Tuesday, June 18, 2002
Jack Buck a St. Louis Institution and Broadcast Legend, Dies at 77
Associated Press
ST. LOUIS -- Jack Buck, who in nearly five decades behind a microphone became a St. Louis institution on par with the Gateway Arch and the baseball Cardinals, died late Tuesday night, his son Joe Buck said.
The Hall of Fame broadcaster underwent lung cancer surgery Dec. 5, then went back in Barnes-Jewish Hospital Jan. 3 to have an intestinal blockage surgically removed. He never left the hospital. He was 77.
On May 16, Buck underwent another operation to eradicate a series of infections, including pneumonia, that kept recurring, and was placed on kidney dialysis.
``We miss him already,'' Joe Buck said on KMOX radio, where his father worked for many years. ``But I've been missing him for months.''
Starting in 1954, Buck called Cardinals games on the St. Louis AM powerhouse KMOX. Nationally, Buck called everything from pro bowling to Super Bowls to the World Series for CBS, ABC and NBC.
``I wouldn't change a thing about my life,'' Buck wrote in a 1997 autobiography. ``My childhood dreams came true.''
Buck's gravelly voice -- crafted in part, he said, by too many years smoking Camel cigarettes -- described to a national radio audience the indescribable end to Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.
``I don't believe what I just saw,'' he said after hobbled Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Kirk Gibson, barely able to walk, hit a two-run, game-winning homer off Dennis Eckersley.
He was behind the microphone for the first telecast of the American Football League and at the NFL championship ``Ice Bowl'' in 1967.
But in St. Louis and throughout the Midwest, it was Buck's calls of Cardinals games that made him a beloved figure. With each final out of a Cardinals victory, he wrapped things up with his tidy, ``That's a winner.''
It was Buck who told Cardinals fans to ``Go crazy, folks, go crazy!'' when shortstop Ozzie Smith homered -- his first ever left-handed -- to win Game 5 of the 1985 NL Championship Series.
Buck chose to pause -- not speak -- when St. Louis slugger Mark McGwire tied Roger Maris' single-season home run record in 1998. Then, he said, ``Pardon me for a moment while I stand and applaud.''
John Francis Buck was born Aug. 21, 1924, in Holyoke, Mass. He left home as a teen-ager to work as a deck hand on the iron ore boats of the Great Lakes and was drafted into the Army at 19 during the height of World War II.
Buck shipped out for Europe in February 1945 and was promptly wounded the next month in Germany. Back home a year later, he bumped into an old friend who needed a roommate at Ohio State. Buck obliged and launched his broadcasting career at the school's radio station.
Buck went to work at WCOL in Columbus, Ohio, even before graduating. It was there his began his relationship with the Cardinals, winning the job as the voice of the team's Triple-A affiliate. In 1954, he beat out Chick Hearn -- who went on to become an institution with the Los Angeles Lakers -- for a job with the Cardinals, working alongside Caray.
Buck left the Cardinals booth for a year in 1960, instead working for ABC, where he called pro bowling, the AFL and the Japanese baseball All-Star game.
Buck and ABC later had a falling out, which led him to not return a phone call that could have landed him the first play-by-play role on the network's ``Monday Night Football.'' Instead, he called Monday Night games and 17 Super Bowls on CBS radio from 1978 to 1996.
In 1976, he was tapped by NBC to host ``Grandstand,'' the network's new NFL pregame show. His co-host was an unknown named Bryant Gumbel.
In 1990, Buck began a two-year stint as lead baseball announcer for CBS. All the while, Buck continued to call Cardinals games. He was joined in the booth by his son, Joe, in 1991. Joe Buck is now the lead baseball and football play-by-play announcer at Fox.
An amateur poet, Buck often read his work on KMOX and, on occasion, to crowds. When major league baseball resumed last year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Buck, a tear in his eye, read a patriotic poem during a pregame ceremony at Busch Stadium.
Inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame's broadcaster's wing in 1987, Buck later became a member of both the Broadcasters' and Radio halls of fame. He was awarded the Pete Rozelle Award by the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1996 and received a lifetime achievement Emmy in 2000.
Suffering from heart trouble and Parkinson's disease, Buck in recent years had mostly called Cardinals home games only.
Buck, who had six children with his first wife Alyce, and two with wife Carole, is survived by his second wife; sons Jack Jr., Dan, and Joe; and daughters Beverly, Christine, Bonnie, Betsy and Julie.