Lucky Bastard

by Joe Buck

  How did that happen? Well, there were a few factors. One is, as I mentioned, that I never wanted to seem above the game. I was also very conscious of the fact that I replaced the great Pat Summerall as FOX’s top NFL play-by-play announcer. If you grew up in the eighties, Pat will always be the standard. He was a master of underdoing it: Montana . . . Rice . . . touchdown. No exclamation points necessary. Summerall was the best ever at saying the most with the fewest words. Just his presence and his voice were enough.

  I fell into a trap of trying to sound like Pat. I couldn’t help it. Funny thing: I had never actively tried to sound like my dad, even though our pacing and some of our sayings were similar. But I did try to sound like Pat. I guess I figured: That’s how you do it. Who am I to pretend I have a better way than Pat Summerall?

  Also, when I took over from him, I was in a three-person booth with Aikman and Collinsworth. We should probably call it a four-person booth and count Cris twice. I’m kidding, but this is true: Cris is fantastic, absolutely brilliant about the game, and there was not a lot of room in that booth for me to do my thing.

  Then there was this: I was so determined to not seem like a homer for whoever was winning. That may have led to some flat calls, especially when the Cardinals were involved.

  And every time somebody implied I was a homer, it affected me. The worst was in 2006, when the Mets played the Cardinals in the National League Championship Series. Before Game 7 in New York, I was screwing around during a rehearsal on camera—dancing to loosen up the crew. Without asking FOX, the Mets took the video off our private feed and put it on the big video board at Shea Stadium before the game. The crowd booed loudly.

  The message was clear: Once a Cardinals guy, always a Cardinals guy. It stung. I wish I could have ignored it, but I’m not wired that way. I was as mad as I’ve ever been in this business. It was totally unprofessional of the Mets to do that.

  That video messed me up—not just for that night, but for the rest of the playoffs. It still affected me eight days later, when the Cardinals won the World Series. My call was way too subdued. I was so worried people would say I was a Cardinals fan that I didn’t do justice to the achievement. The Cardinals won their first World Series in twenty-four years. That was a huge deal in a baseball town like St. Louis. My call sucked. I listen to it now and I’m embarrassed. I think, “What a rip-off for Cardinals fans.”

  —

  Looking back, I wish I had listened to the people who said I didn’t get excited enough. I was just so frustrated that people thought I didn’t want to be there. I love being there. I’d rather work than not work. I love doing a game and trying to put my miniature stamp on it.

  Sometimes I watch games and think, “That broadcaster thinks people tuned in to watch him.” It turns me off. Deep down, I still feel like somebody’s kid doing these games. I don’t want to overstep my boundaries. If a big moment happens, I try to get out of the way.

  The criticism came to a head in Super Bowl XLII in 2008. That was the game when the New York Giants’ David Tyree made that ridiculous helmet catch against the New England Patriots. People around the world were screaming because they couldn’t believe what they just saw.

  Me? I was not screaming.

  And you know why? I wasn’t totally sure of what I just saw.

  If you’re watching at home, and you say, “Wow, what an amazing catch!” and then the replay shows it was incomplete, nobody cares. If you’re doing a game for 100 million viewers and you make that mistake, you look like an idiot. Forever.

  I couldn’t be sure that was a catch until I watched the replay. And by the time we confirmed it, my instinct was: Don’t be too loud and make it all about yourself.

  So I’ll stand by that one. In general, though, I think there was some validity to the criticism. I believe I have a good feel for what’s going on in a game. I know when it’s a big moment. I just got sucked into a trap of not wanting to overdo it.

  But then, when I do it my way, the critics come out in full force. Like in 2005, when the Vikings beat the Packers in a playoff game. I was doing the broadcast with Troy and Cris.

  For years, when we did Vikings games at FOX, Randy Moss was the team’s biggest star. We would request him for one of our Friday production meetings. That’s when a few coaches and players sit down with us to talk informally, off camera, about the game. Those Friday production meetings can be incredibly helpful (when Tom Coughlin or Peyton Manning talks to us) or painfully unproductive (when Bill Belichick sits down with us). But they are generally useful, and most players agree to do them when we ask.

  Moss never said yes. Not once. Eventually, you stop asking. This isn’t high school, he’s not my crush, and I’m not trying to take him to the prom. If a player doesn’t want to talk, that’s his prerogative. It’s really fine. I don’t make a big deal of it.

  So I had no history with Randy, good or bad. I enjoyed doing his games because he was such an electrifying player. Still, I was surprised when he jogged over to the goalpost and pretended to pull down his pants and moon the crowd in Green Bay. He then appeared to rub his ass on the padding on the goalpost.

  In 1981, at age twelve with my mom in an empty TV booth at Busch Stadium, I saw Cardinals shortstop Garry Templeton grab his crotch and basically flip off the fans. Whitey Herzog literally yanked him into the dugout. That winter, Herzog traded Templeton for Ozzie Smith. So when I saw Moss do something even worse, I reacted to the moment the way I would react to a home run or an interception: I said what came to mind.

  “A disgusting act,” I called it.

  Then I said we shouldn’t show that again. I didn’t merely say it to my producer. I said it on the air. It just hit me that way. It was early evening—certainly early enough for a lot of kids to be watching. Also, I think everybody gets a little more conservative after they have kids. You go from “Who gives a shit?” to “Hey! Stop that! I give a shit!” You start caring what’s put in front of them on national TV.

  Moss’s actions weren’t going to cause me to lose sleep, but I usually give some opinions during the course of the game, and here was one of them. I didn’t think what he did was right. It seemed pretty obvious to me.

  Well, from the reaction, you would have thought I gave classified information to North Korea. I got ripped as much as I’ve been ripped for anything in my career. Sportswriter Woody Paige slammed me on ESPN. He called me a hypocrite for doing a Budweiser commercial with an egotistical pro athlete named Leon. Of course, Leon was NOT A REAL PERSON. He also didn’t moon paying customers on national television.

  Somehow, criticizing a guy for mooning the crowd was worse than actually mooning the crowd. Criticism comes with the job, but I still don’t understand that one. And there was an implication that the white broadcaster was trying to keep the black receiver from expressing himself. In some cases, it was more than an implication.

  I’m not an angry old man. I don’t care if a guy does a flip, or pulls a Sharpie out of his sock. I did the game when Terrell Owens took the pom-poms from a cheerleader after a touchdown and started cheering with them. It was funny. (Owens, like Moss, would never meet with us in production meetings, so it’s not as if I liked him more than Randy.) Some of that stuff is great. It makes for fun moments on the broadcast. We replay the hell out of it.

  But this felt different to me. If you’re sitting on the couch with your seven-year-old, why should you have to explain a guy rubbing his ass on the goalpost?

  Randy was fined $10,000 for the mooning. That week, a reporter asked him if he had written the check yet. He said, “When you’re rich, you don’t write checks.”

  So how would he pay?

  “Straight cash, homey.”

  That was funny. But it didn’t end the controversy. Vikings fans were still mad at me. Sometimes fans try to out-anger one another to prove they love their team the most. Once a crowd starts running down a h
ill like that, it’s hard to stop them. Red McCombs, who was the owner of the Vikings, wanted me removed from the Vikings broadcast the next week. People in Minnesota thought I was biased against Randy Moss, the Vikings, the state of Minnesota, snow, people of Scandinavian descent, the movie Fargo, all of it. I was the bad guy.

  I’m sure it added to the perception that I’m a prude. I’m not. I enjoy a good mooning as much as the next person, when the time is right and the ass is properly sculpted. The time was not right. People defended Moss by saying that Green Bay fans moon the visiting team bus when it arrives. Well, if they all give you the finger, that doesn’t mean you can turn around and give the finger to the crowd, either. A player has got to be above that.

  To this day, when I go to Minnesota, somebody will bring up the mooning and my reaction. I really learned the power of the word disgusting. If I had said rubbing his ass on the goalpost was inappropriate or unsanitary, the whole thing might have faded by the end of the game.

  —

  Does this kind of criticism bother me? It shouldn’t. I know that. But . . . well, I’m sure you’ve heard a million jokes that start something like this: “A rabbi, a priest, and Bill Clinton walk into a bar . . .”

  Try this one.

  Five people come up to this announcer named Joe Buck.

  The first one says, “You do a good job.”

  The second one says, “I agree.”

  The third says, “Yeah, they’re right.”

  The fourth says, “I loved that call on the World Series last year.”

  The fifth says, “You suck.”

  Who does Joe Buck believe?

  If you answered, “the fifth guy,” you were correct. For a long time, I couldn’t help it. I always deferred to the naysayer.

  I wish I were more like McCarver in that way. Tim was the best at dealing with criticism. He dealt with more than anybody I’ve ever been around, and it started before the Internet. He just didn’t ever let it slow him down, and I admired that so much. He was confident that he knew the best way to do his job, and that’s how he always did it.

  Me? If I checked Twitter or some message board, I’d blow right through the compliments and go straight to the guy who said I’m only there because my father was famous. And it would bother me.

  I mean, when you think about it, the whole “dad got you the job” part of it doesn’t make a ton of sense. It made sense twenty-five years ago in St. Louis. It doesn’t make much sense in the national landscape. Is FOX really going to ask me to call the Super Bowl as a nod to my dad, who never worked for FOX and died fourteen years ago? That’s a stretch. It’s more than a stretch. It’s nonsensical. When my father worked for CBS in 1991, his name couldn’t even save his own job. How is it going to save mine now?

  But when people say I suck, I hear two voices: theirs, and the little one in my head that’s saying, “You’re not good enough.” It’s hard to shut those voices out. Criticism just fans the flame of whatever self-doubt any normal person would have. Maybe there are people who are so supremely confident that they think, “I’ve got this licked. Wait ’til they hear what I have to say next. Everybody will see how fantastic I am.” I think those people are psychos. You’d have to be a complete dick, completely unaware of your own relative unimportance on the planet, to think that way.

  —

  There is no doubt that being Jack Buck’s kid helped me in a lot of ways when I was younger. But it also works against me in one important sense: I was around this business so much as a kid, so I never thought, “Oh, my God, can you imagine if I were ever to make it into a big-league booth and broadcast for the Cardinals?”

  I was certainly excited when I did my first Super Bowl. But my dad did the Super Bowl every year on the radio. So I had been around it. The Super Bowl was never a far-off, mystical destination for me. It was never the other side of the rainbow. I always felt like it was a career possibility for me. That was good, because it made me realize what was possible, but it was bad in the sense that I didn’t fully appreciate it when I got there. I felt lucky to be there, but I didn’t feel like I had accomplished much. I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.

  To this day, I don’t really believe that I’m worthy of the seat a lot of the time. Whether it’s the US Open or an NFL game, even a baseball game, sometimes I’m really guarded about what I say, because I don’t want anybody to think I’m taking it for granted.

  Early in my career, I was much freer with my sense of humor. Sometimes I would get off a line and people would crush me for it. Phil Mushnick of the New York Post, who writes a scathing, repetitive column that should just be called “I’m Angry and Nothing Is Ever Good Enough for Me,” would continually write that I was trying to be too funny, which is awful. You shouldn’t have to try to be funny.*

  Steve Horn often told me: “Don’t always look for other people’s approval.” He told me that long before Twitter existed. “Do not listen to the noise,” he’d say. Many times, he has reminded me that when Vin Scully worked for NBC in the eighties, he wouldn’t wait around for some vice president or director of sports broadcasting to tell him he did well. He just did his thing. Your critics may be right sometimes, but you still need to tune them out and do the job.

  —

  I was lucky in a lot of ways—to get my job, to have this new network suddenly become an enormous player in sportscasting, and as viewers often reminded me, to be Jack Buck’s kid. But I was also lucky that I got into the business before social media existed.

  I can only imagine the fallout if I made the same mistake today that I made in 2000. I was doing a game in St. Louis, and something happened on the field that was an illusion. I mentioned Doug Henning, a famous magician/illusionist in the 1980s. When I was a kid, my mom and I saw Henning star in Merlin on Broadway. He was a pretty big deal. And I hadn’t heard from him in a while. I didn’t think anybody had.

  So I riffed, on the air: “Speaking of illusion, where is Doug Henning? You know what? Now that I think about it, maybe it’s his greatest magic trick of all time, to disappear from the American consciousness for ten years, and at some point here soon, I know he’s going to pop up and say, ‘Ta-da!’”

  Clever line . . . or so I thought. To my left, I saw Horn shaking his head. I can spot the Steve Horn headshake even if he is standing behind me. And it’s never good. I knew, from his reaction, that I had just messed up.

  Horn thought Doug Henning had died.

  Whoops.

  Horn looked it up, to make sure he was right. He was. I wormed my way out of it on the air. I was lucky there was no Twitter at the time. People couldn’t excoriate me. These days, if you make a comment like that, the Magicians’ Guild starts picketing your games, which is actually not that bad, because you can’t see them.

  —

  Twitter does not help. Every time you crack a joke or step out of the normal line of conversation, you’re asking to get whacked. Social media kind of brings out the bully in everybody. People write stuff on Twitter that they would never say in person, or even in an e-mail.

  It’s part of the deal, and I understand that, overall, I have a great gig. But I think this trend is bad for the fans, too. I think about this sometimes: With every passing year, fans’ memories of my dad get polished a little more. It’s not just him. It’s Harry Caray, Pirates broadcaster Bob Prince—any of the greats from their generation. We remember them as wonderful announcers, and we should, but we forget that our expectations were different then. They had freedom to be themselves.

  An example: Once, my dad and Mike Shannon were describing a ceremony at home plate before a Cardinals game for a radio audience.

  My dad said, “Well, you can see, Mike, by the looks of it from up here, she’s Canadian.”

  And Mike said, “How do you know that, Jack?”

  And my dad’s answer was “She’s big north of the borde
r.”

  And they laughed at his tit joke and went on to the next thing. There were no protests by the National Organization for Women. Talk show hosts did not play the clip over and over in an attempt to set records for fake outrage. If somebody had a complaint, they had to either call the switchboard at KMOX radio or sit down and write a letter. Somebody would open the letter, say “Huh,” and throw it in the trash. And that would be the end of that.

  Can you imagine the reaction if I commented on a woman’s breasts during a broadcast today? I wouldn’t get to finish the inning. That’s OK—when I’m doing a game, I’m happy to keep all breast-related thoughts to myself. But it’s part of a greater trend, and I don’t really like the trend.

  Broadcasting has been great to me, so I hope this does not sound like a complaint. It is an observation. But I think people want more from their broadcasters—more flair, more humor, more personality. And yet as soon as somebody says something that is opinionated or not politically correct, they get crushed. And that keeps them from saying anything interesting.

  I grew up in a time when Howard Cosell was different from everybody else. He would express his opinion on Monday Night Football, and everybody knew, including Howard: Some fans hated him. Some fans loved him. But in the end, everybody wanted Howard Cosell talking about their team.

  Now even the mildest comments bring some heat in return. Not long ago, I was doing a game when Johnny Manziel was a rookie. Manziel came in with all this hype as a Heisman Trophy winner, but he was playing poorly. When we came back from a commercial break during my game in Seattle, I mentioned that Manziel had gotten his first NFL start earlier that day. I said something like “Well, my name is Johnny Manziel. You probably know me as Johnny Football. I made my first start today for the Cleveland Browns, and my quarterback rating was 1.1.”

  Somebody told me the clip went “viral.” I don’t really know what that means. Do you treat the comment with medication? Anyway, people were talking about it like I said something crazy. It was such a mild comment. I mean, the guy walked out on the stage at the draft doing his little money sign, and then he got his chance to play, and he was terrible by NFL standards. It was just a funny way to say it. I was getting ripped for being too harsh.