Joe Buck explains the challenges of calling professional golf
Joe Buck has called six Super Bowls and 23 World Series. He is a member of the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame and has received the Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Buck has been the voice of some of the greatest moments in American sports over the past few decades. He has faced many challenges along the way, but he told GOLF Subpar Podcast that nothing compares to the challenge of calling professional golf.
Buck worked for FOX when the network acquired the rights to the US Open and began broadcasting the major championship in 2015. From that year at Chambers Bay, he learned that calling professional golf, especially if you only do it once or twice a year, is a different animal than calling the NFL or MLB every week.
“It’s the most challenging thing for me to do,” Buck said Subpar Drew Stoltz and Colt Knost co-host. “I remember when FOX got the rights and Johnny Miller was mad and everybody at NBC was mad. I was mad, like, ‘How can they be mad at their network for a network?’ And Johnny Miller was like, ‘You don’t just fall out of a tree and do the US Open.’ It pissed me off. I was like, ‘Well, we’ll do good.’ He was right. He died well.
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“It’s hard to take the PGA Tour and do our national championship and not do anything else until now and try to pretend it’s there every week,” Buck continued. “It’s like doing baseball. I just did the Dodgers-Mets game. I haven’t done a game in a year. It’s hard when you’re not there every day, and you haven’t been through recent history and you’ve been there and you’ve been paying attention and you know who’s hot coming in and you don’t have to research those things.”
For Buck, the most difficult thing was that he could not see with his own eyes what he was calling. He had to rely on what he saw through the monitors and heard through his earpiece.
“Then add to that, I’m not seeing this with my own eyes,” said Buck. “I always turn my back, I love this game, that doesn’t mean anything, that doesn’t make me more qualified to do it than other people, and I don’t look at it with my own eyes.
“I’m looking forward to the cameras and monitors, and I’m taking the information out of my ear or behind the studio. That sounds strange to me. I usually have the best seat in the house; it comes out of my mind for better or for worse, I’ve seen it with my own eyes, I can put my thoughts into it, and now I go out [I’m getting through my earpiece].
“You’re trying to put all that together, you’re keeping the scoreboard, you’re trying to write a story about why certain players step up, why guys fall apart, you remember the last shot that happened. It was more than I thought it would be.”
Buck felt that he and his FOX team got the chance to call golf around Year 5, when they called Gary Woodland’s victory at Pebble Beach. But FOX sold the rights back to NBC after that tournament, and Buck’s time calling the US Open ended.
To hear more from Buck, watch the entire episode on YouTube.
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