In their first season at ESPN broadcasting Monday Night Football, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman were faced with perhaps the most shocking moment to ever take place on an NFL field when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin experienced cardiac arrest in Cincinnati.
What started as a massively important Week 17 tilt between two AFC powers quickly became a breaking news scene being monitored around the world.
In the debut edition of the revamped Sports Reporters from ESPN, host Jeremy Schaap convened four top NFL announcers including Buck, Kevin Harlan, Ian Eagle, and Mike Tirico. On the topic of the Hamlin game, Tirico expressed his belief that college journalism programs should use Buck’s performance that night to educate young broadcasters.
“All of us (have) realized that it’s not just fans who are watching, but it’s also family who is watching, the extended family of football,” Tirico said. “To watch Joe and Lisa Salters and the production team work through truly uncharted waters, to know what to say and what not to share, that’s a master class.”
Tirico marveled at Buck’s ability to meet the moment with the proper tone while giving a global audience all the info he could in real-time.
“I’ve told some folks up (at Syracuse), you should show that. Joe’s work that night, you should show that to everyone who’s going to be on a live broadcast,” Tirico explained. “Because it’s in real-time, 10 minutes before in this electric scene, to now having to walk America, for an hour, hour-twenty minutes, through a life or death situation with very little information. And it’s done with the absolute right tone.”
Certainly, very few sports announcers would expect to anchor breaking news coverage of a potential death. Neither Buck (or Harlan, who was there calling the game on radio for Westwood One), will likely ever experience a moment like that again.
Given the extreme emotional fluctuation Buck had to cut through and the need to stick to facts, Tirico has a point that Buck’s broadcast that night could be educational to many young journalists.
Buck also explained his approach that night on The Sports Reporters.
“What I was very proud of, was that none of us … went down the path of trying to speculate,” Buck said. “We just went on information that we were given, which wasn’t much, but understandably so.”
Around the time of the Hamlin game, Buck and ESPN got into a standoff with the NFL over Buck’s on-air report that teams had been told to return to the field for a 5-minute warmup before resuming play. Ultimately, the game was called off and not replayed.
Aside from that dispute, Buck believes ESPN producers trusting him to guide the audience and tell rather than show went a long way toward meeting that moment.
“The best thing we did, Jimmy Platt our director pulled all the cameras back. So there is no bandit video of that horrific scene down on the field,” Buck explained. “So all we could go on was what we could go on was what we could see with our eyes from the broadcast booth to the middle of the field.”
Whether anyone takes Tirico’s advice and adds footage of Buck from that night to their next syllabus, the longtime voice of the NFL and MLB postseason has a lot to be proud of for how he handled that fateful Monday Night Football.
