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 Broadcaster Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Buck has been the voice of some of the biggest moments in American sports over the past several decades. He has faced many challenges along the way, but he said GOLF Podcast subpar that nothing compares to the challenge of being called a professional golfer.
Buck worked for FOX when the network acquired the rights to the US Open and began broadcasting the major championship in 2015. Starting that year at Chambers Bay, he found 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 on a weekly basis.
“Easily the most challenging thing for me,” Buck said subparagraph co-hosts Drew Stoltz and Colt Knost. “I remember when FOX got the rights and Johnny Miller was pissed and everybody at NBC was mad. I was like outraged, like, ‘How could her network be mad at the network?’ And Johnny Miller said, ‘You don’t just fall out of a tree and do a US Open.’ He was right. He was rightfully dead.
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“It’s hard to take the PGA Tour and make our national championship without doing anything else up until that point and trying to act like you’ve been there every week,” Buck continued. “It’s like when I do baseball. I just did a Dodgers-Mets game. I haven’t played a game in a year. It’s hard when you’re not there every day, and you haven’t walked the latest story and you haven’t been there and you haven’t been paying attention to it and you don’t know who’s hot and you don’t have to research that stuff.”
For Buck, the hardest thing was that he couldn’t see what he was calling with his own eyes. He had to rely on what he saw through the monitors and heard through his headset.
“Then you add to that the layer of, I’m not seeing any of this with my own eyes,” Buck said. “I’m sitting with my back on the course. I love that game. That doesn’t mean anything. That doesn’t make me any more qualified to do it than anybody else, and I’m not looking at it with my own eyes.
“I’m looking forward to the cameras and the monitors, and I’m taking the information that I’m getting out of my ear or the back of the studio. It’s a strange feeling for me. I usually have the best seat in the house; it’s created by my mind for better or worse, I’ve seen it with my eyes, I can put my thoughts (as soon as I go through the information and now).
