Joe Buck gave a lecture at the University of Texas this week, sharing his wisdom with prospective young journalists.
If anyone understands the perils of being a young broadcaster, it’s Buck.
Long before Buck settled into his most iconic role as the play-by-play voice of ESPN’s Monday Night Football, he was best known as the son of broadcast legend Jack Buck. When he joined Fox Sports at age 25 in 1994, he became NFL’s youngest full-time network play-by-play announcer.
Buck is now one of the faces of sports broadcasting for today’s generation. Giving the Frank Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism, he shared some good advice for students hoping to follow in his footsteps and his approach to dealing with one of the profession’s downsides: social media trolls and critics.
“Doing live play-by-play, I think, in today’s climate, is harder than it’s ever been,” Buck said. “It sure is harder than when I started in 1994 at Fox.”
Social media has certainly changed the interaction between broadcasters and fans. Back in the 1990s, if Buck erred during a game, it might get mentioned on sports talk radio the next day. Now, everything announcers say is immediately parsed, critiqued and judged.
Buck then offered what he called his best advice for young broadcasters.
“You better be willing and able to laugh at yourself … you better be willing to stick your neck out and give it a shot and be different and be true to yourself and say the joke, as long as it’s in good taste,” Buck said. “And if Twitter (now X) says, ‘That was stupid,’ or ‘You suck,’ or whatever, you better be willing to laugh and let that roll off your back and go to the next assignment.
“This country is a dangerous place to be for people with opinions. It doesn’t matter what the opinion is. You’re not going to make everybody happy.”
Buck pointed out that he still gets trolled by people who mention his father, best known as the longtime voice of the St. Louis Cardinals.
“I can laugh at Twitter. I can laugh at people,” Buck said. “Still to this day, after 30-plus years of network television, my dad has been gone for 22 years, (people) saying, ‘It’s a good thing you had a famous dad, you suck.’
“OK, got it, I suck. I’ve been doing it since 1994. I’ve been at two different networks, and I’ve done OK for myself. So, I must suck, but I’ll take it. You have to be willing … if someone says something mean, you have to keep plugging.”
Given all those negatives, one might have expected some students to flee the auditorium during Buck’s lecture. Yet he also shared some of the profession’s rewards.
“It’s a great way to make a living. It’s fun. You get to travel around,” Buck said. “No two games are the same. You’re not doing widgets on an assembly line. … There’s nothing like the feeling of walking into the booth and knowing that I get to put my mind … to the pictures and the graphics that are coming to your television and make it seem like a brand-new, fresh, live game.”
