Joe Buck Knows Why You Hate Him

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/magazine/joe-buck-knows-why-you-hate-him.html

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I really didn’t want to ask you about being hated, but — truly — when I told people I was going to interview you, the first thing out of everyone’s mouth was “I hate that guy.” You’ve taken this reputation with some humor, but has anything ever really gotten to you? I get more frustrated than I get hurt by it. It’s like, come on, I’m just the guy in the suit telling you your team lost.

You’re in the enviable position of having a job that, if you wanted, could be your entire life. Is it? Years ago, I did an interview with Colin Cowherd, and he asked what I do at night. I live like a normal human being! I have kids, we’re doing homework, I watch “The Bachelor.” In the industry, that was like heresy. If that had been my only purpose in life — to call home runs and touchdowns — I’d lead a pretty shallow life.

In your memoir, you write about suffering from a paralyzed vocal cord from a “surgical procedure,” which we find out is hair-transplant surgery. That was the sensational detail from your book, but you also talk about going through depression, which is a much more vulnerable thing to talk about. Men are wired to just put up with it. At that time, I was pretty much sure that my voice wasn’t going to come back and my career was over, and I was dealing with the guilt and stress of breaking up a marriage that I had had since I was 23. It really weighed me down. And the idea that I couldn’t talk and couldn’t be heard enough to order a Starbucks, it drove me into a solitary confinement of my own making. I ended up on Lexapro and going to therapy.

Your job is to talk, but I’m fascinated by the choices of when you choose not to. There’s that viral clip from the Cubs’ National League championship when you were silent for almost three minutes. How do you make the decision about when to be quiet? You don’t need a running dialogue from me over that. It’s almost musical: There’s a rise and fall, a crescendo, and if it’s staying up there, you don’t need me. It’s TV.

Has there ever been a time when words have failed you? In 1999, when Ted Williams came out and saluted the fans at the All Star Game at Fenway, I had a huge lump in my throat, and the producer is yelling in my ear to talk, and I couldn’t, thankfully, and it was much better. But usually I’m so wired to see and react and talk that I can usually come up with something if I have to. If I forget who No. 17 is for Green Bay, I can fill in the time with other words while I get down to my board with my eyes to remind myself that 17 is Davante Adams. If I start in, and I’m blanking on who it is, I can say, “Catch at the 15, Green Bay’s got a first down set up by ... Davante Adams.” You can eventually get there. I do it all the time.

How far have you ever gotten away from talking about sports? It’s really hard to go off topic. When Colin Kaepernick was kneeling during the national anthem, my producer said I had to cover it. If you want to get yourself into trouble, start talking about racial inequality and police brutality during the course of a football game. You’re trying to wedge it in, by the way, coming back from a commercial break where you’ve got literally nine seconds before the next play. What I try to do is to think about that moment and then write something down, that I know that when we come back, I go to that little corner of the stuff that I prepare. It’s really hard to make a Van Jones-level point between second and third down.

We have a little bit of time: Would you like to share an opinion on Kaepernick? The point that I would make is it’s easy for somebody like me to be critical of Colin Kaepernick, but I haven’t suffered some of the same issues that Colin Kaepernick has. On some level, it’s like, how dare I weigh in on what Kaepernick is doing or feeling? Having some sort of an open dialogue about taking a knee, that’s what I was always hoping for, and I think he got there.