Lucky Bastard

by Joe Buck

  The first year was as seamless as I could have hoped. I really was just trying to get through it without anybody realizing I didn’t know what I was doing. Thankfully, I was about to get some help.

  Tim Green and I did a practice preseason game in Chicago in 1995. After it, I was walking out of the stadium when a long-haired man shook my hand and said:

  “I wanted to introduce myself. I’m Steve Horn. I knew your grandfather. I know your dad. I’ve worked for [Bob] Costas forever. I work at FOX now. If you ever need anything, give me a call.”

  Horn was doing editorial consulting for FOX NFL Sunday. He was a behind-the-scenes guy, helping with story lines and finding material for the announcers on the pregame show. He had this huge network of scouts for NFL and baseball to tell him what was really going on. He would tell the announcer how a pitcher adjusted his grip for his breaking ball, or why a quarterback wasn’t the right fit for his new offense—stuff you usually don’t see in a newspaper but which is invaluable for broadcasters.

  I called Horn a couple of times early in my time at FOX, to get a different angle on whatever game I was covering that I was doing with Tim Green. I did not yet realize that he would become one of the most important people in my career, and in my life.

  —

  In November 1995, FOX landed another big sports-rights deal: The network would share rights to Major League Baseball with NBC. This did not stun the industry like the NFL deal. FOX had already shown it could do sports. People had already learned they could find FOX on their TV as easily as they could find CBS or ABC if they wanted to watch a game.

  And this time, I knew right away that I wanted to be part of the broadcasting mix. I was established as a football announcer with FOX already. Suddenly, I had an advantage over every other job candidate: I was in-house, and I had done a lot of baseball. I had done all 162 Cardinals games per year before I started doing football for FOX, and I was still doing 140. I knew as soon as FOX got baseball that I would be involved. This wasn’t like when FOX got the NFL, and it never occurred to me that I might work there.

  FOX made me the lead play-by-play announcer, which meant I would do the Game of the Week on Saturdays, playoff games, and the World Series when FOX had it. It was a dream, except for one detail.

  My partner.

  Tim McCarver.

  I think it’s fair to say Tim would not have been my first choice. He would not have been in my top 100, to be honest, and it had nothing to do with his ability. I knew he was very good. But I think you get more protective of your family than of yourself, and I was still upset with how Tim had treated my dad—more upset, I think, than my dad was.

  This had the potential to be awkward. But what was I going to do? I certainly wasn’t going to turn down the chance to broadcast the World Series on national TV because of an old grudge.

  I decided Tim and I needed to clear the air. Before the season started, we went to our first FOX baseball seminar. Then we went to dinner as part of a big group. I said, “Come over here.” At the time, I was twenty-six. He was fifty-four. He was the veteran. I didn’t care. I said, “Look, we need to have a drink. Let’s just figure this out now.”

  We had a drink, and I said, “I know things didn’t go well with my dad. But you and I are going to be judged on how we do together. You know what I think of my dad, how I adore him. But I’m bigger than that. You’re bigger than that. Let’s just go forward and see what we do together as Joe and Tim, not Jack and Tim, or not Jack’s son, Joe. Just Joe and Tim.”

  We shook hands. He was great. We never discussed what happened between him and my father. There was no need. We both knew it hadn’t worked. And he had talked to Mike Shannon, and Shannon told him, “You’re going to love working with Joe. He’s different than Jack.” I think Tim went in with a good attitude. We hit it off immediately. I loved working with Tim. We never had one cross word in the eighteen years we worked together.

  —

  I would never have predicted this in 1991, but Tim McCarver became a friend. He is my friend, to this day. But we are not the kind of friends who socialize together. This story may help explain why.

  Shortly after we were paired, we went out for dinner the night before a game in Boston. I was late to dinner.* So I was the last one in our party to arrive at this seafood restaurant. Everybody else was already seated.

  I took the only open seat, next to our producer, John “Flip” Filippelli. Filippelli and McCarver never got along, pretty much from the moment they started working together. They clashed nonstop, to the point where I, the guy in his twenties, was basically mediator between Tim and Flip. It was awkward. I was still trying to find my way, and I had to make sure that the producer and the main analyst wouldn’t punch each other.

  I’d never witnessed anything like it in this profession. I tried to tap-dance back and forth to ease the tension without violating anybody’s trust. Later, we were in Cleveland before a playoff game, and we were supposed to meet at a production truck, and Tim got there a few minutes late, and Flip snapped at him for it. But Tim had been talking to players in the clubhouse. It wasn’t like he was goofing around. Stuff like that happened all the time.

  I felt like Filippelli should have tried a little harder to get along with Tim, since Tim was the one performing on air and really was the one who gave us credibility. But that was between them.

  Anyway, I sat down with Flip, Tim, and the crew. I ordered this huge lobster claw, and when I finished the meat, the claw was dripping in butter. I wrapped a napkin around it, and while Filippelli was looking the other way, I slipped the lobster claw wrapped in the napkin into the inside pocket of the blazer on the back of his chair. I was giggling to myself. I wasn’t that far removed from being a Sigma Nu* at Indiana, and even though I never graduated from college, I got a master’s degree in doing stupid shit to my friends for my own amusement. Flip and I had the kind of relationship where we could play jokes on each other and laugh about it.

  After we were all done and the check was paid, everybody got up to leave.

  McCarver reached over, grabbed the blazer on Filippelli’s chair, and started to put it on.

  They had switched seats before I got there.

  I was mortified. I knew Tim well enough to know you did not prank him like that. He was big on leaving his stuff alone. As he put the coat on, he felt this bulge in the inside left pocket of his jacket, and said, “What the FUCK? I mean, God-DANG!”

  He pulled out the napkin, and as he was unwrapping it, I jumped in and said, “Tim, I thought it was Flip’s coat. I’m sorry. I’ll buy you a new blazer.”

  To Tim’s credit, he said, “It’s fine. It’s great.” And he laughed. But I know inside he wanted to rip my head off, because that was just not a trick you play on Tim McCarver.

  The coat was not ruined. I think he wore it in the playoffs for the next six years. But we rarely went to dinner together after that, and it’s not because he was pissed. He wasn’t. We just have different personalities. I was far more likely to go out to dinner with my other teammate in the booth, the one nobody ever saw.

  —

  Steve Horn doesn’t appear on TV. I had used him as a resource only sporadically on the NFL. But when I got the baseball job, he called me and said, “I’ve covered baseball with Costas. It’s kind of in my wheelhouse. I’d love to work with you and for you. Is that something you’d be interested in?”

  I was definitely interested. I needed all the help I could get. I was in my midtwenties and would be doing the World Series on TV. I wanted safety nets under my safety nets. I didn’t want to get four innings into my first game and realize I was comparing every situation to something that happened to the Louisville Redbirds. If Steve Horn was good enough for Costas, he was more than good enough for me.

  Before long, Horn was off FOX NFL Sunday and working primarily with me. It’s hard for outside people, even peop
le at FOX, to understand what he does. The simple answer is that he makes me look good. And that ain’t easy.

  When I prepare for a game, I go through the notes provided by the teams, and stories provided by SportScan, a subscription service that sends me all the published stories about specific teams. I get a stats packet on the game I’m doing from STATS—the first four pages are team and league notes, and the next eight are individual notes on players. Then I lean on my own conversations with people in the sport, and all the information Horn gives me, the behind-the-scenes analysis that only he seems to know.

  Steve looks like Tommy Lee Jones playing Joey Ramone in a movie. He has worn the same outfit since I met him: jeans, an Oxford shirt, a leather jacket, and black biker boots. I mean, in twenty years, he has not changed his wardrobe. He is the fashion industry’s worst nightmare. His face hasn’t changed much either. He is in his sixties but looks younger than fifty.

  People sometimes ask if Horn gives me stats. That’s like asking if Tom Brady is the guy who hands the ball to the tailback—he is, but that doesn’t really capture his value. Anybody can look up statistics. I can have my nephew do that. Horn takes information and puts it together in a way that makes telecasts more interesting.

  Horn grew up in St. Louis, but he went to Columbia and even drove a taxi in New York for a while. You don’t see too many Columbia grads driving New York taxicabs. That’s a pretty small demographic.

  Horn gave me a New York sensibility. I felt I was always trying to please the New York critic. Whether it was Richard Sandomir of the Times, or Bob Raissman of the Daily News, or Phil Mushnick of the Post . . . I felt that, if you can pass their test, you pretty much can pass the test of the rest of the country. (Passing Rudy Martzke’s test was also important, but for some reason, Martzke was a lot nicer to me than he was to my dad.)

  Horn gives me a different point of view than the Midwest, conservative viewpoint that I would typically bring into something.

  We meet all the time for lunch. He’s kind of like my tutor. He’ll ask me about the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and explain to me the workings and the history of that. Or he’ll say certain Middle Eastern countries are basically corporations with flags, and that explains their interactions.

  He has a smart way of looking at current events that I wouldn’t have by just reading. He reads The New York Times every day. He highlights it and takes notes. He reads the front section and the arts or living section before he goes to the sports. But he can also tell me about the running style of Gale Sayers, or what made Sandy Koufax special, or what baseball was really like in the early 1960s. He has a way of contextualizing moments that might otherwise seem flat. When he sits next to me in the booth, I feel like I have the smartest guy in the room on my side. When I do football games, Horn has a headset and can talk directly to me.

  —

  One day in the midnineties, early in my FOX career, Horn asked me to go to lunch. When we sat down, he said:

  “I’m going to tell you two things you’re going to be mad about. You may not like me after this. But as your friend, as somebody who works with you, I feel like I need to tell you this. You can punch me in the face, or you can accept what I’m about to say.”

  Great. What is it? Do I suck?

  He said, “First, you need to lose about thirty pounds, for two reasons. One, you’re going to be on TV. Nobody likes looking at a fat guy on TV. Fat guys don’t really exist on TV for the most part.

  “Two, your dad is a type two diabetic. The lighter and thinner you can be, the more chance you have of fending that off. You’re predisposed to all these things. You need to give yourself a fighting chance.”

  I decided not to punch him for that. He was right. It made sense. If you look at those tapes from 1995 and 1996, I am fat-faced. People want to see somebody on TV who is attractive, or at least not unattractive. And speaking of which . . .

  Steve said, “And I think you need to look into getting hair plugs.”

  My hair?

  “Funny you should say that,” I said.

  I told him I had already had some fresh sod laid down, and planned to continue the lawn maintenance in the future. So I didn’t punch him for that, either.

  You already know about my hair obsession. But I needed to think about my weight just as much. I am six-foot-one. I weighed 240 pounds at age nineteen, and if you weigh 240 at nineteen, you are in danger of weighing 340 at thirty-nine. Metabolisms do not magically improve as you get older. I am programmed to be chunky. Who knows what I would weigh right now if I hadn’t started watching my diet? So I started to watch everything I ate, and I still do. Steve’s comment was the best advice he ever gave me.

  Chapter 7

  Big Jumps

  In the fall of 1996, I was twenty-seven and broadcasting my first World Series. The Yankees were playing the Braves, and the Yankees hosted Game 1. It’s hard to capture just how mind-blowing that was. Yankee Stadium! The Yankees had not played in the World Series in fifteen years, which is an eternity for that franchise. Game 1 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium—it doesn’t get much cooler than that.

  Baseball has a different pace than football. When I arrive at a football game, all my prep work is done. I have four 11-by-17 pieces of cardboard full of info done by Saturday night at the latest. (I keep those boards in front of me throughout the game. They basically turn the game into an open-book test—all the info is there. I just have to find it.) By Sunday, if I could be assured of getting there five minutes before I went on TV, I could do that and be fine.

  In baseball, I don’t know the lineup or the defense until I arrive that day, usually about four hours before the game, because there are so many games and those things change day by day. For Game 1, I was slowing myself down, just trying to relax. Turns out, I relaxed too much. I fell behind, and then I had to scramble. I remember thinking, “My God, this game’s going to start in an hour and I’m not even done. I don’t even have all the regular season stats and postseason stats written in my scorebook!” It was like I was Captain Procrastination in high school again.

  Eventually, the game got rained out. I was so happy. It pushed everything back a day. I could regroup. The baseball gods had smiled on me.

  I arrived the next day at 3:00 P.M. for an 8:00 P.M. game. We talked to the managers and a few players. The rain delay had really helped me. I was so worried about being revealed as some fraud. You’re just somebody’s kid. Who let you in the booth? Did you pick the lock? I had a day to get that out of my system.

  Thankfully, I had Tim with me, and broadcasting the World Series was routine for him by that point. He had seen and done just about anything that can happen on a baseball field.

  The first two games went well, I thought, and the rainout also killed the travel day after Game 2. We flew to Atlanta that night, got in the next morning, and I was so keyed up that I couldn’t sleep. I was supposed to take a nap but I couldn’t do that, either. I got through it by taking my first hit of America’s favorite drug: coffee. It was crappy Fulton County Stadium press coffee. I had not moved up to Starbucks-level coffee addiction yet. But I would.

  The rest of the World Series went well. I didn’t step in any major puddles. It was a big moment for me, and I knew it, but I never thought about what I would say when the Yankees won the World Series, or when the Braves won the World Series. I try not to think like that. If you preplan your lines, they will sound preplanned. It does not work.

  Yankees third baseman Charlie Hayes caught a foul ball to end Game 6 and win the World Series. “The Yankees are champions of baseball!” came out of my mouth. “Baseball is back in the Bronx!” That sounds strange now, because of how well the Yankees have done since then, but I think it was the right call at the time. People forget how frustrated Yankees fans were in the 1980s and early 1990s. A lot of their fans thought the glory days were over. They wanted George Steinbrenner to sell th
e team. Now they had won, and Wade Boggs was riding a police horse around Yankee Stadium, celebrating. That became the iconic image of that night, and none of us could have seen it coming.

  At the end of the broadcast, the network wanted me to do a wrap-up monologue. Only six years had passed since I stood across town for a Cardinals broadcast with my earpiece on the floor and makeup dripping down my face. Now I was giving this little soliloquy into the camera after the Yankees won the World Series.

  I had seen my dad do something similar for CBS at the end of the World Series. I remember I was kind of transfixed and nervous for him to get through it. Now I was doing it. I talked about Torre finally winning the World Series after decades in the big leagues. It was an emotional time for Joe—his oldest sibling, Rocco, had died that year, and his brother Frank, his idol, had gone through a heart transplant. I had known Torre my whole life, which made it easier for me.

  I got through it. I called home. My dad answered.

  I said, “Well, what did you think?”

  And he said, “What did I think about what?”

  “What did you think about the game?”

  He said, “What time does it come on?”

  Always the wiseass.

  I said, “Shut up. You watched it.”

  He said, “It was great. It was great, Buck.”

  He handed the phone to my mom, and she went on and on and on, as many mothers do. My dad was very understated. That was just his way. He was extremely supportive of me, but he didn’t give a ton of praise. Still, I was surprised he didn’t say more. The next day, I called home again. My mom answered.