Lucky Bastard

by Joe Buck

  At event after event that week in New Orleans, everything between us was really difficult. She would go one way and leave me to go another. She was getting looks from some of the people who worked with her. Friends told her that being with me was not good for her career.

  That week was one bad night followed by another for me. The highlight, believe it or not, was appearing on Artie Lange’s show on DirecTV. They had built him a village for the Super Bowl and I went on and did about forty-five minutes. It is, to this day, one of the two best interviews anyone has ever done with me. (The other was CenterStage with Michael Kay for the YES Network.)

  I left New Orleans a beaten man. I felt lost. We had had moments where we were so close and shared some things that were really deep, but the public side of it was too much for her. I went home before the game to a Super Bowl party at my house that my sister organized. It was not a big party, but it was more than I could handle. I just wanted to go to bed. I was not a good host.

  Michelle and I agreed that we would take a time-out. We would stop the daily texts and phone calls that had meant so much to me. We broke up before we ever really started dating.

  But then . . . then: She called me the next day and said, “I can’t not talk to you.” I felt the same way.

  A couple of weeks later, I flew to Los Angeles to pick her up and take her to Laguna Niguel. On the flight, I had an epiphany:

  I’m a chump.

  I was doing all the chasing. You can’t build a relationship that way. When I landed in LA, I called my mom first and the airline second. I told my mom this didn’t feel right. The courtship was too one-sided, and I was going home. I called Kate Hudson to talk about it, and stopped by Jason Patric’s house, which was near Michelle’s apartment. Both of them agreed this wasn’t a good way to start a relationship.

  I went to Michelle’s. She opened the door and gave me a big hug.

  I said, “It’s good to see you. I’m leaving.”

  She thought I was joking. I wasn’t. She asked me to stay, but I wouldn’t. It felt good to say no. Not as desperate. Smarter.

  I had a few hours to kill before my flight home. I went straight to a bar called O’Brien’s in Santa Monica, just blocks from where she lived. She was texting and calling me, begging me to stay. I ignored her for the first time since I met her. I talked instead to this guy from Mississippi about college football at the bar, for what felt like two hours over beers. It was probably closer to forty-five minutes.

  I finally texted her back. I told her I was at O’Brien’s and about to leave. Within minutes, she was there. She ran into my arms.

  After all those months, she had chased me.

  We stayed there in Santa Monica and went on our first real “date.” We played pool. We had dinner. We laughed next to a Dumpster in a parking lot behind the restaurant on a perfect night. It didn’t matter where we were. We were together in every sense.

  Chapter 18

  The Mountaintop

  During the 2012 football season, I got an e-mail singing the praises of an organization called WorldServe International, which provides clean water to people in Africa. The effort was spearheaded by a guy named Doug Pitt. You may have heard of Doug’s brother, Brad.*

  Doug and I met in Clayton, a suburb of St. Louis, and talked for about an hour. He and some NFL players were climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to raise awareness and money for clean water wells in Masai villages in Tanzania, and he wanted me to document it.

  I was interested in helping. I had no interest in climbing. I am not an outdoorsman—if you see me going for a hike, I am probably looking for my golf ball. But at the very end of our conversation, after we had talked about our children, Doug said, “Hey, why don’t you climb it with your sixteen-year-old? We have room and I am sure she would enjoy being a part of this experience.”

  That changed my view. Natalie was a junior in high school. Time was already slipping away. When would I get the chance to spend two weeks in Africa with her, trying to climb one of the world’s tallest summits?

  I told Doug we would do it. The girls and I had been through so much. They always knew they came first for me. From those early days of reading Toot and Puddle books to them in bed, or lying on the floor, making dumb Ken and Barbie voices while we played, I have been theirs. I knew I was on solid ground with them even in the darkest days of my divorce.

  I just wanted to go far away with Natalie, with no distractions. (I would have loved to have taken Trudy, too, but she was too young.) It was one of the best decisions I have ever made. From our training to the conversation and anticipation, Natalie and I had a blast.

  Truthfully, even after I said yes, I did not think I could do it. I see people running marathons and marvel at someone’s ability to run twenty-six-plus miles on pavement up- and downhill. I have a better chance of sprouting wings and flying than ever doing one of those. Endurance is not my thing. But this was different. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, and I wanted to do it with Natalie.

  The only problem was that, between committing to the climb and the climb itself, I had met Michelle. Now I was leaving the country for two weeks as our romance was beginning.

  A two-week trip does not sound long. I think we’ve had commercial breaks during the Super Bowl that lasted that long. But when you go all the way to Africa, and you leave behind a burgeoning relationship, two weeks feels like an eternity. I was already worried about the distance from Los Angeles to St. Louis. Now I was on the other side of the world, in a country where cell phone towers aren’t exactly dotting the landscape.

  When Natalie and I arrived at our hotel in Tanzania, we went to the lobby bar. I wanted a beer, and Natalie was probably hoping for chicken fingers and a Coke. In a small-world moment, we happened to run into Chris Long at the bar. Chris is a defensive end for the St. Louis Rams and the son of my FOX colleague, Howie. I have known Chris since before he played in the NFL. He was sitting with another Ram, James Hall.

  Chris and James had just finished climbing Kilimanjaro.

  He said, “Bro, that was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.”

  I’m sorry . . . what?!?!? You’re Chris Long! You play in the NFL! You have muscles in your earlobes! Did you really just call what I am about to do with my sixteen-year-old daughter the hardest thing you have ever done in your life?

  Natalie and I looked at each other and said, “We have NO CHANCE.” We almost headed to the airport.

  But we stayed. We had a couple of nights in the hotel before our safari and climb. The hotel had Wi-Fi, which meant I could use my iPad to chat with Michelle. I would make sure Natalie was set in bed, then head to the lobby to try and corral this woman I clearly adored while she straddled the fence thousands of miles away.

  Natalie and I left to help deliver a water well to a Masai village. Then we did our safari in the Ngorongoro Crater. Then it was time for our climb.

  If you ever climb Kilimanjaro, a little advice:

  Do not ask Chris Long if it’s hard.

  Get malaria shots before you fly to Africa.

  Pick up a prescription for a drug called Diamox.

  Diamox is a necessity, especially for first-time climbers. This drug oxygenates your blood while the air gets thinner up the mountain. Natalie had a bad reaction to the amount of Diamox she was taking. It knocked her out before we even started. She can be a little dramatic sometimes, so I told her to suck it up and stop complaining. But she was really sick. Let me take this opportunity to say here, in my book: I’m sorry, Natalie.

  I was also told that I should carry Cialis with me in my pack in case my blood oxygen got low. So I bought some Cialis, too. I have never bought that before or since—even though I have been taking Propecia since the day it came on the market, I don’t have any of the sexual side effects that I have read about online. I didn’t want to actually take the Cialis. Nobody wants to climb a m
ountain hunched over, and it would be awkward to call my doctor and tell him I was on top of Mount Kilimanjaro and I had an erection lasting more than four hours, and anyway the call probably would not have gone through because the farther we got from civilization, the less my phone worked.

  I was on Verizon, and their coverage at that time on Kilimanjaro was not great. Chris Danforth, a fellow climber, had AT&T. When I called Michelle from his phone, it sounded like I was calling from New Jersey. I begged Chris to use his phone when our climb shut down each day. He let me, and while I was climbing this huge rock, I felt I was also making progress with Michelle. After our third full day of climbing, I was wandering around camp, looking into Kenya, when Michelle told me she had been at a friend’s wedding in Los Angeles and wished I had been there as her date. For the first time, she sounded wistful while we chatted, and I marked that moment in time. Things were turning.

  Here I was, climbing a mountain at the age of forty-three, something I never thought in my wildest dreams I would even attempt, with my daughter. Meanwhile, I was still chasing down this woman who had given me hope.

  I made it to the top. Unfortunately, Natalie did not. That overprescription sunk her. But I am more proud of her than I am of myself, for two reasons.

  First: She really tried. She got to about 16,000 feet before our guide thought it was a health risk for her to continue. She fought, and she had to be told to stop. I think what she accomplished was a lot more impressive than climbing the whole 19,000 feet while healthy.

  Second: When our guide told her to stop climbing, I said, “Nat, we did our best. Let’s get you down safely.” I will never forget her response. “Dad, the only way this is going to be bad is if you don’t make it to the top. Go! I’ll be fine.”

  And I did. I went on. I saw the sunrise from the top of the mountain. You don’t spend a lot of time at the top. It’s like Clark Griswold and the Grand Canyon. You look, you nod, you snap some pictures, and you head back down with a raging headache. However, for that one brief moment, looking down at the clouds and a glacier is breathtaking. It is easily the prettiest sight I have ever seen . . . except one. That came when I got back to our base camp and saw Natalie. She popped up off the cot she was sleeping on, with tears in her eyes, proud of what her father had done.

  That hit me. After all those years of trying to make everybody else happy, especially my girls, I realized how much they want me to be happy. And when you realize that, you realize that it’s OK to try to make yourself happy. It isn’t selfish.

  That week on that mountain reminded me of how small I really am. Life goes on. I can’t protect my girls from every hardship that comes their way. But I can show them how to plow through whatever comes their way. That’s how they’ve been raised. Staying in an unhappy marriage would have been easy. Giving up on Michelle would have been easy. Saying no to Doug Pitt would have been easy. Turning away after we talked to Chris Long would have been easy. Making it to the summit and taking in the view at 19,000 feet gave me great satisfaction. I was truly happy. I had not felt that way in a long time.

  Chapter 19

  So What!

  I’ve become more content with who I am since I met Michelle. I feel supported by her and by Natalie and Trudy. I can do my job the way I think it should be done, and not worry about anything else.

  I keep finding new challenges professionally. Sometimes, the challenges find me. FOX has a golf package now, which is completely new to all of us. Golf is a very different animal from football or baseball. It’s really like broadcasting dozens of sporting events at the same time—I sit in the same tower, and we go from one golfer to another, and I’m supposed to know what everybody is doing.*

  For the 2015 US Open at Chambers Bay, I didn’t see one shot live. We were too far away, and my back was facing the course. I just looked at one screen after another, listened to what I was told in my earpiece, and managed the broadcast. It’s good training for being an air-traffic controller.

  I also have a new show for DirecTV called Undeniable. I interview famous athletes, and we talk about their life journeys, successes, failures, and regrets. It’s been a joy, and it might be the best-received work of my career. Derek Jeter felt so comfortable during my interview, he brought up the report that he gave gift baskets to women who slept with him. I had great interviews with Troy, Abby Wambach, and Michael Phelps.

  Undeniable lets me show my personality while getting to crack the outer shell of some of our era’s greatest athletes before a studio audience of around two hundred people. Seeing Troy Aikman emote on that stage felt like an accomplishment. He wanted to have something like that recorded for his daughters, and this was his spot to lay it all out there. Troy is one of my best friends now, and doing that show with him was a highlight for me.

  I took the lessons from Joe Buck Live and applied them to Undeniable. It’s not live, so we can edit it down, the way many talk shows are edited. We have a clear vision. It’s been extremely satisfying. Viewers have been more positive about Undeniable than any work I have done in a long time, but here is the great thing: I don’t obsess over that anymore.

  I know I can’t change everybody’s minds, and it’s futile to try. Viewers still give me a hard time about Randy Moss, as though we have some deep personal hatred for each other. In reality, I made one comment on the air eleven years ago.

  Besides, Moss and I were coworkers for a while. He did analysis for FOX before leaving for ESPN. When we hired him, I introduced him on the air and said, “We good?”

  He said, “I played the game, you analyzed it. You said what you said, I did what I did, and we moved on.”

  That was it. I’ve been on Artie Lange’s radio show and wrote the foreword to one of his books, but people still yell his name at me sometimes, like I’m going to cry or something.

  I’ve learned to put all that aside and appreciate the cool moments we experience in this business. Even though I’m not a fan of any team, it’s fun to be on the inside of the sports world and see what really happens.*

  Sometimes I get a feel for how a game will go before it starts. Before the Super Bowl in 2011, I watched the Packers and Steelers practice and became convinced that the Packers would win. They were just in a better frame of mind. Their practices were crisper.

  And I really think I knew who was going to win Super Bowl XLVIII in New Jersey in 2014 before the coin was flipped. The Broncos were playing the Seahawks, and a lot of people figured Peyton Manning and Denver would win.

  The Broncos’ practice was fine, and Peyton was great with us in our production meeting, as he always is. He is smart, he is so polished, and he knows how to answer questions.

  But then we had our production meeting with the Seahawks. We sat in the room with the Legion of Boom, their defensive backs: Kam Chancellor, Earl Thomas, Richard Sherman, Byron Maxwell, and Walter Thurmond. And every question we asked, they answered with this ridiculously high level of confidence.

  Sherman was known as the big talker, and Thomas is a big talker, too, but they all deferred to Chancellor. He’d say: “Anybody comes over the middle, I’m going to take their fucking head off.” The other guys said: “Kam’s the intimidator, not them. If they come over the middle, Kam will take care of it.”

  Sherman said Denver’s receivers didn’t scare him. Now, part of that is an act. I understand. But it wasn’t all an act. Earl Thomas was hyperactive, ready to jump out of the room. I didn’t want to look at Chancellor wrong because I felt like he might step up and punch me. And Sherman is so smart, and he is fearless. They were saying, “We don’t care what Peyton Manning does at the line of scrimmage. He can say ‘Omaha!’ five hundred times. He can move guys around. We’re not moving.” That’s how they played their defense all year. They stayed in their base defense and shut you down.

  I went back to Manhattan and saw Michelle in the hotel room. She grew up in Denver. I said, “I’m telling you right n
ow, your Broncos have no chance in that game.” The Seahawks beat the Broncos 43–8, and I wasn’t surprised. I had never felt so sure about any game I had ever done.

  Before Game 7 of the 2014 World Series, we were talking with Giants manager Bruce Bochy. Bruce is a great guy. I won’t say he likes me better than he liked my dad, but I think he appreciates that, unlike my dad, I never punted a football into his nuts.

  Bochy has always been so honest with us. He knows we know what we can say on the air that day and what we can’t.

  The question going into this game would be Giants ace Madison Bumgarner. He was available to come out of the bullpen on two days’ rest, but nobody knew how long he could go. So we asked Bochy, “What’s the most you could get out of him?”

  Bochy said, “I can’t see us getting more than two innings out of him. Maybe three innings at the most.”

  Bumgarner pitched five innings that night and finished the game. It was one of the greatest performances I have ever seen in any sport. And I think our broadcast was better because we could confidently tell viewers, “This is way more than Bruce Bochy expected.” We knew from our history with him that he wasn’t playing a game with us. He expected two, maybe three innings. And here was Bumgarner in his fifth inning on the mound, in the ninth inning of a 2–1 Game 7 of the World Series. He was that good.

  —

  When McCarver was in his last year with FOX, in 2013, we did some interviews together. We always enjoyed doing them together because he would answer a question, and then I would make fun of whatever he said, and we would both laugh. After one interview, Tim and I reflected a little bit, which is not something guys normally do in a broadcast booth.