by Joe Buck
Sometimes, somebody will come up to me on a Tuesday in July and say, “Doing the game tonight?”
I think, “No, I haven’t done the game for ten years.”
That’s not how they think. They see me, they think of my dad, and they think of the Cardinals. And of course people in other cities often feel the same way. I still hear “You’re on the Cardinals payroll, you’re obviously biased.” I got tired of hearing it, which was another reason to get out of there and go my own way . . . but I still hear it.
Leaving the Cardinals was the right decision for me. Most people in my business would agree that being the number one baseball and football play-by-play guy for FOX is a better job than local baseball. I’m certainly fortunate. But better is subjective, and better does not mean “better in every way.” My dad was fairly well-known among sports fans throughout the country but beloved in St. Louis. Me? I’m on everybody’s TV. But I’m not beloved like that anywhere, and I never will be.
Chapter 12
Married . . . with Children
When you’re on TV a lot, you never know who is watching, or what they think you can do. Some viewers think I should do some rather obscene things to myself. Peter Lassally, a producer who worked with Johnny Carson and David Letterman for many years, wanted me to be a guest host for The Late, Late Show on CBS. I was flattered. Craig Kilborn had left, and CBS had not settled on a replacement. FOX had no problem with me hosting a show on a rival network for a couple of days, which is one more reason working for FOX is so great. The FOX attitude is “As long as you do what we pay you to do, we don’t really care what you do with the rest of your time. Just try not to get arrested.”*
CBS did not have that attitude. Lassally had to fight to get permission for me to guest-host the show. I was flattered he wanted me enough to use some of his pull to get me.
I always thought my dad should have gotten an opportunity like that. People often (and understandably) compared my dad to other great baseball broadcasters: Vin Scully, Harry Caray, Mel Allen, Red Barber. I always thought he had qualities in common with another legend: Johnny Carson.
My dad was quick on his feet and could deliver a funny, unrehearsed line in response to somebody. Even though he grew up in Massachusetts, he had this Midwest, everyman kind of attitude. Carson was from Nebraska. David Letterman is from Indiana. David Hill, my boss at FOX for many years, said that what made Carson great was his Midwest sensibility that everybody seemed to relate to. My dad had that as well.
I decided to give the talk show a shot. I hosted for two nights, and I learned a few things:
I could do a monologue. You can tell yourself you can do it, but you don’t know until you go out there and have to make the audience laugh. We also did a couple of funny skits. At one point, I walked outside the studio, which was next to the studio where The Price Is Right is taped, and joined the people waiting in line for our show. I pretended to be annoyed because I wanted tickets to see The Price Is Right, and asked the people in line if they had any idea who this “Joe Buck” guy was. Nobody knew.
Hosting a daily show is hard. It’s not hard like pushing a tractor up a hill with blisters on your feet, but still, it’s hard work. The show may be an hour, but you can’t just show up ten minutes before it starts and leave when it ends. I was working with Kilborn’s writers, and we ran the show the same way he did. I would arrive at eight thirty in the morning and leave between seven and eight at night. It gave me an appreciation for how hard guys like Letterman had to work, even though they made it look easy.
I did not want to host a daily talk show. It was fun, and I thought it went well. I interviewed Ludacris, Kristin Chenoweth, Jason Patric, and Adam Scott.* Jason and I did this Shakespeare-style reading from his movie Speed 2, which had flopped, and it was hilarious.
But I found that hosting the show wasn’t as exciting as doing network TV sports. I had just done play-by-play for the Super Bowl. That’s an adrenaline rush. Going from that to a daily talk show was not that appealing to me.
Afterward, Lassally told me, “If David [Letterman] got hit by a bus, you’re the guy that I would want to take over.” Clearly, he did not want Letterman to play in Manhattan traffic. But it was really nice of him to say.
My mom and sister called after they saw me on The Late, Late Show and said nice things. I called Ann and she was dead asleep. She never watched it. I think she was worried that I would want to do something like that full-time, which would mean moving out of St. Louis. That notion really scared her. My world was increasingly in New York or Los Angeles. St. Louis is such a provincial town. I started to feel like everything had to fit into a little neat box in St. Louis, so people can kind of know what you’re about before they even really know you. But it was also our hometown, and Ann had no interest in leaving.
I didn’t really want to leave either. I loved St. Louis, and I loved my job. I just wanted to share the experience of hosting a late-night show with my wife, and we didn’t. We never talked about it. We were starting to drift apart.
—
One night in 2005, I met Paul Rudd for a drink in New York City. He said, “We’re going to grab Christina Applegate on the way and we’re going to go to this bar downtown.” They had just been in Anchorman together. So we picked her up, and the three of us were hanging out. Christina’s assistant was there, too. At one point, Rudd was talking to somebody else, and it was just me, Christina, and her assistant. We all hit it off.
We ended up over in the corner of the bar playing a video trivia game. I realized that Christina and I had similar senses of humor.
Beautiful woman. Funny. Seems to enjoy talking to me.
Hmm.
I don’t think you could describe the conversation as “flirting.” But it’s fair to say I was smitten. It felt like we were in a high school science class together, about to dissect a fetal pig, and I’m not looking at the pig. I can’t even smell the formaldehyde. All I can see is her.
Nothing ever happened, but I realized that this was the kind of woman who really excited me. I don’t mean physically. She got my mind working. She was fun to spar with—a smart, funny, hardworking woman who understood what it was like to do a job in front of a mass audience.
I went to see her star in a Broadway musical, Sweet Charity. I was in a crowd with Steve Horn and Preston Clarke, who was living in New York at the time. I was married, but I was also mesmerized, watching this beautiful, smart, funny actress perform in this musical. And as I sat in that theater, it hit me:
I am my father.
This is what he did. He had a wife and kids. He met a beautiful, smart, funny actress, and he had an affair with her. He married her and started a new family. The difference, of course, was that Christina and I were not having an affair—it was easy to let my brain run wild, but this was clearly a one-way feeling. It was an affair of my mind. She became a friend for the few days that we hung out. After that, I barely ever really talked to her again.
But at the time, I thought, “Man, I don’t laugh like that at home with my wife anymore.” It hit me hard.
I went home, and that was a tough reentry into my real life. I started to realize that I had the job of my dreams, two beautiful daughters, more money than I had ever dreamed of making, and the biggest house I could conceive. And I was not happy.
—
I think, for most parents, once you have kids, they become your life. I know there are people who write a child-support check or show up at the occasional school play, and that’s it. But for most of us, everything starts to revolve around your kids. You work so you can support them. You get up and take care of them. You spend every day thinking, “What can we do for the kids? How can we make their lives perfect?”
Your relationship with your spouse can become an afterthought. And I think that’s a big mistake. But it’s a mistake Ann and I made. After feeling that my dad was gone for so much of my c
hildhood, I was determined to give my daughters a different experience. I watched The Wiggles and Teletubbies with them. I changed diapers. I dropped them off at school and picked them up afterward.
When my girls were young, I would play with dolls with them, making up voices for Barbie and Ken. I would do an impression of Barney the dinosaur to make them laugh. I even bought a Barney costume to wear to a surprise costume party once.
I kept the costume and threatened to wear it when I picked up Natalie and Trudy from school one day. They thought I was kidding. I wasn’t. I pulled up in our Volkswagen Beetle convertible in full Barney gear. The woman on the intercom at the school said: “Buck girls, Barney is here for you.”
When Natalie saw me, she ran around the corner of the building to hide. Trudy looked at me and immediately burst into tears. They were mortified. I told them that someday, they would laugh about it—and now they do.
Even though I travel a lot for work, I had more time with my kids than most working parents do. When I’m home, I’m home—I’m not in an office from nine to six. And a lot of the time, I would take the girls on the road with me, and they would sit in the back of the booth during a game, like I did as a kid. They knew how to behave. We would see all these great cities around the country. Those are some of my fondest memories as a kid—traveling around the country with my dad. I loved that I could do that with my girls. It’s such a cool way to grow up.
I believed that, despite our marital struggles, Ann and I were doing things right with our daughters. We were raising great kids. But the marital struggles were real.
I was a prime candidate to find comfort with another woman. But I was determined not to do it. Whatever my unhappiness was, whatever Ann’s unhappiness was, whatever our shortcomings were, I never wanted it to be about somebody else, whether it was Christina Applegate or Jane Smith. It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t go there.
I knew the pain that an affair could cause, because I lived it my whole life. That was all I saw as a kid, from the moment I was born. It brought heartache to my half siblings that stuck with me forever. My dad had an affair, I came along, and their lives were never the same. I had nothing to do with it. But I still felt like it was my fault. I felt the venom, even as a five-year-old—this weird sense that I had made their lives worse.
And I think back to being on the road with the Cardinals, seeing players who I idolized in a hotel bar and thinking, “Wait. That’s not his wife.” I knew their kids. I knew those kids’ moms. And I knew this wasn’t right, but my dad said, “Just put your head down, Buck. Keep walking.” What happens on the road stays on the road. I didn’t want that kind of attitude in my life.
I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt somebody like that. And anyway, an affair is kind of an elaborate cop-out. It takes the focus off your own issues and puts the blame on a third party. When a marriage starts to break down, and there’s somebody else involved, it just becomes about that somebody else, not the reasons somebody else ever got involved.
So I never had an affair. Never seriously considered one. But if you want to mess with your mind, as a guy in a disintegrating marriage, you should attend a three-day fantasy camp with Christina Applegate. It really crystallized some of my marital problems for me.
I would sit in my car outside our enormous house and talk to my mom on my phone, just to get away from the tension. Or I would drive to Walgreens and work in my car there, just to get some peace. I’m not blaming Ann. It takes two people to make a marriage work, and when it doesn’t, two people are at fault. There was tension both ways.
I think I realized by 2005 that we were not going to fulfill the whole “’til death do us part” thing. But I still didn’t want to get divorced. I didn’t want either of my daughters to go through high school in a broken home, with divorced parents.
That’s also a pretty common mistake, I think: staying together for the sake of the kids. It’s an offshoot of the first mistake: ignoring your relationship with your spouse so you can focus on your kids. You are still saying, even subconsciously, “The marriage isn’t important. The kids are.” Trudy had twelve more years of school at that point, but I was thinking, “We’ll stay married that whole time. For her. I’m going to slug it out!” Like “Ah, heck, that’s only a decade of my life, plus a couple of years—what’s the big deal?” I really think, even after they get married, husband and wife must continue to “date.” They have to keep courting each other and find some time to be together, just the two of them. In my opinion, that is key to survival.
I wanted to keep our marriage going and raise the girls together in a household that looked perfect from the outside. It’s what pleasers do. If something bad happens, I assume it’s my fault. And that’s a problem, because you try to make everybody else happy, and the last person you think about is yourself. But if you’re not making yourself happy, you can’t make other people happy. That’s why therapists talk about the speech that flight attendants give: If the cabin loses pressure, you put your mask on first before you assist your child. You need to be right to help them be right.
Still, I didn’t fully appreciate all of this at the time. I knew my marriage was falling apart. I tried to block it out and concentrate on the wonderful life I appeared to be leading.
Chapter 13
Buck Rhymes with Suck
If you watch sports enough, you probably have your favorite broadcasters. I certainly have mine.
To me, Mike Tirico is as good as it gets in this business. Every time I watch him do a football game, I am inspired to work harder, just to keep up. Mike’s preparation across the board is incredible. I probably appreciate it more than the average viewer because I know what goes into it. He doesn’t just read the graphic off the screen. He knows it and adds supporting material extemporaneously, with ease. He has such great recall, and such a smooth delivery. You can tell he works extremely hard, yet he makes it seem easy.
And it’s not just football. He is beyond great at everything he does. I marvel at his ability to do golf, an NBA game, tennis, football—whatever is on the calendar. If our country suddenly decided that our favorite sport was feather bowling, Tirico would be our best feather-bowling announcer. If I ran a network today, and we needed to hire a guy to cover multiple sports, I would hire Tirico over anybody else. It’s not even close.
Tirico is not the only play-by-play guy I admire, of course. If I needed to hire an announcer to do the NFL, and only the NFL, I would call Al Michaels. He is the best, maybe ever, because he’s been able to do it at a really high level for a really long time. He’s done it with different partners, on different networks, in different eras, with different audience expectations.
Al is not the funniest guy in the world—he’s not that kind of entertainer. But as far as the mechanics of doing a broadcast and being accurate and an enjoyable listen, he is the best. If a catch is made at the 40, and the guy lunges for a couple of extra yards, I might say, “He’s across the 40.” Al tells you, “He’s out of bounds at the 42.” It’s a subtle difference, but broadcasters notice. He’s past seventy now and still as fast and good as anybody. It’s so impressive.
And if I needed somebody to give my eulogy on national television, I would call Bob Costas. Admittedly, this would be hard, because I’d be dead, and my cell phone coverage plan does not include calls from the great beyond. But I’d want Bob to do it. He is the best at making a point wisely and artfully. He’ll go on Bill Maher and talk about gun violence and hold his own. He’s the kind of guy that we all hold up in the sports broadcasting world as if to say: “See? We’re not just idiots talking about sports. Some of us can be smart, too.”
Bob’s memory is phenomenal. My dad hired him at KMOX when he was basically fresh out of Syracuse. I admire the way his mind works. Mine doesn’t work that way. I wish I had his memory. I get the information in my head, I regurgitate it on the air the way I want to regurgitate it, then it’s gone. Costa
s is one of those legends who is even more respected by the people in the business than people outside.
There are a lot of great broadcasters. Those are a few of the guys I admire most.
And of course, if you watch sports enough, you probably have your least favorite broadcasters. I have mine, too, though I’m not going to call them out in a book.
In the 2000s, I was surprised to learn that a lot of viewers have one broadcaster they just can’t stand:
Me.
—
I don’t emote enough for some people’s tastes. People say I seem detached. They say I think I’m above it all. The opposite is true: I never, ever want to seem bigger than the game I’m covering. I think people tune in for the game, and the play-by-play broadcaster’s job is to present the game. People don’t tune in for the announcers unless they are related to them. And I don’t have enough relatives to improve the Nielsen ratings.
So when people say I don’t emote enough, are they wrong? Well, it would be easy for me to say that. I mean, this is my book, right? I could just call it Am I Awesome or What? and rip the people who rip me.
But there is a problem with that.
And the problem is . . . they are not completely wrong.
I understand the criticism. Sometimes I listen to old broadcasts, from the mid-2000s, and I think, “Damn . . . that’s boring.” Still professional, I think. (I hope.) I liked my call of the 2004 World Series, when the Red Sox broke their championship drought: “Red Sox fans have longed to hear it: The Boston Red Sox are world champions!” But sometimes I did not rise to the emotional level that the drama demanded.