, in the sense of “helping” the team “win,” but they did not take my uniform away. I joked later that I would eat onions so I would have the worst possible breath, then stand next to the coach and keep asking him when I was going in. And when I was a junior, even that didn’t work.

  But going into my senior year, I was a starter at both offensive and defensive tackle. Then, in one of our last contact practices leading up to the opening game of my senior year, I was running in to make a tackle, and I ended up meeting our running back, Mike Mayweather, helmet to helmet.*

  The thing about “helmet-to-helmet” hits is that there are heads inside those helmets. I was in real pain. I got knocked down and it took ten seconds for me to get feeling back in my body and get up again.

  At that point, in the great tradition of high school football coaches, our coaches started riding me: “Finally you make a great hit, and now you’re hurt!” There is a reason high school football coaches d
o not work for Hallmark in their spare time. I went to the sideline for a minute to regain my senses.

  I knew something wasn’t right. But I’m a pleaser, and I wanted to make my coaches happy. So I started both ways in that first game, and played the whole way. Then the next Monday rolled around and I was sore beyond belief. My neck was killing me. I finally told my coach I needed to see a teammate’s dad who was a doctor. He begrudgingly agreed.

  The doctor came out of his office and said, “You’re not going to believe this, but your neck is broken.” I had a clean fracture at C6, for those scoring on your spinal charts at home. He told me I was done playing football and asked me to wear a neck collar. I politely declined the neck collar. I was eighteen and already insecure enough. I didn’t need to walk around the hallways at Country Day looking like a chubby dog with a cone around my neck.

  I told my head coach my neck was broken. He paused, blew his whistle, and resumed practice. I wanted to say, “Hello? Did you hear me? I played a game with a broken neck!”

  My football “career,” such as it was, was over. But I could still play baseball. I was a pretty good pitcher—I even had scouts watch me occasionally. My dad was always fairly low-key at my games. He tried to hide in the background so nobody could see he was there. But they always knew. He was older than the other parents, and one of the most recognizable guys in St. Louis.

  One time I was pitching for Country Day as a junior, and my dad took a red-eye flight just to be there. He pulled up by the little baseball field at Country Day in his Lincoln Mark VI, dust flying behind it, as we were warming up.

  He went out to talk to me before the game, to wish me luck. I told him my arm was killing me. He advised me to just throw fastballs and changeups, and stay away from curveballs and sliders. When the game started, I lost control of the very first pitch, a fastball, and hit Brentwood High School’s tiny leadoff batter squarely in the helmet. Everybody looked at my father like he had told me to drill the first hitter. He put his hands up, as if to say, “Hey, I didn’t tell him to do that!”