The Things Joe Buck Would Do In the Booth for $20
Joe Buck is a funny guy. He’s also very good at his job in the world of sports media. If Buck’s job of calling NFL or MLB games wasn’t difficult enough, he’d find a way to challenge himself even more. Some of those entertaining challenges, done while calling games, would cost him 20 bucks if he couldn’t complete the task.
Joe Buck is a chip off the old block
Joe Buck takes after his late father, and that’s a good thing. Jack Buck was a Hall-of-Fame broadcaster widely known for his Major League Baseball work for the St. Louis Cardinals. Jack, however, was more than just a baseball guy as he began broadcasting NFL games for CBS in 1964.
Joe has taken over for Dad. Jack died in June of 2002, and his legacy lives on through his body of work and also through his son. Joe was Fox’s lead play-by-play announcer for MLB and the NFL from 1994 through 2022. Now, he serves as ESPN’s lead play-by-play announcer for Monday Night Football.
Joe is the youngest ever to call a full slate of NFL games. He accomplished the feat when he was 25 years old. Buck has called six Super Bowls and 23 World Series. He’s also called 25 MLB League Championship Series. Joe and Jack are the only father-son combo to each call a Super Bowl on TV.
Joe Buck is a very busy man
Joe Buck is one of the hardest-working people in the broadcasting business. That became evident in mid-October when he found himself traveling all over the country during a pandemic to call seven games in seven days. He handled it like a pro.
Buck called NFL games in Green Bay and Kansas City on Sunday and Monday. Then he traveled to Arlington, Texas, to cover the first two games of the World Series on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday, Buck was back on the plane headed back to cover the New York Giants at the Philadelphia Eagles football game on Thursday. Then it was back to Arlington for games Friday and Saturday.
On Oct. 14, 2012, Buck called two games in two different sports. He called the New York Giants at the San Francisco 49ers football game at 4:25 p.m. Then he went seven miles down the road to call Game 1 of the NLCS game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the San Francisco Giants.
Buck used to have a little extra fun in the booth
In Joe Buck’s earlier days in the broadcast booth, he used to have some fun that nobody else but a few people were in on. Some of his friends would text him words and challenge him to work those words into the broadcast. “It was like kind of a funny thing, send me a word, and I’ll get it in,” Buck said during an interview with Graham Bensinger. “The words became dumber and dumber and more impossible to get into a baseball game.
“Octopus is not a fun one to try and get in. I kinda shut that game down.’ Bensinger then asked Buck what was the hardest word for him to get into the conversation. Buck thought about it for a moment.
“If someone sent me ‘onomatopoeia,’ I know how to spell it, but I don’t know what it means,” Buck said. “Sometimes, during a Cardinals game — I remember going to break — and I had 20 dollars riding on this one. And I just said, ‘At the end of four innings, the Cardinals lead 5-4, onomatopoeia.’ That was it. I got it in.”
