About
Joe Buck is an American sportscaster known for his work with Fox Sports as lead play-by-play announcer for NFL and MLB coverage. He has garnered three National Sportscaster of the Year Awards as well as numerous Emmys, and has been play-by-play announcer for the World Series since 1996.
Buck began his career as a broadcaster while still an undergraduate at Indiana University Bloomington, subsequently moving on to calling play-by-play for the now-Louisville Cardinals. Buck called for the Cardinals and served as play-by-play voice for University of Missouri basketball broadcasts until he was hired by Fox Sports in 1994, becoming the youngest man ever to regularly announce NFL games on network TV.
Two short years into his tenure at Fox, Buck became the network’s lead play-by-play voice for Major League Baseball alongside Tim McCarver, becoming the youngest man to do a national broadcast for a World Series that year. Buck ended Fox’s broadcast of the 2002 World Series with the phrase, “We’ll see you tomorrow night,” a tribute to his late father which became a phrase he would use at other appropriate times in his career. As of 2018, Buck has called 20 World Series and 19 All Star Games, the most of any play-by-play announcer on network television.
In 2002, Buck became Fox’s top play-by-play announcer for NFL games, and is the third ever announcer to cover the network’s lead MLB and NFL coverage in the same year. Multiple times, Buck has called a doubleheader, covering two games in different locations on the same day. Buck joined HBO in February, 2009 to host Joe Buck Live, which ran for two episodes before being cancelled. He also hosted a weekly sports-news show called Goin’ Deep in the late 1990s, and called horse racing and professional bass fishing during those years. Buck has appeared in numerous television programs as himself, including Family Guy, Conan, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Pitch, and American Dad.
Buck has hosted the “Joe Buck Classic” since 2001, a celebrity golf tournament which raises money for the St. Louis Children’s hospital. In 2016, Buck published a successful autobiography, Lucky Bastard. He is also a charismatic speaker, and is regularly booked for corporate events.
