Jack Buck, R.I.P.: The Impossible Becomes The Improbable

The Diamond District - A Baseball Review ^ | 19 June 2002 | Yours, Truly

[BluesDuke]

Wednesday, June 19, 2002

Jack Buck, RIP: The Impossible Becomes The Improbable

Yes, I know. Baseball is in a mess of its leadership's own making, between Bud Selig's conflicts of interest (real and alleged) and Donald Fehr's duplicity. (Fehr sits on the board of the U.S. Olympic Committee, which send to the Phantom Zone competitors caught using cold remedies if certain ingredients just so happen to be even a minor part of the mix, but he runs the Major League Baseball Players' Association on the plank that steroid testing - which a continually rising number of players favour, perhaps to his chagrin - deserves no address beyond collective bargaining, unless "real" health/safety issues arise.)

And, yes, I also know: Bob Watson as baseball's top cop is beginning to resemble the Police Academy alumni as leaders of the FBI. (Which, considering a lot of what has transpired of them lately, is precisely what enough people fear is the case.) Watson has declined to fine Roger Clemens for announcing he would introduce himself quickly to that big old piece of plastic on Barry Bonds's elbow, a week before The Rocket up and did it. But Watson has harrumphed, "There are rules that were broken," in choosing to fine...Shawn Estes, the only man in baseball, it seemed, who did not announce he should avenge Mike Piazza a week or even an inning before he threw one behind Clemens in the third inning.

But those are in a sense small nuisances compared to a loss our game incurred this morning, when the news arrived that we had lost a gentleman who made his listeners feel they belonged to his territory even if they never set foot therein or rooted for his core employer. If you were not a St. Louis Cardinals fan, you might stay with a game regardless if your radio picked one up, risking Jack Buck's evocative deftness at making you a fan for at least that game.

"The basic idea," he once said, "is to communicate with those who are exiled from the game; in hospitals, homes, those who have seldom seen a game, some who can't travel to the games, those who are blind. After all these years, I realise that my energy comes from those on the other end." It is easier to pass a fast ball through the eye of Ichiro Suzuki's batting arc than to resist the draw of a broadcast prose poet who practises his art from a sensibility like that.

You might return to your customary partisanship when Buck's day's work was finished, but you might also nurse a furtive craving for the next chance you might have to become a Cardinal fan for a day by the default of Jack Buck's congenial rasp of a voice. The citiest slicker or countriest bumpkin, the Californiest beacher or the Georgiest peach, the Chicagoest hard boiler or the New Yorkiest night crawler, could never hear him without becoming part of the Midwest and for his Cardinals, even when hearing him anywhere but, broadcasting anyone but.

The call for which he may be remembered best had nothing to do with the Redbirds at all. Splicing it long since onto the television capture of that play has led a generation at least to believe he made the call for the cameras. But he was set in fact in his customary seat behind radio's microphone, for CBS, as a pinch hitter who should have batted in a wheelchair stood in against Dennis the Menace in the bottom of the ninth.

And a big 3-2 pitch coming here from Eckersley. Gibson...swings...and a fly ball to deep right field--this is gonna be a home run--unbelievable! A home run for Gibson, and the Dodgers have won the game, 5-4. I don't believe what I just saw!

And somehow, though we knew at core it was due to arrive, we don't believe our game will be honoured no longer by Jack Buck calling one. His duel against Parkinson's and lung cancer came to the bottom of the ninth, and he went down swinging mightily.

He leaves a son whose own deftness behind the mike at the ballpark is cured enough with the father's sensibilities. "We miss him already," said Joe Buck over the station (KMOX) where his father had become St. Louis. "But I've been missing him for months." The son has also inherited the father's grasp of proportion.

Lookit here! Lookit here! the father hollered as Mark McGwire's record-tying blast flew into the seats. McGwire Flight 61 to Planet Maris. Pardon me for a moment while I stand and applaud! Surely at least one among departed Cardinals, upon seeing Mr. Buck arrive to his much-earned reward, said those words precisely.

At about the moment he didn't believe what he saw Kirk Gibson do, someone was on television for NBC calling that incandescent walkoff home run. "The impossible has become the improbable," said Vin Scully. That is probably a fair way to describe St. Louis without Jack Buck. St. Louis, and America.

[BluesDuke]

OK, so I am posting my own essay. But somehow America does not quite feel like America without Jack Buck somewhere broadcasting a baseball game. Much as it did not quite feel like America when we lost such as Red Barber, Red Smith, Bob Prince, Jim Murray, and Jimmy Cannon; and, as it will not quite feel when we lose (many years hence, we should pray devoutly) Vin Scully, Thomas Boswell, Bob Murphy, Roger Angell, and Ernie Harwell...

[BluesDuke]

...I hope to God, too, that someone at Mr. Buck's memorial service thinks to offer him what he so appropriately offered Mark McGwire that night: a valedictory salute of Pardon us, while we stand up and applaud. He earned such tribute if anyone did.

[hole_n_one]

Nice tribute, BD.

I came across this column by SI's Rick Reilly......it's somewhat dated but nonetheless it is still another fine tribute to a broadcasting legend......

The Spirit of St. Louis

Click here for more on this story

Posted: Tuesday May 01, 2001 5:48 PM

Promise me one thing. Promise that at the end of this you won't feel sorry for Jack Buck.

As square as a pan of corn bread, as American as a red Corvette, Buck has been doing what he loves in the St. Louis Cardinals' radio booth for 47 years, which makes him just about the exact center of this country. The last thing he wants is sympathy.

Yeah, Buck has Parkinson's disease, which makes his hands tremble and his arms flail. He also has diabetes, which means poking needles into himself twice a day. He also has a pacemaker. And cataracts. And vertigo. And excruciatingly painful sciatica. And a box of pills the size of a toaster. But all that only gives him more material to work with.

"I wish I'd get Alzheimer's," he cracks. "Then I could forget I've got all the other stuff."

Luckily, you can still find the 76-year-old Buck at the mike during every St. Louis home game, broadcasting to the Cardinal Nation over more than 100 radio stations in 11 states. Herking and jerking in his seat, his face contorting this way and that, he still sends out the most wonderful descriptions of games you've ever heard.

"I've given the Cardinals the best years of my life," Buck says. "Now I'm giving them the worst."

That's a lie. Despite enough diseases to kill a moose, Buck has gotten even better lately. "I have no idea how," says his son and radio partner, Joe, "but his voice has been stronger lately. It's like he's pouring every ounce of energy God can give him into those three hours of the broadcast."

Yet Buck makes it all sound effortless, like talking baseball with the guy across the backyard fence. He's natural, simple and unforgettable. When Kirk Gibson hit his dramatic home run for the Los Angeles Dodgers and limped around the bases in the 1988 World Series, Buck, calling the game for CBS Radio, said, "I don't believe what I just saw!" When St. Louis's Ozzie Smith hit a rare lefthanded home run in Game 5 of the 1985 playoffs, Buck said, "Go crazy, folks! Go crazy!" When Mark McGwire hit No. 61 in 1998, Buck said, "Pardon me while I stand and applaud!"

Like thousands of other eight-year-old boys in Middle America in 1966, all I had of baseball most nights was Buck. If I fiddled enough with my mom's old radio in our kitchen in Boulder, Colo., I could pick up Buck doing the Cardinals' games on KMOX. Bob Gibson. Tim McCarver. Curt Flood. I worshiped Buck then. I respect him now.

He was a kid whose family couldn't afford toothpaste; who didn't go to the dentist until he was 15 (and immediately had five teeth pulled); who worked as a soda jerk, a newspaper hawk, a boat painter, a waiter, a factory hand; who was the first person in his family to own a car; who took shrapnel in an arm and a leg from the Germans in World War II; who danced in Paris on V-E Day.

This is a man who is coming up on his 10,000th game broadcast; who was in the stands the day that Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak ended; who called Stan Musial's five-home-run doubleheader; who ate dinner with Rocky Marciano in Havana; whom Jesse Owens called friend; who survived the Ice Bowl -- and 16 years in the booth with Harry Caray.

I would eat a bathtub full of rubber chicken just to hear him emcee a banquet. He has more lines than the DMV. If an Italian woman wins the door prize, Buck says, "You know, I've always had a fondness for Italian women. In fact, during World War II an Italian woman hid me in her basement for three months. [Pause.] Of course, this was in Cleveland."

If anything, Parkinson's has given Buck more banquet material. "I shook hands with Muhammad Ali recently," he says. "It took them 30 minutes to get us untangled."

This may be Buck's last year behind the mike, so he's savoring every inning. So should we. "This is his victory lap," says Joe. "This is him circling the outfield."

That lousy day is coming, of course, when he opens his mouth and the Parkinson's won't let anything come out. But don't feel sorry for him. "Hell, I've touched so many bases," says Buck, "I've got no quarrel with these last few."

So, on the day he quits, he'll have to pardon us while we stand and applaud.

Issue date: May 5, 2001

[BluesDuke]

Personally, I would sooner have listened to Jack Buck than to Blowhard Harry Caray. I mean, I enjoyed Harry in small doses, but...but...

Besides, Jack Buck wasn't even a sixteenth of the buttinski Harry Caray was said to have been during his St. Louis years. (Stories abound about Caray having such an in with Gussie Busch that, as often as not, Harry's word would prevail when it came to trading for or dumping this or that Cardinal - Harry was even said to have been the swingman when Busch decided like a cheap coward to dump manager Johnny Keane, until Keane had the Cardinals winning the pennant and decided to rehire him anyway, only to get egg on his face when Keane quit the day after the World Series anyway...to take the Yankee job from which Series opponent Yogi Berra had just been canned!)

[CARDINALRULES]

Firing from Cards' booth was "blessing in disguise"


By Dan Caesar
Of the Post-Dispatch
06/19/2002 09:13 PM

Jack Buck spent 47 seasons in the Cardinals broadcast booth, but he almost didn't make it to 10. He was fired before the 1960 season, and almost left town.

Buck, who began broadcasting the Cards in 1954, worked with Harry Caray and Joe Garagiola in '59. But after that season Buddy Blattner was moved into the booth as a payback to Ben Kerner, owner of the St. Louis Hawks NBA team, for switching beer sponsors from Falstaff to Anheuser-Busch. Blattner was the voice of the Hawks; Anheuser-Busch owned the Cardinals.

With Harry Caray and Joe Garagiola already aboard, there was no need for a fourth man. Caray, already established as the star of the booth, was entrenched. He had been instrumental in getting Garagiola, his friend, hired in 1955. And Caray wasn't a big Buck fan. So there was little doubt as to who would be the odd man out.

"I got the word I was fired just before Christmas," Buck wrote in his autobiography. "We had just built a six-bedroom house with a swimming pool and had bought all new furniture, on credit of course. I had to find a job quickly, or I'd have to sell the kids."

In an interview several years ago, Buck called that firing "the proverbial blessing in disguise. In the long run, it helped round me into a much more versatile broadcaster because of all the things I had to do to survive."

Buck wrote in his book, "Jack Buck, That's A Winner," that he considered applying for baseball broadcast work in Detroit and Baltimore but was persuaded by KMOX general manager Bob Hyland to stay put.

"Before I even applied for the jobs, Bob Hyland talked me into staying in St. Louis and going to work full-time for KMOX. He knew baseball was my first love, and told me he was certain things would work out. He also indicated that if I took one of those out-of-town jobs, it would be the start of a ride on the merry-go-round a lot of announcers take. ...

"Hyland convinced me that he was right. I liked St. Louis; it was a good place to raise my family, and I liked the idea of having a base at KMOX."

Buck settled in at KMOX, and also began to develop into the most-sought public speaker in St. Louis. His friend Al Fleishman, a public relations executive who had many contacts with business and civic groups, helped him line up many engagements.

"You talk about work!" Buck wrote. "One year I made 385 appearances! Every time more than 10 people sat down to eat, I was there talking to them. ... Looking back, I think that was a big help in developing a relationship with the folks in St. Louis."

Being away from the Cardinals actually proved beneficial. Buck was hired by ABC-TV to broadcast baseball once a week, and he also called the American Football League and college basketball for that network. He also teamed with Chris Schenkel in the early days of Pro Bowlers Tour telecasts.

And his absence from the Cardinals broadcast booth didn't last long. He was back in 1961, after Blattner took a job with the expansion Los Angeles Angels and Garagiola moved to New York to work for NBC.

"Staying in town and remaining involved with the Cardinals and KMOX had been the correct decision with me," Buck wrote. "I moved back into the booth with Harry. Caray treated me better than he did the first time we worked together. I was older and more experienced, and he and Garagiola had become enemies. Caray didn't view me as a rival; I was content to just do a couple of innings and fill in when he needed a break."

And they developed into one of the top announcing teams ever, until Caray was fired after the 1969 season. Then Buck flourished with top billing, a role he had until going into semi-retirement in 1995 - eight years after he was inducted into the broadcasters' section of baseball's Hall of Fame.

[BluesDuke]

The word on Harry Caray's 1969 heave-ho had to do with an apparent rumour that Caray had had an affair with a Busch daughter-in-law. Caray to his dying day was circumspect about it, saying stuff along the line of, "If you were me and you were accused of an affair with such a younger woman..." You get the idea. To this day no one knows for certain if the rumour was really true.

On the other hand, no one ever accused Jack Buck of doing the dark-end-of-the-street bit with someone else's wife. Though I'm sure he'd have had a quip or three if he had been. Jack Buck was a gift to baseball...and to America.

[CARDINALRULES]

Yeah that is one of several rumors I have heard about it.
Wouldn't be surprised if that was the real reason at all.

[2Trievers]

Amen and God Bless him! Great post Dukester! &;-)

[hobbes1]

Great Essay BD.....

[hobbes1]

That Having been said.... (Fehr sits on the board of the U.S. Olympic Committee, which send to the Phantom Zone competitors caught using cold remedies if certain ingredients just so happen to be even a minor part of the mix, but he runs the Major League Baseball Players' Association on the plank that steroid testing - which a continually rising number of players favour, perhaps to his chagrin - deserves no address beyond collective bargaining, unless "real" health/safety issues arise.)

I loathe Fehr....BUT...don't kid yourself, the Olympics is anything BUT clean. Clearing Times, and Masking agents....The Hypocrisy of the IOC makes MLB look like Judge Landis is still in charge....

[socal_parrot]

I think for most American males over 40, there is a childhood memory of listening to a familiar voice call a baseball game on a warm summer's night. My voice was Dick Enberg calling Angel games with Don Drysdale. Enberg's signature phrase after an Angel's win was, "and the Halo shines tonight".

One of my favorite Jack Buck calls that you didn't mention was from I believe the 85 NLCS when Ozzie Smith hit a home run off of Tom Niedenfuhr(?) of the Dodgers. "Go crazy folks! Go crazy!"

[Charles Henrickson]

I was at the Cardinals-Angels game last night here in St. Louis, and there was a ceremony to honor Jack Buck before the game. Then they played video tributes on the scoreboard between innings. Today there was a memorial service at Busch Stadium. (The Angels graciously consented to let the start time be pushed back to accomodate, even theough it's their getaway day.) They had the casket at home plate since early this morning for people to file past and pay their respects.

It's amazing the impact Jack Buck had on this city. He was probably St. Louis's most well-known and best loved citizen. For almost fify years he was a big part of this community, and not just broadcasting baseball games. Jack Buck was very involved in his community, very generous, very down-to-earth. The service personnel--the "little people"--at ballparks, restaurants, hotels, etc., all around the country loved him, because he was so generous and friendly. Buck was extremely witty, a terrific sense of humor, a great storyteller. And he was a great American, very patriotic, a man who served his country well in battle.

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, it's nothing but Jack Buck on TV, radio, and newspapers here in St. Louis. Well deserved.

[Charles Henrickson]

I was at the Dole-Kemp rally at the Arch on Labor Day, 1996. Jack Buck spoke to the crowd on behalf of the ticket. I had the feeling he had a couple extra reasons especially motivating him: 1) respect for his contemporary and fellow WWII wounded vet, Bob Dole, and 2) like the rest of us, he probably couldn't stand Bill Clinton. (Now that I think of it, Buck probably also knew Jack Kemp from Kemp's football days.)

[Digger]

I thought the three worked together more than a year but I do remember it. I know my dad would be mad because I would go out in the car & run the battery down listening because it came in clearer than the radio inside. Got it on the St. Joseph. Mo. station in south central Nebr.. Sorry, but I was a Harry fan but the three togther. I knew that was something special.

[A Citizen Reporter]

Jack Buck also spoke at the last Bush campaign rally in St. Louis on November 2, 2000.

"We also were treated to a roaring speech from St. Louis Baseball Cardinals announcer Jack Buck. This was a terrific endorsement, as Jack is so well-loved in this community!! Jack said that some people may say that he shouldn't be political, but this year and this election is just too important. And he is tired of the regime we have in the White House. Jack gave an excellent speech!!"

Rest in peace, Jack. We miss you so....

[Charles Henrickson]

I hope to God, too, that someone at Mr. Buck's memorial service thinks to offer him what he so appropriately offered Mark McGwire that night: a valedictory salute of Pardon us, while we stand up and applaud.

Mike Matheny, speaking on behalf of the players, did exactly that.

(BTW, besides being the best defensive catcher in baseball, Mike Matheny is a great guy, a real leader, and I predict that one day he will be the manager of the Cardinals.)

[A Citizen Reporter]

FYI

[xp38]

I used to listen to him here in Toronto on clear nights. One of the greats without a doubt...I don't know if he is in the hall of fame as a broadcaster but if he isn't he should be. It's a shame he will miss Ozzie's induction this year.