Thursday, July 17, 2008
The Many Sins of Joe Buck
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If you write a column for a small corner of the web as I do, and you are occasionally critical of other columnists and media members, you're often accused of being motivated by jealousy, or sour grapes.
It's not true. High-profile sports writers and announcers inhabit a large part of my avocation, and it's only natural I would have opinions on them and their shortcomings. If I wrote a single column excoriating the Knicks, no one would say to me, "Well, stop watching them, then. Why are you obsessed with the Knicks?" But they will say just that if I write a parallel piece on a pundit rather than an athlete or team.
So these raves occupy my less of my psyche, and much less of any tell-it-like-they-see-it columnist's psyche, then you might think.
I don't lose sleep over Bill Simmons, Rick Reilly, Peter King, and Greg Easterbrook. I read their columns, say, "Ha! What a maroon," dissect and mock them in my column, and then forget about it until the Defenders of the Force chime in in the comments. I read those, perhaps respond, and once again get on with my life. I may think certain guys are overpaid and overexposed for their talent level, but that fact doesn't make me angry, and they themselves don't make me angry.
Until now. Someone has crossed a line, has breached a sacred trust, and now I am angry. Now I hear his name and start muttering to myself. Now I am every bit the hater that the haters imagine me to be.
When I was a little kid, my heroes were not the players, but the announcers. No particular announcer, I was just in love with the idea that some lucky guy got to narrate the game for the whole world. I would turn the sound down and "call" the games myself, a practice I continued for many more years than I care to admit.
I didn't have an affluent or even a middle-class childhood. My sister and I were raised by a single mother who dropped out of college to care for us. Food sttamps and welfare were sometimes part of the equation. Then my mom married my stepdad, who provided for us until he died, but the financial situation therein was only marginally improved; my stepdad was a laborer.
The reason for my little biographical non-sequitur will be clearer momentarily. By now, you've probably heard about the Joe Buck controversy. I've made negative note of Buck in this space before (in fact, I truthfully implied that he was my least favorite announcer in my last Sports Announcers column), but my main problem with him his that he's too uninteresting and unremarkable to hold the lofty positions he does — lead man on FOX for both football and baseball.
Now the reason he sounds so bored at the games he calls is clear: it's because he is bored.
You can hear the clip on Awful Announcing, the proprietor of which sums it up nicely...
"I'm borderline furious ... I'm just at a loss for words. FOX's national voice for baseball openly admitted to not enjoying the game he covers, cramming for weekend matchups, thinking that the games are too long and that the game just isn't the same. Unbelievable. You're getting paid millions of dollars for watching a game three hours ... You have the coolest damn job in the world in sports fans' eyes, and while you're supposed to be serving as the voice of the fans, you act like you're above the game.
"...for the voice of the World Series to bash sports this way is just wrong and shows how much the game suffers when you continue to put them on air. It's your g'damn job to know what you're talking about ... Joe Buck is the worst of the worst in my book and if he doesn't want to call baseball anymore, there are a million of people that would jump at the chance. Hurry up and give him a talk show, FOX, so I can completely tune him out."
I'll go AA one better and say FOX would do better not to give him a talk show, but perhaps something like the weekends-only Jazz pre-game reporter on FOX Sports Utah. There, he might find rediscover some enthusiasm and passion for sports by working with young scrappy reporters, journalists, and production assistants that would kill to have the job Buck ought to be fired from.
I say "rediscover," but I honestly doubt Buck ever had much passion in sports to begin with, as he was, as the old saw goes, born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.
An alumni of the very prestigious St. Louis Country Day school, he of course is the progeny of the legendary baseball announcer Jack Buck. There is no doubt in my mind Joe would not be where he is today if his Dad isn't who he was. Partly because he isn't good enough. Mostly because I don't think he'd been interested if he didn't grow up in it. It must've just seem like the easiest vocation to follow in the Buck household, especially since FOX has wanted to give him the keys to the kingdom for a long time now (in 1994, at 25, he became the youngest person ever to call a football game on national television, and it was on FOX).
As bad as all that is. It gets worse. Buck apologized some time later. I would like to tell you that he apologized for being an ungrateful douchebag who doesn't deserve to be the voice of baseball and the NFC, and he is tendering his resignation immediately, but no, he's just apologizing for not telling his joke well enough.
He was kidding, you see, "It was a total joke. If it didn’t come across as that, you fault the joke teller."
Aw, shucks, Joe. You just didn't tell it right.
I like how he says "total." Like the entire interview was just one great big put-on. The audio is right there for you to hear. The bit about preferring the "Bachelorette" might have been a joke. The rest of it was obviously, painfully serious. So we can add "liar" to the list next to all of the other wonderful words that can be used to describe young Buck.
So yes, I despise Joe Buck. Don't know if I would have the guts, but I imagine how satisfying it would be to tell him off if I bumped into him on the street. He is scum. He should be fired. I hate him. Have at me.
"Have at me." Haha, I don't think you'll get a whole lot of people who disagree with you on Buck, thus there's no outrage. Personally, he is a bit annoying, but not a terrible announcer. I think most people dislike him because they see him as a spoiled rich kid who doesn't deserve it. That may be so, but he's at least decent at it, regardless of how he got there.