You can't interview Pete Rose and not ask about betting on the Reds and being banned from baseball.
Joe Buck
Broadcasting is a brutal, often unfair business, where looks are valued more than skill.
OK, I will never say anything degrading or bad about Tom Brady. He is a god in cleats.
Nobody's tuning in - let's check the TV Guide listings and see what game Joe Buck is calling. Nobody cares. They want to see the Cubs. They want to see the Packers. They want to see the Cowboys. They don't care who's calling the game.
I'm lucky that I was born to these parents. I'm lucky that my dad wanted to be around me, that he took me to all these National League cities by the time I was 12.
If Jim Nantz is tweeting at me, 'Go back to baseball, you suck at golf,' then I've got problems. If it's somebody else who's just a voice out there, well, that just comes with the job.
I always try to shine the spotlight on what's happening on the field and not what's coming out of my mouth.
I know what baldness can do to a man. When you see guys with a toupee that should come with a chinstrap, or somebody whose been through hair replacement surgery and tapped out early because it's too painful, you realize guys will do anything to maintain their sense of virility. They don't want to give up looking young.
I have a casual interest in the NBA.
I, Joseph Francis Buck, became a hair-plug addict.
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.
Broadcasting golf is not like broadcasting baseball or football. You see the ball and the action through your own eyes. The story is unfolding in front of you. In golf, the story is unfolding here and there and everywhere. As the guy in the broadcast tower, you're getting it all on screens and from reporters in the field. It's a tricky business.
Pat Summerall personified less is more. His play-by-play was so bare bones but so great because he had a great, deep-toned voice.
I just consider Boston and New England incredible sports fans. If they give me trouble, think I'm rooting for other side, it's mainly because they're living and dying with every pitch and every play and think I'm rooting for the other side. I'd much rather that than apathy.
If you're confident in what you do, the compliment doesn't matter.
If I had a walk-up song in 2019, it would be 'Baby Shark.' It's haunting. It's mesmerizing. It's catchy.
There are a lot of people across the country, for as silly as this sounds, who obsess about hair loss.
I don't want to keep doing the same thing over and over for the rest of my life.
I mean, I've done college basketball, a horse race, a bunch of different things and they'd blow by but golf has a frenetic pace of bouncing around from shot to shot and green to green and, in essence, acre to acre over this huge plot of land with over 150 players who are their own team.
I mean the home run king, to me, is Hank Aaron, but statistically, it's Barry Bonds.
Troy Aikman is one of my best friends.
In football, for some reason, I was a Houston Oilers fan.
I kind of feel like curling combines this weird vision of people sliding down a lane, and it looks like it combines bowling and every bar game I've ever played. But I still don't understand what the hell it is.
Most of the time, if someone gives me trouble at a bar or something, saying, 'Why do you hate the Red Sox or Patriots?' they end up buying you a drink or whatever. They like to be heard, say their piece, and then talk about the team.
I don't know who had a more tiresome, wall-to-wall schedule than my father, and I know what it's like to be a kid in that situation. He was gone a lot. He needed to be. I understood it. So did my mom.
You can let the size of the crowd, when you do Super Bowl, overwhelm you if you want, and that opening on camera is one of the most intense, awkward feelings you can ever have.
I'm close with Paul Rudd.
We do scales, vocal exercises every day. I run the voice up and down, get as high as I can and as low as I can. I work on breathing, too.
My dad worked so hard. He slept in his own bed maybe half the nights of the year because of road assignments, but even when he was home, he was covering games. It put a lot of pressure on my mom. She brought in her parents to help out, and it took a village to raise us. I was lucky.
Timing in my life has been fortuitous.
My dad was not good at saying no. I'm trying to be better at saying no.
I got a chance to host the 'Late Late Show' for two nights before they hired Craig Ferguson. I enjoyed it, but nothing can replace the thrill of calling an NFC championship game or a Super Bowl or a World Series.
I love the St. Louis Blues, it's the only team I openly root for.
If you're going to scream and yell and pull a groin when calling a catch, you have to really make sure what you're seeing is actually what's happening.
I would rather be in San Francisco than just about anywhere on Earth.
People would ask, 'Why is your vocal cord paralyzed?' I said it was a virus. I didn't say it was an elective procedure to add hair to the front of my head. It was embarrassing. There's an embarrassing element to that.
I'd be willing to do anything once. I did live bass fishing on TV. I've done horse jumping... so clearly I'm not very picky.
You can't let criticism stop you from learning new things.
Any surgery done to improve one's looks is not really something someone wants to talk about.
I try to make what I say count.
I'm a flawed, hard-working, hard-trying person.
I was broadcasting Cardinal baseball in the major leagues at the age of 21, and that only happened because my last name was Buck.
I was not broadcasting St. Louis Cardinals baseball because I was accomplished. I was broadcasting baseball at 21 years old because I was Jack Buck's son. I had a billion advantages.
I'm out there to be real, and I think people respond to that. If you have some image that you're protecting, eventually people get sick of it, and I can't imagine living that way for an entire lifetime. I'd rather just be who I am, and that's good enough.
Never bite off so much in your job that you can't spend a lot of time with your family.
I live like a normal human being!
I'm my dad's kid, and I'm still, right or wrong, fighting that uphill battle, and I'm not saying that makes sense. I mean my dad didn't hire me at Fox... but it certainly gave me my start, and I think I'm always kind of fighting that.
I'm in awe of what it takes to run a nation, especially our great nation.
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?
To declare the Cubs champions after 108 years was the highlight of my career.
