With No Sports to Announce, Joe Buck Turns to Parenting and Podcasting

(Bloomberg) -- For the first time since Joe Buck was a teenager, he doesn’t know when he’ll next step into the broadcast booth.

As the top play-by-play broadcaster at Fox, Buck has called the World Series, countless National Football League games, the U.S. Open (golf, not tennis) and the occasional bass jumping competition. With every major sports league in the U.S. on hold during the coronavirus pandemic, Buck, 51, is at home with his wife, Michelle, looking after 2-year-old twins and narrating home videos as if they were the final moments of the Super Bowl. 

He has also started a new podcast with his friend the American actor Oliver Hudson, called “Daddy Issues.” In between interviews with guests like Bill Simmons, Alex Rodriguez and Mark Cuban, Buck and Hudson banter about fatherhood, fame and Buck’s middle-aged, postpartum, mid-pandemic sex life.

Talking about all things Buck is a new frontier for the buttoned-up broadcaster, who abstains from personal revelations during football telecasts. But he’s getting used to opening up. Buck spoke with Bloomberg about the art of podcasting, the decline of baseball and why he was wrong about Tony Romo.

Do you find yourself missing sports? Are you watching old games and documentaries? Or are you taking a break?

I go through different cycles. I’ve just randomly turned on the TV and I’ll go to MLB Network and it’ll be a World Series game I’ve done. I could sit there if I were more of a narcissist than I am. Admittedly, I’m probably some form of narcissist.

But it’s like watching “Ozark” — only knowing how the thing ends. You lose a little bit of interest in it.

On your podcast, you talk about feeling insecure about being the son of a famous broadcaster. Why did you go into the same business?

My career is way different than anything my dad did. He came along at a different time. There was very little TV. 

I admired my dad. He and I were more friends than father/son. He was my best friend when I was a kid. I was his traveling partner. It’s only natural to want to go into that.

Was baseball your first love?

I was a pretty decent high school pitcher. I tried to walk on at Indiana, and blew out my shoulder trying to overthrow.

I was a realist. I knew I wasn’t good enough to really play. But it was the one I paid the most attention to. I’d been to every National League city by the time I was 12. Baseball is my favorite to this day. I consider myself a baseball announcer.

During your dad’s era, baseball was America’s pastime. Now it’s football. Are you surprised?

Look at the world we live in. Everything is driven by instant gratification. Baseball requires patience and, at times, sitting through long half-innings where the scoreboard doesn’t change. There’s a lot less activity than when I was watching baseball in the 1980s.

The game now is dominated by those true outcomes. That can be really fun from where I sit. Calling home runs is fun. But the strategy, some of that has been lost. I know that’s something MLB is constantly trying to find again. I believe they will. Everything is cyclical.

Major League Baseball has debated a lot of rule changes. Do you support them?

What baseball is trying to do is not just get the time of game down but ratchet up the action. That to me is a bigger deal than overall time of game. Once the inning starts, how do we get more activity on the bases and more strategy? It’s why they’ve talked about a  pitch clock, or maybe banning the shift. That will require both sides to see changes have to be made, and I’m not sure the players association is in lockstep. In fact, I’m sure they are not.

Why has baseball had such a hard time creating new stars? You look at the best players in recent years — Clayton Kershaw, Mike Trout — neither of them is close to what Derek Jeter was.

That’s the key name. The best player walking the planet plays in Anaheim. Anyone in the Midwest to the East Coast… they are playing games starting late and ending way later. They don’t see Mike Trout. There hasn’t been any postseason for Mike Trout, which is when stars are made. He’s living in obscurity.

When football ratings were down a couple years ago, did you think that was the end?

It’s easy to say now I was always confident they would bounce back. Let’s just say I’m pleased they have. The network where I hang my hat is as well. Everyone wanted to blame the Kaepernick situation and kneeling. That had an effect. I don’t know that it affected ratings as much as some people think. There were also big injuries at those times.

Will there be a football season this year? Are you in touch with the league or Fox Sports?

They think there will be. I’ll go with what the network tells me it believes until I hear differently. Maybe without fans. It may be with sparse crowds. As I sit here, it feels like the story changes, if not every day then every week.

When did you start talking about creating a podcast?

Once Oliver was doing one with his sister Kate [Hudson], who was my original friend in that family from back in 2006. I became close with Oliver through golf. They had some success, and he came to me. We’d kicked it around for a while and said, “Let’s give it a shot.”  I like just turning on a mic and going. I’m always so action dependent in my real life. There’s not much to say until someone kicks the ball off or hikes it.

It’s been a good diversion that allows me to show my personality, and who I am more than I can even on the biggest stage there may be in the world — the Super Bowl or World Series. That’s not the time for it. I’m coming up on 27 years at Fox. I’ve done thousands of hours of broadcasts. I feel like it’s liberating.

How has it been launching it in the middle of the pandemic?

If I’m going to listen to a podcast, going to probably be when I’m in transit somewhere. Now we’re all on lockdown. I’ve had the same tank of gas in my car for the last 3 1/2 weeks.

It’s good and bad. Good in that I’ve got tons of time, and anyone we call to be a guest has time to say, “Yeah, I’ll give you an hour.” At the same time, I don’t know if people are consuming like in normal times.

How are you selecting guests? Why was Bill Simmons first?

The honest answer is we were looking for people we want to interview, but who also have a social media following. It’s the best way in 2020 to get something up and running. If you have a compelling guest and you’re on social media, you’ll have a lot of people who follow you. I’m friends with people like Jon Hamm and Paul Rudd, but they are not social media people.

Are you using any podcast as a model?

The only thing we’ve talked about is the Dax Shepard model. Dax and Kate [Hudson] dated, and Dax knows Oliver. Dax pulled Oliver aside and said, “Take it for what it’s worth, if you’re going to start this, the only thing I suggest is be as open and honest and real as you can be.”

Do you keep a list of players that would be good broadcasters?

We always knew if Brett Favre wanted to do it, he was a great storyteller. He would probably do well on a studio show. I don’t know about a game.

The booth is the tricky one. It’s a different animal. When I was younger, the best quarterback I saw not named Tom Brady was Joe Montana. A thoughtful, good-looking guy with multiple Super Bowl wins. He’s smart, he can talk. I thought he would be an unbelievable analyst. It really just wasn’t for him.

You have to be a little bit louder than you typically are. Otherwise, you get lost. And you have to be able to form an opinion on what you just saw and spit it out.

Did you  think Tony Romo would make a good broadcaster?

I didn’t. I was wrong about that. I didn’t know if he’d be loud enough, or assertive enough.

He didn’t try to sound like anyone else. For a while, everyone tried to sound like John Madden, and for good reason. He’s arguably the best to ever do it. Now that mantle has been passed to Romo. He’s more looking ahead and freewheeling. He broadcasts like he played.

You’ve been at the same company more than two decades. Do you ever think about leaving ?

No. I don’t really think of myself going anywhere else. It takes two. It takes them wanting me to continue. Fortunately, I had a really good connection with David Hill. I feel like I have it in a different way with Eric Shanks, who has worked his way up from being broadcast assistant to being everyone’s boss. Thank God I was nice to him back then.

With the shift Fox made, the whole company is focusing on news and sports. It’s the best place to be no matter where you sit. I work for people that aren’t hypersensitive. They let me do a podcast, let me do almost anything I want on another network as long as it wasn’t calling play-by-play sports. It has really still, for me, a family feeling.

There are a lot of people who worked on the entertainment side at Fox that resented being in the same company as Fox News.

I’ve never felt that way. I’ve never gotten that feel from anyone we’ve covered. People are used to this business enough to be able to separate church and state, so to speak — even geographically. News is New York, and sports is Los Angeles.

We’ve done a good job of keeping politics out of sports. That was the first lesson I learned from my dad as a kid. I don’t think anyone knew what my dad’s likes and dislikes were. We’re all tax-paying citizens. Everyone has a right to their own opinion. I don’t think anyone tuning in to the NFL or U.S. Open gives a rip about what I think politically.

There are times where it is unavoidable. Colin Kaepernick being a prime example.

You can’t duck it. I’ve never been told what to say or what not to say by my bosses at Fox. They trust my opinion and my judgment to present a hot-button topic the right way. You can present the topic and not weigh in on it personally. You state the facts and go back to second down.

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