by Joe Buck
I thought I might get a baseball scholarship to Duke—the coach said he might have room on the team if I could get admitted. But then he didn’t have any scholarships, and I couldn’t get in. My SAT score was good but not great.
I got into Boston University and I wanted to go there, but we couldn’t afford it. I ended up going to Indiana University, the Harvard of central Indiana. And I think I needed a phone call from my dad just to get in. I’m sure that was a proud moment for him. Even after he spent all this money on this little private school, his dumb son couldn’t get into Indiana on his own.
—
My dad’s net worth finally passed $1 million when I was in high school. In his mind, that made him a millionaire. I guess that’s technically true. But when you’re counting everything you own, including your car, it’s not like you are sitting on a million dollars that you can go spend. It wasn’t like “OK, we’re millionaires. Let’s go buy a pony for the kids.”
What I did get, though, was an Eddie Bauer Ford Bronco II when I turned sixteen. It was maroon, with a tan stripe on the bottom. It was a great car. And it was above and beyond what my dad was used to giving a child, at least any of his first six, when they turned sixteen. He didn’t have that money then. He certainly didn’t buy them six new cars.
But my half sister Betsy married the son of local Ford dealer Bo Beuckman. I’m sure Bo gave us a break on it. And so here I was, driving around in this new car. I should have been grateful, and I was.
For a while.
The next year, when I was still in high school, my friend John Gregory and I tricked my mom into taking us to Lou Fusz Mazda. Next thing you know, we were talking to a dealer about a little swap. My mom couldn’t say no. She loved spoiling us. We traded in my nice, solid Bronco II for a Mazda RX-7 sports car. It was an awesome car, with those pop-up headlights that made you think it was wide-eyed at you.
I’m sure my mom had to pay more for the upgrade, though I didn’t realize it at the time. I just remember my dad coming home from a road trip and seeing this sports car sitting there. My Eddie Bauer Bronco II was gone, and in its place was this James Bond vehicle. That was the only time I saw my father really, really mad at me. He had worked all those jobs for all those years and bought me a nice car, and I conned my mom into trading it in for a cooler one.
I asked him, “Do you want to take a ride?”
He said, “I don’t want to get in that fucking car.”
“C’mon.”
He got in. “All right, let me see you gun it.”
I pushed the pedal down.
He was like, “That’s enough. That’s enough! This is the worst fucking caper of all time. This is a bunch of bullshit.”
He was so mad at my mom for letting that happen. And he would just get madder.
At one point, I was driving home in that car from baseball practice, coming around a curve, and I thought, “Better slow down here. Be careful!” No, of course that’s not what I thought. I was a teenager driving a sports car! I thought: “I just want to see what this does around a curve.” I hit the gas. It was a little bit damp. I spun out and I crashed into a little rock wall. It popped my light up. The front of the car was damaged.
I got home. My dad was so mad. He was like, “You got to be fucking kidding me. This car!”
About a week later, I parked in our driveway, behind my father’s car. He got into his car to go down to the ballpark, and in his haste, he didn’t realize I was parked behind him. He backed into it.
He walked inside. I was in my room, probably sleeping because I was tired from playing American Legion baseball every night. (When I would complain that I was tired, my dad would say, “Tired?!? I didn’t yawn ’til I was twenty-three!”) He was so furious. Now both cars were damaged—his and mine. It was father-on-son crime, but he would have to pay for both.
Still, I kept driving it for a little while. I took it to a party, parked behind my friend Harriet Cella’s Chevy Suburban, and she didn’t see it either. It must have been made out of the same material as a Stealth bomber. Harriet backed over the front of my car. It compressed like an accordion. One light was pointing up, one was pointing down. The car looked like a boxer who can’t open one of his eyes.
Harriet walked in and said, “My dad is going to kill me. Here is a blank check. If it’s more than a thousand dollars, you’ve got to tell me. I’ll have somebody put more money in my account. But don’t tell your dad, because your dad will tell my dad.”
Well, I had to tell my dad, because my car was wrecked. It had been in three accidents in just a few weeks. It was like a big karmic “I told you so” from my father.
But also, the first two accidents suddenly didn’t matter. I had a blank check from Harriet Cella to cover all the repairs. My dad got a laugh out of that.
—
When I was a junior in high school, I was asked to go to the prom at Mary Institute, which was the sister school to my all-boys Country Day School. My date and I did not know each other very well. I was in a high school musical production with her. I was a dorky kid, the kind of boy that girls ask to the prom when they really want to be with somebody else.
I mean, while other guys were dating girls, going to parties every weekend, I was hanging out in my friend Kevin Omell’s basement and we were watching Vacation for the twentieth time or Fletch for the thirty-fifth time. Sometimes we would switch it up and play “One on One,” a computer basketball game where one of us was Larry Bird and the other one was Dr. J.
We walked into the prom. My date went her way. I went mine. I ended up in this hotel room (with my friends, not my date). I think the room belonged to the girl who took my best friend, Preston Clarke, to the prom. She had connecting rooms with all the girls in her class.
I’d been to a few parties. I would drink a little bit, but never enough to get into trouble. Whenever I came home, my mom was always waiting up for me—I can still see the silhouette of her, through the window, smoking a cigarette in the kitchen. I’d have to go through this inquisition from my mom when I got home. I think that was her way of testing my lucidity. I always passed.
I was in this hotel room, and there was a big commotion in the connecting room.
Gee, what could this excitement be? Are they playing Dr. J vs. Larry Bird?
I went into the connecting room. A guy had pulled the mirror off the wall and was taking out a big bag of cocaine. He spelled Coke is it on the ripped-down mirror.
I spent my weekend nights pretending I was Dr. J or Larry Bird. This guy pretended he was Scarface.
A bunch of kids—mostly juniors and seniors in high school, but also some sophomores, who were invited as dates—were snorting up cocaine. Some of them were also taking Ecstasy, which was just hitting the market. I don’t think it was called Ecstasy at that time. I don’t know what they called it. But all these girls had popped Ecstasy and were walking around just freaking out. They were shivering, grinding their teeth—they were just so out of it.
That was not on the Country Day curriculum, and there was no test afterward. But it was probably the most important night of my high school education. I watched all these people take on different personalities and just be completely out of control because they were on drugs. I realized that I never wanted to be that out of my skull. That is why I have never used recreational drugs.*
Chapter 4
My First Professional At-Bat
I never considered any career other than broadcasting. It just never occurred to me to do something else. If you grew up in that world, why would you ever want to leave?
From watching my dad so much, I learned the job without even realizing I was studying. But I was learning, and practicing. My dad must have liked what he heard, because on my eighteenth birthday, he decided to put me on the air alone for a half inning of radio play-by-play. It is a sign of how beloved he was in St. Louis that he could
get away with it.
It was April 25, 1987. I was supposed to go to the prom at Mary Institute again. But in keeping with my prom record, the girl changed her mind. She didn’t want to go with me. So my dad took me to New York instead.
I was in the back of the booth, probably thinking about the prom. I wasn’t really paying attention to the game. Then I heard my father say, “Well, now, to take us through the fifth inning is my son, the birthday boy, Joe Buck.”
I said, “Please don’t.” I’d just been dumped. That was enough humiliation for one week.
My dad and his partner, Mike Shannon, left the booth.
The inning was starting. Somebody had to broadcast the game.
That somebody would be me.
Thankfully, nothing interesting happened. It was a 1-2-3 inning, and lasted just a few minutes. I went back and I sat down next to the radio engineer, Colin Jarrett, and asked what he thought.
Colin said in his thick Trinidadian accent, “It lacked description.”
It lacked description? It was a radio broadcast! That’s like saying a painting lacks paint. Not good.
Still, on some level, I knew I could do it. I’m not saying how well—that’s for others to judge. But I’d been around it so long. I’d spent a large chunk of my life in the broadcast booth. I’d be running around with Mike’s son, Danny, and his daughter, Erin, who is three years younger than I am. Erin was always the cute little girl in the back of the booth.
But I had paid attention. I knew how the job was done, even though he didn’t really teach me. What I mean is: He never, ever said, “OK, let’s sit down tomorrow and I’m going to tell you how to broadcast.” I just sat in his booth with that little earphone and I listened to him while I watched the game.
Sometimes I would go to the next booth over and do my own play-by-play into a recorder. I had access to all the game notes—the packet that teams hand to all writers and broadcasters, which include interesting tidbits and comprehensive stats. I obviously had firsthand knowledge of what the Cardinals players were doing because I was around them before the game. My dad and I would listen to that tape on the way home, and he would give me small tips about diction and grammar, and he would show me how to make one ground ball to shortstop sound different from the next grounder to shortstop. That was as close as we came to broadcasting lessons.
I was fascinated by what he did because he loved it. I think if your parent does something that he or she loves, as a kid you’re automatically drawn to it because you see how happy it makes them.
I was like a kid whose parents own a diner—I knew how the lasagna was made and what to do when the place got crowded. I’m sure I did a lousy half inning of play-by-play at Shea Stadium that day, but at least I did it. I didn’t panic, and my father made me do it only because he knew I could handle it.
I did not waste much time getting into the business after that. When I was still in college in 1989, I started working as the number two radio play-by-play broadcaster for the Louisville Redbirds, the Cardinals’ Triple-A team. I was nineteen at the start of that season.
They didn’t really need a second play-by-play guy. I don’t think there was a job opening. I think they thought there was some novelty in having Jack Buck’s kid broadcast their games.
I was working with an announcer named Jim Kelch. It could have been a really uncomfortable situation—Jim had ample reason to resent me. But he could not have been nicer. He grew up in Peoria, Illinois, listening to my dad, and he really welcomed me. He and his wife, Diane, had two small kids, Dan and Laura, and they basically welcomed me in as part of their family. We were all new to Louisville, as he had been broadcasting in Chattanooga for the Reds’ Double-A team when he got hired.
I was making a hundred dollars a week. They just basically paid my road expenses. My father said that is when I learned the definition of the word subsidized, because he was helping me pay for my apartment in Louisville as I started my career.
It is also when I learned I really wanted to do this for a living. I loved it. The money didn’t matter. I wasn’t worried about who was listening to minor-league baseball. I rode a lot of buses and stayed in a lot of cheap motels. It was like Bull Durham except that Susan Sarandon didn’t read poetry to me.
And I couldn’t just show up and talk into a microphone while the support staff did everything else. We would get to the stadium, find telephone lines, put our mixer up, and put the microphones in—things that an engineer would do for my dad at Cardinals games. Then we did our own interviews and tried to get the rosters straight for the other team; unlike with the major leagues, we had no idea who most of the players were.
If we went off the air because we lost a telephone line, Jim and I had to figure out how to get back on the air. It was very primitive. It was on us to figure out how to do it. The whole experience was actually a lot harder than doing a major-league game, but I loved it.
My dad let me find my own way. I think he decided that, since he figured out how to do the job himself, I should, too. This probably made me a better broadcaster, but it also made our relationship stronger. If he hovered over me, telling me what to do, I would have hated it.
He would criticize me for only one thing: getting on the umpires. If I said, “That’s a terrible call—that’s not a strike,” he’d look at me like, “Shut up.” He taught me that umpires are professionals just like major leaguers. They work as hard at their craft. They deserve the same respect.
And you know who else deserves that respect? Minor leaguers. When my dad dropped me off in Louisville to broadcast Triple-A, he said, “You know, you spent your entire life watching Major League Baseball. Now you’re going to the minor leagues. These guys are kids. Remember how hard the game is. Unless you believe you could have made that play ten times out of ten, don’t act like you could do it.”
It was such great advice. Some announcers rip players—Harry Caray did it a lot. He would openly say, “How in the heck can you miss that fly ball?” I’ve tried to avoid that.
But it was the only big advice my dad gave me. My mom is the real critic. I call her when I want an honest assessment. My father always said something like “That’s great,” and left it at that. Even when I was an adult, he was my buddy more than my father. Buddies don’t critique each other.
That season, I got a chance to fill in as color commentator on a Cardinals game. That meant I was supposed to analyze what happened in a major-league game for a TV audience. That was new for me. A color commentator doesn’t have to be as polished a broadcaster as the play-by-play guy, but he needs to have more knowledge of the game. A play-by-play announcer may tell you the runner is taking a big lead off of first base, but the color commentator has to tell you why stealing a base makes sense in that situation.
I knew this was going to be really different. When you go on TV, you put on a fancy suit, make sure your hair is just right,* cake some makeup on your face while somebody sets up the lighting to make you look good, put in an earpiece, listen to a producer count down until you can go on the air, and then introduce a prerecorded video piece.
When you go on the radio, you . . . go on the radio. That’s it. Sit at the microphone and speak. You don’t even have to wear pants, though I usually do.
Television is an act. Radio is about being yourself. On the radio, you just start painting a picture, for lack of a less pretentious term. In TV the picture is already painted, and you just add the happy little trees.* Television announcing is, by its very nature, redundant: As long as viewers can see the screen, they don’t really need the play-by-play announcer.
On the radio, there is no ground ball to second base until the radio announcer says, “Ground ball to second base.” It can be a smash or a one-hopper or a flare or a slow roller, but that’s for the announcer to decide. On TV, if you see a ground ball to second base, and I say, “Ground ball to second base,” the appropriate re
action, as a viewer, is “No shit. I just saw that.” That’s why I tell anybody getting into the TV business: The camera really does the play-by-play. You just accentuate it.
A lot of times, I won’t say the score at the end of an inning, especially if it’s a big moment in an important game. I let the video tell the story. I’ve gotten letters from visually impaired people ripping me for not giving enough information.
So radio allows for more creativity, but in a way, TV is more complicated. You can get away with more on radio. You can miss something by a second and nobody will know. On TV, you had better be on it. In radio, the announcers run the show. In TV, there are producers and a lot more moving parts.
But back then, I didn’t know all of this—I was just excited for the opportunity and the differences, too. I was paired with Ken Wilson, who held the distinction of being one of the few people in the world who hated my dad. I think he was jealous. At one point, somebody compared Wilson to my dad, and Wilson responded by doing a mocking imitation of him for an entire inning of a Cardinals game. It’s kind of amazing that he got away with that.
As you can imagine, a man who did not like Jack Buck really didn’t like working with Jack’s college-punk son. To be fair, I had no business doing color commentary on a major-league game. I had never done it on any level, I was in college, and color commentators are usually former major-league players. It was silly to ask me to analyze everything happening on the field. I was just as qualified to write international trade agreements.
But here we were. He had no choice.
We were in Montreal. Before the game, I was walking behind Wilson by the batting cage, and he said to Mike Shannon, “Well, Mike, it looks like it’s my turn to babysit tonight.”