Remember those bets on what Joe Buck will and won’t say during the Super Bowl LI broadcast? Well, Buck himself has taken notice, and he’s blowing the game wide open, telling Howard Stern Monday what he plans to say and not say on the broadcast.
The latest
“Some of the things in there, Aaron Hernandez, Michael Vick, guys that played for these teams, I’m not going into Aaron Hernandez.”
He then mentions that Matt Ryan’s “Matty Ice” nickname “just sounds cheesy,” that he’ll be showing up with a beard, and that as per Tom Brady being drafted in the sixth round, “I could see it working itself in there.” Stern then asks “So how do they prevent you from getting in on this action?” and Buck says “I don’t know! No one asked me. I don’t sign some waiver.”
There’s lots of other interesting stuff in Buck’s interview with Stern here, including this discussion of how hair plug treatments affected his vocal chords and what Matthew McConaughey told him:
Buck revealed in his book “Lucky Bastard” that he received hair plug treatments at the beginning of his career after a colleague suggested the procedure to him, as well as advised him to drop 25 pounds. He said losing the weight was easy compared to the hair plugs. After his eighth and final surgery, he woke up to find the respiratory tube used to keep him breathing had damaged one of his vocal chords, rendering him almost speechless.
“I went into depression,” Joe said. “I’ve got a baseball season that’s about to start and I can’t say a complete sentence.”
He then ran into recent Stern Show guest Matthew McConaughey at an event in Mexico and admitted to having the hair plug procedure. “And [McConaughey] goes, ‘Mm, so what you’re saying is, you fixed your video but fucked up your audio,” Joe recounted.
He was honest with McConaughey but lied to his Fox bosses about his ailment, blaming his voice loss on a virus. It took seven months for Joe to recover, but he told Howard his voice will still crack on air from time to time. And when it does, he says his harshest critics lay into him on the internet.
Criticism of Buck is nothing new, and neither is him striking back at the critics. Buck does share one interesting story of criticism here, though: how Yankee fans blamed him for injuring Alex Rodriguez, leading to a New York Daily News “What The Buck” cover:
In there, Buck also mentions that criticisms that he hates the Yankees seem ridiculous, because having the Yankees do well and make the postseason is very good for ratings, and thus for Fox and for him.
On a more serious note, Buck also spoke to Stern about his conversation with his famed father Jack after calling his first World Series game, and about his relationship with his father overall and what the day his father died was like:
