Joe Buck: ‘I Took My Voice for Granted’ Early in Career

When Joe Buck was undergoing hair transplant surgery after the Super Bowl in 2011, he suffered a paralyzed vocal cord while under a general anesthetic. Because of this, he was limited in the utilization of his voice during the season of MLB games on FOX, which concluded with a seven-game World Series victory for the St. Louis Cardinals over the Texas Rangers. Buck reflected on the experience while delivering the Frank Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin Center for Sports Communication & Media within the Moody College of Communication.

One of the students attending the lecture made a salient observation that Buck had changed since leaving FOX Sports after 28 years with the company and joining ESPN to serve as the lead play-by-play voice of Monday Night Football. Coming off a year in which the broadcast property earned its second most-watched season on ESPN platforms with an average of 15 million viewers per game, the attendee observed a shift from nonchalance to palpable excitement in his voice. Buck acknowledged that the question was well thought out and acknowledged the dichotomy between former NFL on FOX broadcast duo Pat Summerall and John Madden.

Following the 2002 season, Madden joined ABC to call Monday Night Football alongside Al Michaels, and Summerall opted to retire from regular broadcasting. As a result, FOX decided to utilize a three-person lead booth consisting of Buck with analysts Troy Aikman and Cris Collinsworth. Rather than being himself on the airwaves, he tried to sound like Summerall and regrets having taken the proverbial bait that he had not felt when starting to call local games for the Cardinals.

“I tried to sound like Pat Summerall and be very, ‘Don’t look at me, look at Cris and Troy,’” Buck reminisced. “Like, ‘Touchdown,’ and it was not – I don’t like those calls when I hear them back.”

After Buck suffered the paralyzed vocal cord, he slowly worked his way back to full strength and articulated that he felt as if his world was collapsing and that he was about to get fired. As the muscle improved, he began to feel that he had “a new lease on life” and started to display more emotion for the game while abstaining from archetypes that did not align with his persona.

“The beginning part of that year, I sounded like I was dying because my vocal cord was paralyzed and I couldn’t keep air and I couldn’t make loud noises and I couldn’t yell and I couldn’t emote, and then slowly it got better,” Buck said. “And when it finally got better, I went from worrying about how I was going to even make a sound to just letting it fly and having fun with it and being like, ‘I took my voice for granted.’”

Later in the session, Buck spoke about the future of the sports media business and conveyed the ambiguity surrounding podcasts, specifically the ability to make money outside of a select cadre of professionals. In considering the query, he recognized that the best manner in which to respond would be by asking what would classify as being can’t-miss television. Live sports, he divulged, fits this category for him despite the variety of platforms on which content is disseminated.

“Nobody’s ever gone, ‘Hey, don’t tell me who wins the Super Bowl, I’m going to watch it in two weeks,’ so when there’s that kind of an immediate reaction to something that’s that important to American culture, which I think the Super Bowl is, the World Series is, the All-Star Game is, the NBA Finals is, that’s where it is,” Buck said. “So it is evolving? Yes. Is it cord cutting, has that happened? Yes.”

The contrast between Buck’s generation and the college students to whom he was speaking, he explained, is in the putative indifference surrounding where content is disseminated. Buck surmised that the crowd did not care if games were on Netflix, Hulu or YouTube, but it is something that others consider to be a major shift in the landscape. Even so, it all relates back to the draw of live content as other linear programming transitions to on-demand, streaming modes of delivery.

“If it’s not live sports, it’s going wherever you want it, whenever you want it,” Buck said, “and that means that it’s missable.”

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