Lucky Bastard

by Joe Buck

  I said, “Why was Dad so short with me?”

  She said, “He was crying so hard, he couldn’t talk. He was just that proud.”

  Later that week, my mom and dad passed each other in their cars in our old neighborhood. One was going home, and the other was going out. They stopped and looked at each other like, “How great was that? Our son just did the World Series!” But they didn’t say anything. They just kind of looked at each other, nodded, and drove on.

  —

  A few years earlier, I had watched my father do games with Tim and winced. Now my dad was watching me do games with Tim and he was smiling. My on-air chemistry with Tim was great.

  Early in my time with McCarver, my goal every Saturday, when we broadcast our regular Game of the Week to a national TV audience, was to make him laugh. FOX’s Game of the Week was an even bigger deal then than it is now—we had exclusive Saturday windows with no other games, and there weren’t nearly as many channels as there are today. But we were still doing regular-season baseball games. I wanted the broadcast to be fun. Tim has a great sense of humor, and a great laugh, and I wanted people to hear it.

  Chemistry and delivery are so important when you try to be funny. We shared the postseason with NBC; they had Bob Uecker, who is probably the most naturally funny man ever to be in sports. He is certainly way funnier than I am. But Joe Morgan was in the booth with him along with Bob Costas, and Morgan didn’t really laugh at Uecker’s jokes, which made it kind of weird. Tim and I would genuinely laugh with each other.

  Horn would tell me, “I hope you realize how great an audience you have in Tim.” I did. He gave me instant credibility and was the kind of audience for me that he never was for my dad.

  I selfishly wanted him to be there with me because he was the ultimate security blanket. Nothing could happen in 1996 that he hadn’t witnessed before. And I think he realized FOX was invested in me in a way that CBS had never been invested in my father. Even though I was much younger than Tim, I had actually worked for FOX longer than he had.

  But it was more than just power plays. It was a genuine friendship. We hit it off.

  Tim worked so hard. He never acted like he knew the game better than anybody because he’d played it. He read. He talked to players. He talked to managers. He was critical. He had foresight. He wasn’t looking back. I think, at his peak, he was the best baseball analyst to ever do TV, because he wasn’t worried about upsetting somebody. If he did tick somebody off, he’d walk right into the clubhouse the next day and face him. He really was the complete package. He made my job so much easier for a lot of years, and he was the ultimate partner for me. I used to kid him that he was like an older brother to me—a much, much older brother.

  —

  When FOX started to acquire major sports properties, a lot of fans worried that FOX didn’t give a shit about sports. The truth: FOX doesn’t give a shit about critics. And that attitude helped revolutionize TV sports broadcasting.

  Sure, I’m biased. But FOX was willing to try stuff nobody else would even consider—and if it didn’t work, FOX would just abandon it and move on.

  It usually worked. FOX was the first network to put the score and time of an NFL game in the corner of the screen. We call it the FOX Box. A lot of people, including NBC’s Dick Ebersol, said it was foolish—they said viewers would flip the channel to that game, see the score, and then keep flipping. That’s like saying, “Let’s keep the viewer hostage by hiding the score.” Now everybody has the score up there. You would get ridiculed if you didn’t do it.

  FOX put microphones in bases, in foul poles, in outfield walls, and on football officials, so you can hear the snap count and pads crunching. FOX put lipstick-shaped cameras in front of home plate. That stuff is TV magic. FOX put a little balloon and arrows on the screen during NASCAR broadcasts to tell you which car was which.

  Yeah, FOX also had that glowing hockey puck in the 1990s, which turned a lot of people off. I love hockey. I think the glowing puck was ahead of its time—the idea was solid, but the technology wasn’t there yet. If you were doing it now, in high-definition, you could make the puck stand out without looking silly.

  FOX has tried to put a camera on a pulley system over a baseball diamond, like we have in football, but Major League Baseball is worried about fly balls hitting cameras. We put cameras on drones for golf. We put microphones in the golf holes, allowing us to pick up conversations between players. It’s one cutting-edge move after another.

  I don’t want to sound like I’m taking any credit at all for any of this. These are rarely my ideas. (I have lobbied to interview batters in the on-deck circle during an All-Star Game, and I would love to talk to a center fielder during game action, but nobody has gone for that. Yet.) I’m just thankful to work at a place that takes viewers where they haven’t been before. It’s fun to be a part of it.

  —

  Occasionally, we also take the broadcaster to a place he has never been before. Sometimes that works out, and sometimes it doesn’t.

  In 1998, David Hill asked me if I would do a live motorcycle jump in Las Vegas. The good news was I would not be the one on the motorcycle. I just had to talk about it. The guy on the motorcycle was Robbie Knievel, Evel’s son.

  Our show was called Daredevils Live: Shattering the Records. I thought it would be a dramatic event. There was a lot to like: It’s live, it’s network TV, and this guy is defying death by jumping over thirty limousines. I’m old enough to remember Evel Knievel and those jumps in the Snake River Canyon. Evel had a much heavier motorcycle, so he couldn’t jump as far.

  Robbie signed this deal with FOX, and he was going to get a ton of money to do this jump. I got to know Robbie a little bit. He was extremely nice. As we prepared for the broadcast, I was strongly in favor of him not getting killed.

  The day before the jump, Robbie was out there doing dry runs: taking his bike up to the top of the ramp that his guys were building, and gunning it. The thirty limos were all in place, but he wasn’t going to jump over them that night. He was just getting a feel for the ramp.

  Well, Evel came out and started talking to him. The talk became an argument between father and son. It was getting heated. I was doing rehearsals with Ron Pitts, who was doing the broadcast with me. We had a two-hour show and a jump that would take less than a minute, so it was tricky. We really had to sell the whole death-defying nature of it to the audience: If he hits that last limousine, this is what his spleen will look like!

  Evel and Robbie kept arguing. They were getting animated. Finally, I watched Robbie take his bike up to the top of the ramp.

  He gunned it down the ramp and took off, into the air, over the limos.

  Our cameras were not on. There was no money at stake for him. FOX was paying him to land the jump on national television, not in practice. I was stunned. And then, as his motorcycle was flying through the air, Robbie took one hand off the handlebar and gave his father the finger. Then he put his hand back on the handlebar, landed the jump, and went inside. That was the end of his warm-up.

  I looked at Ron Pitts and said: “Did that just happen?”

  And so the whole next night, we were sitting on TV acting like Robbie Knievel was defying death, but I knew Robbie was not the least bit worried about landing the jump. He had done it the day before, just as a fuck-you to his dad.

  —

  In 1999, David Hill had another idea. He asked me to do a live bass-fishing broadcast. Those words—live bass-fishing broadcast—should never appear in that order. Our show was a disaster. I would have preferred to be one of the fish.

  First of all, those bass-fishing guys weren’t used to doing live broadcasts. There were some technical hurdles. Obviously, you’re not going to have cables going to their boats. It was all on radio frequency, with wireless earpieces and microphones. I was supposed to interview these guys while they were on these different lak
es in the Orlando area, pulling in different fish.

  FOX asked me, “What do you know about fishing?”

  I said, “I had a fish tank in college. That’s about it. I know how to clean a fish tank. I don’t know anything about bass fishing, lures, boats, any of it.”

  They said, “Perfect! You’re hired.”

  I don’t know what answer would have gotten me out of it. Maybe if I said my favorite fish was Swedish fish, or the one on Barney Miller.

  I had already done a World Series. I had no burning desire to do a bass-fishing tournament, and I felt I had earned the right to turn it down. But David said, “This is going to be the next fucking NASCAR. We’re going to see the fish hit the line!”

  In other words: “Please?”

  He was asking me for a favor. I said yes because it was David Hill. I’d do anything for David Hill.

  There were three of us in a studio on this lakeshore: former major-league catcher Bob Brenly, who was a big outdoorsman; Forrest L. Wood, who is the creator of the modern-day bass-fishing boat; and me, who kept a fish named Oscar alive for a little while in college.

  The show was ninety minutes long. If it had been ninety-one minutes, we would have had a minute of dead air because I had prepared exactly ninety minutes of material on everything from the history of the bass boat to who the fishermen were. I was tapped.

  So if you ask me, “Joe, what’s the dumbest thing you ever said on the air?” it would be anything I said during those ninety minutes.

  I was up there saying, “Obviously, these guys are trying to catch fish . . . the bigger, the better.” I can imagine what the fourteen people who were watching thought of that. Oh, so they want to catch BIGGER fish? Is that what you’re saying? It’s not a contest to catch the SMALLEST fish? Bigger is better? Thanks, Sherlock.

  Some of these competing gladiators forgot to turn their microphones on when they were out on a lake, and so as I was trying to talk to them from the studio desk, they were talking into a dead microphone. I couldn’t hear anything they were saying. If they gave out an Emmy for Worst 90 Minutes of Television, we would have won, then dropped the trophy.

  The big finale, the big payoff, the moment that would turn bass fishing into the next fucking NASCAR was supposed to be . . . weighing the fish. Exciting, huh? It was like a weigh-in for a boxing title match, except instead of humans we used fish, and also there was no fight.

  And we couldn’t even do that right. They were putting these fish up and the weights were wrong. It was such a debacle.

  I don’t remember if I asked David Hill what he thought of our broadcast. I didn’t need to hear him say, “Shitty,” in his Australian accent. The good news: Nobody ever asked me to broadcast bass fishing again.

  —

  Except for that unfortunate bass-fishing interlude, my career was going better than I could have dreamed. So was my life. In the mid-1990s, thanks to my FOX contract, Ann and I were able to buy a bigger house. It was almost 4,000 square feet, much bigger than the house I grew up in.

  My father walked in and said, “Who the hell is going to live with you—the Rams?” They had just moved to St. Louis.

  I showed him around. After he had seen most of the house, I said, “Dad, there’s a third floor.”

  He said, “I’m sure it’s great.”

  He never walked up there. Ever. He just said, “The house is too big.”

  I didn’t think it was too big. But my world was getting bigger by the day. One day, Ann bounded up the steps of our house and said, “You are on the Monica Lewinsky tapes!” That was weird. I had no recollection of meeting Monica. I was ready to tell my wife I did not have sexual relations with that woman when I learned that, while Lewinsky was spilling secrets to Linda Tripp, you could hear my voice in the background, plain as day: “Ground ball to Jeter . . .”

  It’s strange, but moments like that are when you realize how far sports reach. When you’re at the stadium, doing a game, you just think about the game. You don’t really think that the president might be watching. Or his intern.

  We were happy in our house, and with our lives. But I wouldn’t say we were ever content, and that’s a big difference. In 1996, we joined Old Warson Country Club, which was a real treat for me because I am obsessed with the game of golf. And sometimes I would go to the course and think, “Man, what if we could live right here, next to the course? That would be so great.” There we were, living in this beautiful 4,000-square-foot house that my dad said was too big, and I was already thinking about upgrading.

  —

  When I was born, in Florida, my dad was calling a Cardinals game in Philadelphia. When my mom called to tell him the news, he said, “Thank you.” She can still remember the sweetness in his voice. It was a pretty strong turnaround from when she told him she was pregnant and he said his knees were melting into the pavement.

  But my dad never considered skipping work to see my birth. There were balls and strikes to call. That’s just how his generation operated. In the 1960s and 1970s, fathers were not expected to be in the delivery room or change diapers. I don’t think my father even hugged us until we were potty-trained.*

  The world had changed by June 7, 1996, when Ann gave birth to our first child, Natalie. It was now accepted for a player to miss a game to be there for the birth of his child. And if players could skip work, an announcer sure could, too. Those balls and strikes are still balls and strikes, no matter who calls them.

  The Cardinals found a familiar voice to replace me on their West Coast swing: my dad. He had stopped traveling with the team at that point, for the most part—he stuck to home games. But he went to the West Coast so I could be with Ann. This was the one and only time anybody could say he got a job because of me.

  I was so giddy when Natalie was born, I called my dad at around 4:00 A.M. Pacific time, never even thinking he might be asleep. I was bawling and could barely squeak the words out. He was so happy on the other end. I could hear it in his voice. It was a moment I will never forget.

  We did not know we were having a girl until Natalie was born, and Ann had literally just finished pushing and I was in her ear, asking if she thought the next one would be a boy.

  I was in Boston preparing for the 1999 baseball All-Star Game when Ann was days away from delivering Mystery Child number two. If I got the call that she was in labor, I was going to fly home immediately and let somebody else take over. We had a whole plan in place. I don’t remember who would pick up the play-by-play if I left, but it wouldn’t have been a problem. You couldn’t swing a dead cat in Fenway Park without hitting six play-by-play guys.

  I thought we would be OK because when Natalie was born, we had to induce—it seemed unlikely that number two would take the express train. Still, it was a bit stressful, wondering if the call was going to come as Pedro Martinez pitched the first inning.

  That’s a called strike two and . . . whoops! I gotta go, everybody!

  That All-Star Game featured one of the most moving pregame ceremonies I’ve ever witnessed. Ted Williams made both his triumphant return and his grand exit—all in one trip, from the right-field corner to home plate.

  The ovation was thunderous. Williams always had a complicated relationship with the public and with Boston, but in that moment, he was truly touched. As he took off his hat and saluted the fans, I was silent. Our producer, the great Mike Weisman, shouted into my ear: “We are on! Go, Joe! We are on!”

  I tried to speak, but nothing would come out. I was so choked with emotion that I was scared my voice would squeak. That would ruin the moment for viewers. Imagine millions of people wiping away a tear and then saying, “Hey, did Joe Buck just hit puberty?”

  It was best for everybody that I didn’t and couldn’t talk. The emotion of the moment was there for anyone at home to feel, the same way it was for any lucky fan with a ticket that night. It was one of the best c
alls I never made.

  Ted threw the ceremonial first pitch from a cart. San Diego Padres star Tony Gwynn, a close friend and kindred batting spirit of Williams, caught it. We were supposed to go to a commercial, but Weisman sensed something special was about to happen and decided to stay on air—defying his boss, who was sitting behind him.

  Then Gwynn and the other current players in the game all walked up to Ted’s cart and gathered around it, just to be close to him. You could see how much he meant to them—and that Williams still watched and cared about the game he had dominated.

  It was extraordinary television, and we got it because Weisman refused to go to commercial. We got to hear Ted ask Mark McGwire if he ever smelled smoke when he fouled a ball off his bat. Having that on tape would have been nice. Having it live was great.

  Two days later, Ann gave birth to another girl. We named her Trudy. We never did have a son, and I never cared. My girls are my life.

  Chapter 8

  Thrills and Chills (and Steroids)

  During the 1997 season, the Cardinals traded for a new first baseman—a guy who had been injured a lot but was one of the best power hitters in baseball when he was healthy. We didn’t realize it at the time, but he would quickly become the biggest story in all of sports. His name, of course, was Mark McGwire.

  McGwire was a quiet guy, and he didn’t easily blend into a clubhouse full of major-league players. It was one reason the Cardinals kept second baseman Pat Kelly around. He was a buddy of McGwire’s.

  Mark had an appreciation for baseball history, and for people who had contributed to the game. And he took to my dad instantly. My father’s health was starting to deteriorate—he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease—but he was still doing Cardinals games, and Mark loved him.

  In early August 1998, the Cardinals played a series in Atlanta. I was doing a national game for FOX that weekend, so I wasn’t with the Cardinals. I caught up to the team in Milwaukee and met Mark at a bar near the Pfister Hotel.