Joe Buck has done it all. Super Bowls, World Series and everything in between.
And in case you forgot, golf.
Out of everything he broadcast with Fox Sports before his jump to ESPN in 2022, the 57-year-old doesn’t look back on his time calling the U.S. Opens and U.S. Women’s Opens favorably.
“Easily the most challenging thing for me to do,” Buck said on Golf.com’s Subpar Podcast.
NBC held the rights to the U.S. Open from 1995 through 2014. However, in ’15, the USGA began a 12-year deal with Fox worth nearly $1 billion.
And around that time, Buck recalls a tense conversation with NBC lead golf analyst Johnny Miller.
“I remember when Fox got the rights and Johnny Miller was pissed off and everybody at NBC was mad,” Buck said. “I was like indignant, like, ‘How could they be mad its network to network?’ And Johnny Miller was like, ‘You don’t just fall out of a tree and do a U.S. Open.’ It upset me. I was like, ‘Well, we’re going to do great.’”
Miller apparently had a point, though.
“He was right,” Buck said. “He was dead right.”
Why?
“It’s hard to pick up the PGA Tour and do our national championship having not done anything else to that point and trying to act like you’ve been there every other week,” Buck said. “It’s like when I do baseball. I just did a Dodgers-Mets game. I haven’t done a game in a year. It’s hard when you’re not there on a day-by-day basis, and you haven’t kind of walked through the recent history and been there and been attentive to it and known who is hot coming in and you don’t have to research that stuff.”
Yet that wasn’t the most difficult part of his time calling USGA championships.
“Then you add to that the layer of, I’m not looking at any of this with my own eyes,” Buck said. “I’m sitting with my back to the course. I love that game. That doesn’t mean anything. That doesn’t make me any more qualified to do it than anyone else, and I’m not watching it with my own eyes.
“I’m looking forward at cameras and at monitors, and I’m going off information I’m getting out of my ear or from the back of the studio. That’s a weird sensation for me. I usually have the best seat in the house; it’s generated out of my mind for better or worse. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, I can put my own thoughts to it, and now I’m just going off the information [I’m getting through my earpiece].
“You’re trying to put all that together, maintain the scoreboard, trying to create a narrative of why certain players are ascending, why guys are falling apart, remembering the previous shot that happened. It was way more than I ever thought it would be.”
In 2020, Fox opted out of its deal with the USGA and had sold the remainder of the contract to NBC.
Buck’s time calling golf was over.
