by Joe Buck
Dr. Zeitels has fixed some famous voices: Adele, Steven Tyler, Roger Daltrey, James Taylor, Dick Vitale, and Doc Rivers. You walk into his office and see signed pictures from these music and broadcasting giants. I must say: I took solace in those photos. These people were so pleased with his work, they wanted their pictures on his wall, announcing to patients: “You are in the best place you can be.” I suppose it was possible that he bought the photos on eBay and forged the signatures, but that seemed unlikely.
If the Restylane didn’t work, we were looking at a permanent procedure that involves GORE-TEX being inserted surgically, to hold the paralyzed vocal cord in place. The problem with that is that your airway is cut in half, and breathing can become difficult.
I kept thinking of worst-case scenarios. Not being able to breathe was definitely up there.
—
I tried another kind of treatment, too: old-fashioned relaxation. I went back to Cabo, figuring I would do yoga, then rest and try to get my voice right. I brought two books with me. One was A Prayer for Owen Meany* by John Irving, which I had read years earlier and I wanted to reread. The other was In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson.
As it turned out, I could have brought all the Harry Potter books and the Bible printed in six languages and it wouldn’t have mattered. I got there and found Pat Perez, the PGA Tour player and a friend of mine. Within two hours we were drinking margaritas out on the golf course and having a ball.
By the end of the week, I was more tired than I was when I got there. I was about to go back to work, which would normally be exciting for me, but I was scared because of my voice.
We went to this dinner party. I was sitting at a dinner table with one of my best friends, Mark Human. And this guy came up to Human and said, “You know, the house manager made pot brownies.”
I had never tried marijuana, in any form, ever. I never wanted to do it. I had a close friend in college who smoked a lot of pot. Whenever he did it, I got out of there. I don’t like the smell of it. I don’t like being around it. People in an altered state make me nervous and uneasy. I always want to be in control.
But as I sat there in Cabo, I had already lost control of so many things.
I looked at Human and thought, “You know, maybe that’s what I need.”
I never smoked anything in my life. But now I wouldn’t have to smoke it. It wouldn’t affect my lungs or my vocal cords. It’s a brownie! We put them in lunch boxes! How bad could it be? Maybe it would make me relax for the first time in two years.
I ate it. Human had one, too, as a show of solidarity. Half an hour went by, and I felt nothing. I was thinking, “Only me. Only I can eat a pot brownie and still not relax.”
Human said, “Well, let’s eat another.”
So I ate another. We got a ride to a bar in downtown Cabo. On the drive, I was looking down at my phone, trying to text, and the letters started coming off my phone into my face. I don’t remember buying that app. I freaked out.
I’m sure stoners get used to that feeling. But it felt like Alice in Wonderland to me. We walked into this bar, which was crowded, and I panicked. I wanted to stay in the car. I was convinced—convinced—that everybody in the bar:
Knew I had eaten a pot brownie.
Gave a shit.
They were almost all younger than me, and presumably have seen more interesting things in their lives than a fortysomething sports announcer who was stoned. But I felt like I was fifteen years old again and got caught smoking weed, even though when I was fifteen, I never smoked weed.
I started to lose feeling in my extremities. I felt like I was walking through molasses to get to my seat. Great. Now my vocal cords AND my legs are paralyzed.
I turned to this Australian security guy. He was with the Australian version of Navy SEALs. I assume they go on assignment, killing bad guys and stealing their beer. He was drinking a Coca-Cola.
I said, “I need to drink that right now, and then we need to leave.”
He said, “Yeah, no worries, mate. We’ll get out of here in the next fifteen to twenty minutes.”
I said, “No, no, no. We need to leave right now. You’re going to have to help me get up and we’re going to need to go.”
He was like, “OK.”
He knew I was serious because I was panicking and sweating very seriously. There was no enjoyment in any of this. I was so miserable.
We got up. He had his arm around my shoulder as I walked down these stairs. I went to the right. He said, “No, let’s go this way.” He pulled me and spun me around. I passed out on cobblestones in the marina, with my head under the rope, almost in the water.
Two waiters and the owner of Nowhere Bar, Pablo Marrone, were standing over me. They hoisted me up moments after I went down and asked if I was OK. I went from foggy and not feeling my legs to hypersensitive to everybody around me. Did somebody take my picture? Are people tweeting about this? MY CAREER IS OVER. That’s how big a worrier I am. Can you imagine Al Michaels falling down at a bar? I thought I was done.
I was already worried about my career even before I ate that brownie. I walked back, thinking, “Holy shit, fuck, fuck, fuck, I’m dead, this is it, my career’s over.”
I got home and woke up at 7:00 A.M. the next day. I kept googling my name all day, just to see if I was on some gossip site. I had my sister scouring the Internet. You can imagine this getting out, and me releasing a statement saying this was a one-time incident, and of course nobody would believe that. It would also give FOX an excuse to fire an announcer who couldn’t speak anyway. I went out and played golf, just to get out of the house. Nobody ever wrote about it. They either didn’t notice, didn’t give a shit, or both.
—
In July, as I continued to struggle to speak, viewers and some critics were writing about me, and not in a good way. One of our PR guys at FOX, Dan Bell, told a reporter, “For as much as Joe has done for FOX, he deserves more time.”
He was trying to defuse the situation and defend me, because Dan is a friend who does a great job. But that’s not how my warped mind read the comment. I read: “The clock is ticking, Silent Joe!”
I was terrified. I’d been doing games and was struggling. I was ready to quit. I was supporting a lot of people: my kids, Ann, my mom, my sister. I pay Steve Horn. There is this little community of people who are important to me, who need me to be employed. And I felt like they were all screwed.
I also felt guilty because I was still lying to my bosses. I continued to tell everybody at FOX it was a virus.
I was on Jimmy Fallon’s show that year leading into the All-Star Game. I remember going in there with Preston Clarke. We were in the green room, doing the prep. I told Fallon that before games, sometimes I sing Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” into a microphone that’s open to the whole crew to loosen everybody up. I was still doing it with my voice kind of screwed up as it was. I ended up singing “Ring of Fire” with the Roots on his show.
It’s amazing how your mind can tell you that things are OK. I came out of the Fallon interview thinking, “Wow, that was really good.” I can’t even listen to that Fallon interview now. There are so many things I know I wanted to say, but I couldn’t say them quickly because I had to gather this big breath to just get something out. It’s painful to watch.
You know you’re not having a good night as a talk-show guest when the lead guest is Snooki, from Jersey Shore. But she was. During my segment, I kept going back to Snooki, making jokes about her being the more important guest, but a lot of the jokes didn’t work because I was struggling for air. I sounded terrible.
I was taking singing lessons from a woman in St. Louis, trying to do all these vocal exercises. One evening, I sat in an empty section of Citi Field before a Mets game in prime time on FOX, listening to my iPod, doing scales as best I could. I was trying to warm up my voice to get any movement in there whats
oever.
As you might imagine, if you can barely talk, you can’t sing. But I was trying. Normally, I can sing pretty well. I sang in high school. I am my mom’s son, and I can hit notes. I carry a decent tune. And when I wasn’t able to do it well, that frustrated me, too.
I felt, internally, like I was getting better. But you couldn’t hear it yet. When I do a broadcast, I hear where I want to go before I say it. If I hear where I want to go, and I know I can’t get there, I’m just trapped. And it forces me to really dumb down what I want to say.
I went to see Dr. Zeitels periodically through that summer and into the fall. Every three months he would give me a shot. He’s not a bedside-manner guy. He’s a strict clinician who will give you the bare-bones facts. He deals with a lot of thyroid cancer, a lot of lung and throat cancer. He delivers the worst possible news to people. He sure wasn’t going to sugarcoat mine.
He had told me when I first went to him: “If you don’t get it back within three months, what you have then is probably what you’re going to have.” Now here I was, six months out and it was the same.
I’d go up there, sit, and they would do the whole banana-spray thing.
“No, it’s not moving,” he’d say.
Every time I heard that, it was like a hammer to my chest. I kept looking in his eyes for some glimmer of hope. I didn’t see one.
—
Sometimes I would turn to Steve Horn in the booth before games, or even as we were in a commercial break, and say, in my raspy voice, “I can’t do this.” And he would say, “You’re fine. You have a big instrument. If parts of it aren’t working, you have enough to get by. And you’re more than just your voice.” I didn’t always believe him, but he knew what to say.
Somewhere along the way, Horn became more than an editorial consultant for me. He became a life consultant. He has ridden shotgun through every moment of my life since 1996. In my life, just like in the booth, Horn sees things that most people around me wouldn’t see—or if they did, they wouldn’t say it. He is the one who told me to stop doing local car ads on TV in St. Louis because my career had moved beyond that. It was a good point. You don’t see Al Michaels or Bob Costas doing stuff like that.
Horn is a wonderful human being and easily my closest friend at this point. Naturally, this means I want to kill him sometimes. That comes with best-friend territory. We are together every weekend. Sometimes I feel he is crowding me, or that he gets heavy-handed. We have screaming fights that would scare the crap out of whoever was in the next room in the hotel. But I rely on him so much, in so many ways.
I went to the All-Star Game in Phoenix in July. The day before the game, I had lunch with David Hill. We were joking around—David was the kind of boss who loved to joke around. But at one point, we stopped goofing around, and he said, “I know you’re struggling.”
He wanted me to do yoga to help me relax. He had been through a divorce himself, and he knew I was going through one, and he knew that couldn’t help my physical condition.
Then he said, “I just want you to know: I don’t care if you have to take a year off, you’re still going to be my guy here at FOX.”
That was a tremendous gesture, and I appreciated it. It took a bit of the pressure off. But at the same time, I knew: I still had to get better. At some point, it’s over. You can either do the job or you can’t.
I thanked David. But I still didn’t tell him what really caused my vocal problems. It was too embarrassing. My career was hanging in the balance, and I was stuck in a lie about my mystery virus, and I didn’t know how to fix either problem.
Major League Baseball made me come to the stadium at 9:00 A.M. the day of the game to practice the pregame introductions, where all the players line up on the foul lines. I was trying to save my vocal bullets, but I had to do this. We ran through it, and then I hear: We have a problem. The fake players they hired to run out there when I say their names messed it up. We had to start over. Let’s do it again. Crap.
When we were done, I went out and hit golf balls for a mental break, because I was about to have a nervous breakdown. Then I went back to my hotel room. I had Trudy, Natalie, one of Natalie’s friends, and my sister, Julie, with me.
Trudy, who turned twelve that year, wrote me a card. It read, Good luck tonight. I know you’re going to be perfect. Nobody will ever know you have a problem. We’re rooting for you. She stuck the card in my scorebook.
I opened the scorebook when I got to the game and found the card. I cried.
That gesture was so typical of Trudy. She is a pleaser (like I am) and a problem solver, and she always seems to know the right thing to say.
As we got ready to go on the air that night, I was nervous. Tim was nervous. I didn’t know if I could squeeze these words out loud enough to be heard. And then, out of nowhere, ESPN’s Chris Berman walked into our booth.
Chris said, “Hey, can I talk to you?”
“Yeah.”
He said, “I just want to say, I know you’re dealing with a vocal thing, OK? I had laryngitis once. Just remember this: We’re not as young as we used to be.”
I thought, OK . . . ?
I have no idea why he said that, or what he thought was causing my vocal problem. Maybe he figured I was smoking too much crack or something. I don’t know. But he was trying to be supportive, so I appreciated that.
I rehearsed the pregame introductions a few times. I made notes on the pages. Then somebody from Major League Baseball said they made another change. They handed me a new script, but one page of it was missing. I found out the hard way—as I was introducing them live.
So Miguel Cabrera was standing there, and I said, “From the Texas Rangers, Ian Kinsler.” The camera was on Cabrera. I quickly ad-libbed: “Or maybe from the Detroit Tigers, Miguel Cabrera.” I didn’t know who would appear next on camera because I was looking at the script. I was struggling like hell to even speak these names out and a page was missing.
I thought, “Oh, my God. I’m going to have to go off sight. I hope I get them all correct.” If I got the names wrong, people would assume I was an idiot. Nobody would care about the script or the pages missing.
I got through it. People were tweeting: Is he dying? . . . He sounds like shit . . . He has no emotion . . . This guy sucks . . . I hope he has cancer.
Believe me, I had plenty of emotion. I just had no ability to express it.
During the game, reliever Heath Bell sprinted in from the bullpen and slid into the mound. I tried to make light of it, but I couldn’t. My voice wasn’t there. It’s hard to laugh at a joke from a guy who sounds like he has emphysema.
We had Chris Rose interview Justin Timberlake, who was in the bleachers. He kept saying, “What about that Joe Buck? He’s the best. He’s the best.” People thought he was ripping me, because my voice sounded like crap. The reality is that he was having some fun because we are friends. I got to know him from Kate’s party at first in 2006, and then we ran into each other again, and we played golf down in Cabo.
I was not going to say, “He was just kidding, folks! We’re actually friends!” If I do that, I’m the asshole who tells the whole world he knows Justin Timberlake, and half the people watching wouldn’t believe me anyway. You’re friends, huh? I bet you are. Right. Shut up about your famous friends and call the game in a normal voice, loser.*
—
We got into the end of August, the beginning of September, and it was hard to pretend everything was OK. Eric Shanks, one of my bosses, called me and said, “Look, I need you to level with me. Do you think you can do the postseason?”
I mustered up the strength to say, as loud as I could, “Yes, I know I can. I’ll be ready.”
That was a lie, too. I didn’t know. But FOX trusted me. The one thing I knew from going to Dr. Zeitels was the more I used my voice, the more my vocal cords would swell from usage and the better I woul
d sound. The swelling puffed both cords up like the Restylane shots did to my left cord. So I was getting a little benefit by overusing it.
My voice got a little better in August and September. But it wasn’t better enough. Put it this way: Nobody would have hired me to do a big game with that voice. I was doing it because I had been doing it for so long, and FOX had faith in me.
Conveniently for me, the Cardinals made the World Series that year, which allowed me to do some home games in the playoffs. My voice was slowly getting better but still wasn’t really back. Before World Series Game 2, I walked into the Cardinals radio booth. I’m not really sure why. But it was almost like a mini reunion, because Mike Shannon was there, and so was his daughter, Erin. She had gone from the cute girl in the back of the booth to a doctor of holistic psychology and energy medicine.
Erin said, “I can help you.”
She had been reading about my issues. She had taken up energy healing when her mother was dying of brain cancer.
Erin believes that, if you have a balky knee, she can feel it by touching your knee. I mean, it’s out there. But I was willing to try some stuff that was out there. I would have injected cat urine into my cheeks if somebody told me it was going to help my voice get better.*
Erin started working on my throat, rubbing my neck and my throat as I sat there, focusing on my “chakras,” or energy points.
I really believe it helped. Maybe it just reduced stress. I don’t know. But my voice was steadily coming back. I was still struggling, and it sounded a little bit thin, but it was passable. I sounded more like me.
The series was tied 1–1 and was moving to Arlington, Texas, across a parking lot from where I had broadcast the Super Bowl with a clear voice just ten months earlier.