Joe Buck is as talented an announcer as you'll find. I think Buck is incredible — I know he's not universally beloved, but I don't really understand that view — and there's no one else that I'd rather have setting the tone for an important matchup than him. His versatility stands out — he can use a hushed tone and rise to perfect crescendos as a baseball game comes near its end, or he can continually use an excited, louder voice throughout a fast-paced football game — and it makes me look forward to every event he calls.
But there are some sports that neither Joe Buck nor Jim Ross (or whoever your favorite announcers are) could save from the on-screen monotony that comes with the game being played. Exhibit A? Bass fishing.
"The worst one was live bass fishing. When they asked me to do live bass fishing, I should have said no," Buck said on the latest episode of "Starkville," with Jayson Stark and Doug Glanville, both of whom were reduced to fits of laughter. "...No fish bit, and we screwed up the weigh-in at the end. When the whole thing ends [and] the ultimate moment of the broadcast is a weigh-in of fish, that should not be on network television."
Buck co-hosted Fox's broadcast of the Ranger Millennium M1 Bass Tournament in 1999, and the whole production didn't exactly receive rave reviews. New York Times writer Richard Sandomir wrote these little notes within his review of the event:
— I watched every minute of it, waiting for the action. My discovery: patiently standing in a boat does not count as action.
— The hosts were two baseball announcers, Joe Buck and Bob Brenly, who are accustomed to narrating the activities of men standing in place but who usually end up running. Not here. How long can cameras wait for a bass to bite?
— There was Buck ably trying to fake his way through fish talk and chat up the anglers. Why not badger Tiger Woods in midputt? ''Tiger, who's your favorite Spice Girl?'' The shore-to-angler audio frequently didn't work -- or the bassmen simply ignored Buck.
Buck had more to say about this when recounting the experience with Stark and Glanville.
"...They were all on earpieces and microphones and they all forgot to turn their earpieces on when we came on the air at 4:30 Eastern and turned their microphones on," Buck recalled. "So I'm talking — 'hey, let's go out to Kevin Smith (a name he just made up, I assume) who's out there on Lake Lulu here in the Orlando area. Kevin, how they bitin' out there today?' — which was my only question I could ever come up with because I'm a fishing idiot, and he's just fishing and didn't hear me.
"And then I'd go to the next guy. He'd hear me but he didn't turn his mic on, so he was talking, and it was just like a horrible Zoom meeting with lakes and boats."
Sounds like a thrilling broadcast! At the time, Buck appeared to be intrigued — somewhat — by the opportunity.
"I just thought it was interesting," Buck said (via Ernest Hooper, then of the Tampa Bay Times). "There are 55-million who consider themselves to be anglers. I'm not in that group. But they couldn't find anybody in that 55-million to do the broadcast.
"At first, I thought it was just guys sitting out on boats, but it's so much more than that."
...But was it?
I love fishing, no matter if it's for bass in a lake or trout in a river or flounder out in the ocean. But even I don't think live bass fishing is for me, and for Buck, calling something a tad more eventful — like, say, the World Series — was probably the right decision going forward.
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