Lucky Bastard

by Joe Buck

  That stung. I don’t even remember the game—just Wilson’s comment.

  —

  I think my dad was proud that I was willing to go to Triple-A at age nineteen and make $400 a month. That salary included my duties as the club’s traveling secretary. I was giving per diem money to players—some pretty well-known, like Leon Durham and Terry Francona, some prospects like Bernard Gilkey and Ray Lankford, and some career minor leaguers. There was no glamour in it. I think my father could see that I wasn’t doing this just because I grew up around it. I really enjoyed it as much as he did.

  Todd Zeile, the Cardinals’ prized catching prospect, was on that Louisville team, and we hit it off. Late in that 1989 season, he was called up to the major-league club, and the next season, I got my own taste of major-league life.

  The first game I ever did play-by-play for the Cardinals was in New York in 1990. That was when I slapped too much makeup on my face and sweated so much that my earpiece fell out.

  The next year, I left Indiana University. My dad paid for all those years of Country Day, and now his kid was a college dropout. He couldn’t complain too much, though. I had a good reason: I was going to call Cardinals games on the radio with him and Mike Shannon.

  As I got ready to go back to St. Louis, my personal life took a radical turn. My high school girlfriend, Ann Archambault, called me. Her mom had cancer. She was dying.

  Ann* and I had remained good friends after high school. I felt a strong urge to take care of her, because I cared so much about her and this was such a terrible time in her life. We started dating again—long-distance, because she was in college. In 1991, I rented an apartment so that I wasn’t living with my parents while I was broadcasting for the Cardinals. Soon after, I bought a house, thinking: “This is where Ann and I will live.” I just kind of assumed that she and I were going to get engaged. And we did.

  We were twenty-three years old when we got married. It was a big wedding. My dad was the master of ceremonies, in essence. Stan Musial was there, playing his harmonica. Dan Dierdorf was there. We hired a band, but they barely had to play because one entertainer after another told stories. One of Ann’s classmates was dating a minor-league catcher named Mike Matheny, who now manages the Cardinals. Sometimes, St. Louis can seem like a one-stoplight town.

  I confided in Ann. I told her about my fears of broadcasting failure. She supported me, and off we went, on a journey that we expected to last forever.

  Meanwhile, my professional life was taking off. Stepping into the broadcast booth with my dad and Mike was bizarre. I had spent so much time with both of them through the years that I considered them Dad and Other Dad.

  But there were definitely some adjustments to make. One problem was that I didn’t even know what to call them. I couldn’t call my dad “Dad” on the air—that would be like reminding the world that I was his kid. And I had never called Mike Shannon “Mike.” It was “Mr. Shannon.” That wasn’t going to work on the air either. I finally settled on “Mike” for Shannon. I never really addressed my father as anything. It was “Hey, you . . .” or “Great point, and” . . . like he was nameless. I hoped nobody would notice.

  —

  My dad and Mike were a broadcast team, but they were also great friends. And like a lot of great friends, they went through stretches where they wanted to kill each other. I believe it was Walt Whitman, or perhaps Grantland Rice, who wrote, “A baseball season is really fucking long.”

  It can seem longer when your partner is Mike Shannon. Understand: I love the man. I actually learned more baseball from Mike than I learned from my dad. He taught me about game situations, when to hold against runners, how to pitch certain guys, how to position outfielders—the overall feel of what a team is trying to do.

  But Mike is an in-your-face presence. He always has deals going—he’s setting up golf, he’s setting up fishing, he wants to go out to dinner. He craves action. My father was different. He enjoyed the rare moments when he didn’t have to play “Jack Buck”—he liked to sit on the bus or in hotel lobbies and read biographies.

  Even though my dad was a people person, and he would talk to strangers anytime and anywhere, he was not really the center of the social whirl with the Cardinals. That was the players’ place. He would sleep on a plane with his mouth open and a Stim-U-Dent toothpick dangling out of it. Then he’d wake up and play cards with Herzog, the Cardinals manager. Or he would read his book.

  But when we were out in the city, any city, he would talk to people. I don’t know if it felt like part of his duty as the broadcaster for the Cardinals, or he just thoroughly enjoyed interacting with random people. Probably both.

  My dad was the broadcasting pro—naturally eloquent, capable of doing any event. Mike was . . . different. Mike grew up in St. Louis, briefly played quarterback for Missouri, and played for the Cardinals before retiring at age thirty because of nephritis. When I was little, he would come to our house to get broadcasting tips from my dad because his grammar was so poor. But he became this larger-than-life local radio guy who people enjoy listening to because it’s comforting.

  When you do the home team’s games, you don’t have to be as refined as Vin Scully or Ernie Harwell. You can be quirky and endearing. If you grow up in St. Louis, you know that when you hear Mike Shannon, it’s time to chill and enjoy a ball game.

  And you never know what you’re going to hear. One time, we were doing a Cardinals-Astros game, and Mike said, “Thomas Howard hasn’t stolen a base since . . .”

  Since what?

  Since May 3?

  Since he injured his toe?

  “. . . the Jupiter invasion.”

  Then he ended it with “Right?”

  I was like, “Uh, yeah, Mike. Right. He hasn’t stolen a base since the Jupiter invasion. You took the words right out of my mouth.”

  A lot of Cardinals fans thought Mike was drunk during games. He wasn’t. I never saw him work while drunk. I never even saw him have one drink in the booth. He would just say wacky shit sometimes. I loved it, and I think fans did, too. It doesn’t hurt anybody to have a little diversion in a three-hour broadcast. I would listen to other broadcast teams, and I would think, “God, that’s just so straightforward—so blah, so bland.” Our booth was never bland. Baseball is not math class. It’s supposed to be fun.

  Another time, I read a note on the air, welcoming a few hundred French foreign exchange students to the ballpark.

  Mike said, “I wonder where they’re from.”

  I said, “France?”

  He said, “Yeah. You know, they say if you can speak French, you can speak any of those languages over there. It’s not like Chinese, because they got a million different derelicts.”

  I said, “You mean dialects.”

  He said, “Yeah, I mean dialects. But they got a million derelicts, too.”

  Meanwhile, I was trying to tell people what was happening in a baseball game, pitch by pitch.

  —

  You can have a lot of wild times on the road with a major-league team when you are young, but since I was in a serious relationship that quickly led to marriage, I wasn’t all that wild. I was enjoying life on the road with a major-league team in my own dorky way. Zeile was still my good friend, and we were traveling around together in the major leagues. So we struck a deal.

  At the time, most players had to room together. The collective bargaining agreement did not mandate that each player got his own room. If they wanted their own room, they had to pay the difference.

  I was a member of the media as the Cardinals announcer, so I got my own room. (Imagine that: the media getting better perks than the players.)

  Zeile said, “Hey, you and I are hanging out anyway. I need a roommate.” He wasn’t close to many teammates, so he wasn’t dying to room with any of them. And he didn’t want to pay to get a single room, partly because he wasn’
t interested in picking up groupies and bringing them back. He was married to Julianne McNamara, the Olympic gymnast, whom he met at UCLA.

  And so Todd and I ended up rooming together. I didn’t think much of it. I was happy to be in the big leagues, and Todd was a good friend. I was glad to help him out.

  Not everybody saw it that way. Joe Torre was the Cardinals manager, and one day when we were on the road, Joe called Todd and me into his office.

  He said, “Look, I really don’t care that you guys are in the same room. I get it. Todd, you don’t want to pay for a single room. But some of the guys on the team don’t like a player being such close friends with an announcer on the team.”

  It didn’t even dawn on me that this was weird until Joe said so. But as soon as he said it, I understood. Why would they be comfortable with it? We were crossing a line we shouldn’t have crossed. Zeile wasn’t passing state secrets to me, but it was a bad look.

  Two or three years later, there were rumors that Todd and I roomed together because we were gay. It was a long time ago, but I’m pretty confident we never slept together. This seems like the kind of thing I would remember.

  You would think that, in 1991, if an announcer and a player were gay lovers, they would be smart enough not to share a room on the road. I mean, that wouldn’t be very discreet.

  Anyway, the rumor was false, but it was out there. There was nothing I could do about it. And it wouldn’t be the last time I dealt with a rumor like that.

  —

  When the Cardinals hired me, I was supposed to just do the weekend games on the radio. But that quickly changed. Tom Barton, the former radio engineer who had been promoted to run the broadcast, told me to do a few innings of every game on the radio, and keep doing it unless somebody above him complained about it. So I would do some play-by-play while my dad did color for me, or Mike Shannon would do play-by-play while I did color. We rotated inning by inning.

  The job itself did not intimidate me. I had taken those steps into the KMOX booth since I was able to walk. There was no mystery to it. I literally moved one seat over, exchanged the single canned headphones for a microphone, and joined the broadcast. To others, it looked like I was overpromoted. For me, it felt totally natural.

  Meanwhile, my dad’s career had taken its own exciting turn. He was supposed to be on CBS’s number two major-league broadcasting team with Jim Kaat, which would have been great for him. He and Kaat loved each other. They would have been a good listen, too. It would have been a good team.

  But then, right before the 1990 season started, CBS fired Brent Musburger. He was supposed to be the number one play-by-play guy for baseball, along with their number one guy for pretty much everything else. That stunned the industry, and it left a hole in CBS’s major-league lineup. They moved my dad up. He would get to call the top games, including the playoffs and the World Series, for a national TV audience.

  I felt like we were both getting the chance of a lifetime. But it turned out not to be so pleasant for either of us.

  Chapter 5

  Cold Winds

  Early in my time with the Cardinals, I was stunned to pick up my hometown paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and see this headline:

  BUCKING DUES: ANNOUNCER’S SON MUST EARN CARDS SPOT

  Dan Caesar, the media critic at the Post-Dispatch, wrote:

  The burning question is why is Joe Buck, at age 21, being force-fed to Cardinals fans? Why is a kid, still in college, showing up on what many broadcast people consider the premier local team network in baseball? The reason is simple. And it’s spelled B-U-C-K . . . What’s most offensive about the situation is Joe Buck’s lack of dues-paying.

  It was hard to read that in the only paper in my town, as a twenty-one-year-old. I felt like I got torpedoed before I even got started. I was so devastated that I actually cried.

  A few weeks into the season, Caesar criticized me again. Then he asked for an interview.

  I said, “Dan, you have my permission to just make up my quotes. I’ve got nothing to say. So if you want to make it up, I’m giving you free rein.”

  He said, “Well, what does that mean?”

  “It means I’m not interested in talking to you. You’re going to write whatever you want. You haven’t even really given me a chance. So just make it up. Go ahead.”

  He asked if he could take me to lunch to try to talk it out. We met at some restaurant at the mall. I told him: “I realize I’m being sensitive. I realize I’m my dad’s kid. But give me a chance. Let me do it and then tell St. Louis if I’m good or not good.”

  And you know what? He did. He gave me a chance. And we got along great after that. But I kept that first article in my wallet for many years.

  —

  Meanwhile, my dad was having his own difficulties. He never seemed comfortable in the CBS booth, and he didn’t do his best work there. One reason was that, when he got called up to the number one team, Jim Kaat did not go with him. My father had to work with the network’s lead color guy: Tim McCarver.

  I don’t know when the problems between Tim and my dad started. But they were obvious to me as I watched the games. One time, as CBS showed a shot of flags flying in the outfield, my dad said on the air, “As you can see, the wind is blowing out to left.”

  Tim said, “Jack, I have to correct you on that. You can’t see the wind. You can see the effect of the wind.”

  I remember thinking: “But you can see that Tim McCarver is being a dick.”

  Tim nitpicked everything my dad did. It seemed clear he didn’t want him there. One time, when I was doing minor-league games in Louisville, Jim Kelch and I drove to visit my dad in the booth in Cincinnati for an afternoon game.

  I walked into the booth.

  My father said, “Say hi to Tim.”

  I did, but it was a cold, almost angry hello.

  And even though my dad was a Baseball Hall of Famer, Tim was considered the star at CBS. He was the country’s premier baseball announcer at the time, and in many ways he would set the standard for color announcers for the next twenty years. Tim was the fair-haired boy. He would even help anchor the Olympics broadcast in 1992.

  My dad? He was the aging radio-turned-TV-play-by-play guy, and he couldn’t be himself. His voice sounded different. It sounded squeezed to me. It didn’t have the same life. He didn’t have the same laugh. His sense of humor didn’t translate. In their booth, he was supposed to be the setup man, not the closer.

  He grew up listening to radio, not watching TV. He came up in the business in the 1960s—a wilder time, carefree in ways that are hard to imagine today. When he did the Ice Bowl in Green Bay in 1967, he needed something to warm him up. He drank coffee, and the stuff he poured in it was not half-and-half. Drinking alcohol on the job was not scandalous—it was almost expected at that time. Certainly it was accepted. He and a couple of other broadcasters flew out of Green Bay on a rented plane. Just after takeoff, the door opened, and they landed in a cornfield—and they laughed about it. It was just a wilder time in so many ways.

  Now he was in this staid broadcast, and he didn’t fit. It just was weird. I was watching, thinking, “That’s not him.” It’s strange to watch your father on national TV, not acting like himself. And it’s not fun.

  People noticed he was struggling, and if they didn’t, Rudy Martzke was there to remind them.

  The name Rudy Martzke doesn’t mean much to sports fans today. I don’t even know how much it meant to sports fans in 1990. But if you were in the media—or if your dad was—that name could send chills down your spine and make you so nauseated you wanted to skip breakfast.

  Rudy was the sports TV critic for USA Today. These days, there are a million sports TV critics, from the actual professionals to bloggers to the fan who makes one snarky comment on Twitter that gets retweeted three thousand times.

  Back then, there weren’t many TV
sports critics, and Martzke was by far the most powerful. I maintain, to this day, that the average person didn’t read his column. But everybody in the sports television industry went right to it every Monday. It was a recap of the weekend. He seemed like someone who could make or break your career in about three words. It was a big deal to be in that column. I think I had been the only kid at Indiana who subscribed to USA Today. I wanted to see what Martzke said about my father.

  Rudy and my dad had some history together. It was not good history. My dad got sideways on a financial deal with somebody who was a friend of Rudy’s.

  This was in the early seventies in St. Louis. My dad borrowed money for our first house from somebody who was . . . what’s the best way to describe this? Of questionable reputation. My dad paid the guy back, but then he was kind of intertwined with this guy. He was not the kind of gentleman with whom you would want to be intertwined. Law-enforcement officers came to my father to ask about this person.

  Then somebody else came to my father and he said, “You have a nice young new wife, huh?”

  My dad said, “Uh-huh.”

  The guy said, “You have a little boy. What’s his name? Joe?”

  “Yep.”

  He said, “Yeah, we’re keeping an eye on that.”

  So there was basically a threat of a mob hit put out on me when I was a kid. My dad told the cigar-smoking chief of detectives of St. Louis, a friend of his named John Doherty. Colonel Doherty went to this gentleman and said, “If Jack’s son, Joe, skins his knee, you’re dead.”

  I know what you’re thinking: “That wasn’t your childhood, Joe. That was an episode of Columbo.” But I swear, this actually happened.

  Well, Rudy Martzke had St. Louis ties—in the seventies, he became the director of operations for the Spirits of St. Louis, the American Basketball Association team. He was friends with the guy who loaned my dad the money. So when my father became the lead baseball voice for CBS, and Rudy was the nation’s premier sports TV critic, there was already some bad blood there.