Fox announcer Joe Buck says broadcasting golf “is nuts”
Joe Buck is currently anchoring Fox’s coverage of the World Series but took part in an extensive interview with USA Today’s For The Win in which he discussed the difficulty of announcing a golf tournament as opposed to the many other sports he works…
Golf is — golf is nuts. You would think it’d be the slowest to do, but it’s actually the fastest. I mean, I’ve done college basketball, a horse race, a bunch of different things and they’d blow by but golf has a frenetic pace of bouncing around from shot to shot and green to green and, in essence, acre to acre over this huge plot of land with over 150 players who are their own team. And I’m not doing any of it live, it’s all of monitors. I go from the best seat in the house at Game 3 of the World Series to literally the worst seat with no vantage point when I’m doing a U.S. Open. That’s the weird thing. It’s more of a television show because you’re just piecing information together. If everything went out, I could still do a baseball or football game. If the cameras went out in golf, I’d be sitting there literally not with one clue what’s going on.
He was also asked about how difficult it must have been to prepare for Fox’s first ever U.S. Open and what he has been doing to improve for next year’s majors…
I think back to my HBO show. We’re doing a live HBO show and we’re going to do it in June and the next time we see you will be in August. You can’t get into a rhythm. You see it in late-night shows — not to compare. But Jimmy Fallon started and where he was a month later is totally different. It’s the same with Letterman or Conan who was on a week-to-week contract because it was so bad at first. That’s golf. That’s the way I feel. By the time the Open ended, we were getting a hell of a lot better. You gotta develop a rhyhtm, then by the time you do, it’s done. Then you have the Senior Open which doesn’t have the eyeballs and the Women’s Open which doesn’t have the eyeballs. It’s a tricky thing and then you’re off for months.
How do you get better? I think you have to watch your old tapes more than you do with any others. I don’t watch my old stuff any more — which is probably a mistake. I won’t watch this World Series again. It will come and go. Maybe I’ll see a highlight here or there. We kind of have to go back over last year’s U.S. Open and track where it went from Thursday to Sunday and try and pick up where we left off when we show up at Oakmont next year. I don’t know how else to do it because we’re not out there doing it.
Check out the full interview here.
