Joe Buck

This article is about the sportscaster. For the fictional character, see Midnight Cowboy. For the rockabilly musician, see Joe Buck (musician).

Joe Buck
on the field at Busch Stadium
Born	(1969-04-25) April 25, 1969 St. Petersburg, Florida
Education	Attended Indiana University. Did not graduate.
Occupation	Sportscaster
Children	Natalie and Trudy
Parent(s)	Jack Buck and Carole Lintzenich

Joe Buck (right) with President Barack Obama and Tim McCarver (left) during the 2009 MLB All-Star Game.

Joseph Francis "Joe" Buck (born April 25, 1969) is an American sportscaster and the son of sportscaster Jack Buck. He has won numerous Sports Emmy Awards for his play-by-play work with Fox Sports.

Biography

Education

Buck was born in St. Petersburg, Florida (where the St. Louis Cardinals, for whom his father broadcast, then conducted their spring training) and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. After graduating from St. Louis Country Day School, Buck began his broadcasting career in 1989, while he was an undergraduate at Indiana University. Buck was also a member of Sigma Nu Fraternity Beta Eta Chapter.

Career

Career timeline

• 1991–2007: St. Louis Cardinals play-by-play
• 1992–1993: University of Missouri basketball color commentator
• 1994–1997: NFL on Fox regional play-by-play
• 1996–present: Major League Baseball on Fox lead play-by-play
• 2002–present: NFL on Fox lead play-by-play
• 2006: Fox NFL Sunday host
• 2009: Joe Buck Live host

Before Fox

Buck called play-by-play for the then-Louisville Redbirds, a minor league affiliate of the Cardinals, and was a reporter for ESPN's coverage of the Triple-A All-Star Game. In 1991, Buck did reporting for St Louis' CBS affiliate KMOV. Also, in 1991 Joe followed in his father's footsteps by broadcasting for the Cardinals on local television and KMOX Radio, filling in while his father was working on CBS telecasts. In the 1992–95 season he was the color commentator for University of Missouri basketball broadcasts.

Buck continued to call Cardinals games after being hired by Fox, initially with his father on KMOX and later on FSN Midwest television. As his network duties increased, however, Buck's local workload shrunk, and prior to the 2008 season it was announced that Buck would no longer be calling Cardinals telecasts for FSN Midwest. This would mark the first time since 1960 that a member of the Buck family would not be part of the team's broadcasting crew.

Hiring at Fox

In 1994 Buck was hired by Fox, and at the age of 25 became the youngest man ever to announce a regular slate of National Football League games on network television.

Major League Baseball on Fox

In 1996 he was named Fox's lead play-by-play voice for Major League Baseball, teaming with Tim McCarver, who had previously worked with Joe's father on CBS. That year, he became the youngest man to do a national broadcast (for all nine innings and games, as a network employee as opposed to simply being a representative of one the participating teams) for a World Series, surpassing Sean McDonough, who called the 1992 World Series for CBS at the age of 30. McDonough had replaced Jack Buck as CBS' lead baseball play-by-play man after the elder Buck was fired in late 1991.

On September 8, 1998 Joe Buck called Mark McGwire's 62nd home run that broke Roger Maris' single-season record. The game was nationally televised live in prime time on Fox. It was a rarity for a nationally televised regular season game to not be aired on cable since the end of the Monday Night Baseball era on ABC in 1989.

During Fox's broadcast of the 2002 World Series, Joe Buck paid implicit tribute to his father, who had died only a few months earlier (he had read the eulogy at his father's funeral), by calling the final out of Game 6 (which tied the series at 3–3, and thus ensured there would be a Game 7 broadcast the next night) with the phrase, "We'll see you tomorrow night." This was the same phrase with which Jack Buck had famously called Kirby Puckett's home run off Braves pitcher Charlie Leibrandt which ended Game 6 of the 1991 World Series. Since then he has continued to use this phrase at appropriate times.

Buck famously announced the end of the "Curse of the Bambino" with: "Back to Foulke. Red Sox fans have longed to hear it: the Boston Red Sox are World Champions!"

His low-key statement "St. Louis has a World Series winner," at the close of the 2006 World Series, echoed a long-time catchphrase of Jack Buck's, at the close of any Cardinals victory: "And that's a winner!"

NFL on Fox

Buck became Fox Sports' lead NFL play-by-play man in 2002 (taking over for Pat Summerall), teaming with Cris Collinsworth and Troy Aikman as color commentators and Pam Oliver as the sideline reporter. Buck is only the third announcer to handle a television network's lead MLB and NFL coverage in the same year (following NBC's Curt Gowdy and ABC's Al Michaels). By 2002, Buck's Fox duties forced him to cut his local Cardinal schedule to 25 games. Whenever Joe Buck has been on a postseason Major League Baseball assignment, Dick Stockton (and Kenny Albert beginning in 2007), who coincidentally was the back-up announcer behind Jack Buck for CBS' baseball telecasts in the early 1990s, would fill-in for him.

On February 6, 2005, Buck called his first Super Bowl, as the New England Patriots defeated the Philadelphia Eagles for their third championship in four years, just three months after he called the end of the "Curse of the Bambino". His father called 17 Super Bowls for CBS television and radio in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

Fox NFL Sunday

On August 14, 2006, Buck was named the host of Fox's pregame NFL show, Fox NFL Sunday and postgame doubleheader show. According to the Nielsen ratings system, viewership was down for the entire season. Fox announced in March 2007 that Buck would no longer host Fox NFL Sunday in 2007, concentrating on play-by-play for the week's marquee game. Since James Brown, the original top sportscaster for Fox, left for CBS in 2006, Joe Buck has been the network's top broadcaster since.

HBO Sports

On February 5, 2009, Buck signed with HBO to host a sports-based talk show for the network called Joe Buck Live, with a format similar to that of Costas Now, the monthly HBO program previously hosted by Bob Costas.

The show's debut on June 15, 2009 made national headlines due to the tension-filled banter between Buck and guest Artie Lange, a comedian from The Howard Stern Show, who made several outrageous jokes at Buck's expense. Two more episodes aired in 2009. In March 2010, Buck told a St. Louis radio station that HBO might be planning to cancel Joe Buck Live, adding that he "won't really miss" the program and that it involved "a lot more effort and hassle than I ever expected". HBO subsequently confirmed the show's cancellation to Broadcasting & Cable.

Other notable appearances

In the late 1990s, Buck hosted a weekly sports-news show, Goin' Deep, for Fox Sports Net cable. He also called horse racing and professional bass fishing events early in his Fox career, as well as the network's first Cotton Bowl Classic telecast in 1999.

Part of Buck's broadcast (with McCarver and Bob Brenly) of Game 5 of the 1997 American League Championship Series could be heard in the background of one of the recordings Linda Tripp made of a conversation between herself and Monica Lewinsky, regarding the latter's affair with then-President Bill Clinton.

Buck once guest-hosted an episode of the E! network's Talk Soup program.

Since 2001, Buck has hosted the "Joe Buck Classic", a celebrity pro-am golf tournament that is played each May to raise money for St. Louis Children's Hospital.

Buck can be heard as the voice behind one of the more significant moments in modern Red Sox-Yankees lore. In the bottom of the 11th inning of Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series, Aaron Boone famously hit Tim Wakefield's first pitch over the left field wall as Buck exclaimed, "The Boston Red Sox, and fans from New England, will tell you that they were five outs away, leading by three...as Boone hits it to deep left...that might send the Yankees to the World Series. Boone is the hero of Game 7!"

On a Season 3 episode of Lost, Ben shows Jack a clip of the last play of the 2004 World Series, and Buck can be heard calling the final out: "Red Sox fans have longed to hear it: the Boston Red Sox are world champions!"

Buck appeared as himself in the premiere episode of the HBO comedy series Eastbound & Down.

Buck appeared numerous times on Late Night with Conan O'Brien as a guest. During an appearance prior to the 2006 World Series, Buck was handed a garish necktie that had previously been worn by O'Brien and bandleader Richie "LaBamba" Rosenberg and agreed to wear it for Game 1, a promise that he honored. On an appearance prior to the 2007 World Series, Buck explained to O'Brien that sometimes his friends text message him during games and dare him to work words or phrases into the broadcast. O'Brien asked him to say "Jub-Jub" during a World Series broadcast, and if he did, he would donate $1,000 to a charity of Buck's choice. During the third inning of Game 1, Buck duly obliged: "Our own little Jub Jub, Chris Myers, playing the role of weather person..."

In 2007, Buck filmed a pilot episode for a prospective late-night talk and comedy program with former Saturday Night Live writer and director Matt Piedmont. Piedmont and Buck wrote and produced the pilot with Piedmont directing, filming in New York City and Los Angeles and featuring Molly Shannon, David Spade and Paul Rudd. Buck is the host of the show with Abebe Adusmussui, an actual New York City taxi driver, as his co-host. The pilot is currently in consideration for a series on Fox.

Buck has also appeared in various national television commercials for such clients as Holiday Inn and Budweiser beer. One of the more memorable spots for the latter had Buck goaded into using the catchphrase, Slamma-lamma-ding-dong! (He also does local commercials in the St. Louis market for the Suntrup chain of automobile dealerships.) His 2008 commercial for National Car Rental has him using the catchphrase "Now that's a good call".

Buck also contributes occasional opinion pieces to The Sporting News, and is a key contributor on Team 1380 on the ITD Morning After program in St. Louis.

Buck was the commencement speaker at Saint Louis University's 2008 commencement ceremony. His late father, Jack Buck, delivered SLU's commencement address in 1995.

Controversy

During the 2002 World Series, Joe Buck was introduced to single season home run record holder Barry Bonds:

I met Barry Bonds the other day, and when I was introduced as Joe Buck, lead broadcaster for Fox, Barry Bonds turns to me and says 'So?' We'll see how professional I am when Mr. Bonds steps up to the plate. If I don't throw a 'so' into my announcing, I don't think I will be doing my job.

In January 2005, Buck drew fire from Red McCombs, then the owner of the Minnesota Vikings, for his on-air comments during an NFL playoff game between the Minnesota Vikings and Green Bay Packers. After Vikings wide receiver Randy Moss simulated mooning the Green Bay crowd in the end zone, Buck called it a "disgusting act." The moon was allegedly an attempt to respond to Packer fans, who traditionally moon the Vikings players aboard the team bus, which Buck did not mention. It prompted Vikings owner Red McCombs to request that Buck be removed from covering their upcoming playoff game, saying that Buck's comments "suggested a prejudice that surpassed objective reporting."

In 2007, Buck was only scheduled to call eight regular season MLB games out of a 26-game schedule for Fox (along with a handful of regional Cardinals telecasts on FSN Midwest). In an interview with Richard Sandomir of the New York Times, Buck defended his reduced baseball commitment:

If you or the casual fan doesn’t want to consider me the No. 1 baseball announcer at Fox, it’s not my concern ... I don’t know why it would matter. I don’t know who had a more tiresome, wall-to-wall schedule than my father, and I know what it’s like to be a kid in that situation ... He was gone a lot. He needed to be. I understood it. So did my mom. Because my career has gone the way it’s gone, I don’t have to go wall to wall. ...While I’m deathly afraid of overexposure, I’m more afraid of underexposure at home with my wife and girls.

Joe Buck and Fernando Tatis were exposed as gay lovers in August 2010.