Lucky Bastard Read online

  Moving from the back of the head to the front is the ultimate upgrade for that hair. Those strands go from the Bob Uecker seats to sitting with Mark Cuban—they get a much better view of the action. The total procedure lasts about four hours. I now know how long it takes to go to hell and back.

  I felt like I would NEVER feel my head again. It was numb with a dull throb for about five days.

  And then . . .

  Well, well, well: I had a new, semi-believable hairline. I was pleased. And like any red-blooded American eating a bag of Lay’s potato chips, I decided I couldn’t stop at just one.

  I, Joseph Francis Buck, became a hair-plug addict.

  —

  I had a routine to stop my hair follicles from retreating like they were being chased by the IRS. Whenever I had a break in my schedule—usually between the end of football season and the start of baseball—I flew to New York and had the doctor bring them in. You might wonder: Why didn’t I save the plane fare and find a hair doctor in St. Louis? Well, we in the Midwest believe we aren’t capable of such elaborate procedures. We can make you a burger or build your dining-room table, and we never run out of ranch dressing. But we’ll leave the fancy hair operations to people who live near an ocean.

  My hairstylist in St. Louis, Sandy, complimented my work. But then said she had another client who had had the same procedure in St. Louis, and that doctor’s work was the best she had ever seen.

  Huh? So mine really isn’t that great?

  You’ve seen better?

  I made an appointment with the St. Louis doctor, and I must say: Sandy was right! He was better. The guy was brilliant—the end result looked more like a natural hairline. I sat there during my first procedure with him, and instead of hearing a New York–accented cruise director behind me, I just had to listen to four hours of NPR. That was his magic go-juice: NPR. I listened, too, if only to get my mind off the blood running down my neck from the new gash in my “harvest area.” I paid attention to All Things Considered like I was following directions to disarm a nuclear weapon.

  When you are undergoing a medical procedure, there are five words you don’t want to hear: “Boy, you are a bleeder!”* But that’s what he said. And when I had to use the restroom in the middle of the surgery, I found out why.

  The nurse was kind enough to put surgical paper up on the mirror, so that while I peed, I wouldn’t see what my head looked like mid-procedure. But I am a curious guy. I like to look. I pick things a lot. My nose when I read? Guilty! I want to know what’s in there. A scab before its time? Guilty! Get it off me, even if it bleeds (and now that I know I am a bleeder, you would think I would be smarter than that).

  I had not used the restroom during the New York procedure, so I had no opportunity to peek at my head. But in St. Louis, I had my chance. I just barely peeled the corner of the surgical paper back, to peek at my head. Curiosity killed the bald cat, and I almost threw up. I was a bloody mess up top (literally, a bloody mess—I’m not pretending to be British) and I had another two hours to go.

  Well, I pissed, I missed, and I tucked it in before I was finished, adding a pattern of dark gray to my light gray sweatpants that would have made Zubaz proud.

  I went back in, furious with myself for looking. A couple of hours later, after listening to some NPR host who had clearly taken too much Ambien, I was finished.

  —

  A few times over the years, someone said a single sentence to me and changed my life. When I was failing an astronomy class in college, a roommate told me I could drop it. This was a revelation. Drop? What is that? You mean I can walk down to the bursar’s office where the class registration is and just poof—make it go away?

  And then there was the time I was getting a consultation for my seventh hair landscaping when the doctor casually said, “You know, you can get this procedure under a general anesthetic.”

  Um . . . WHAT?

  The needle came off the record, the room brightened, the birds chirped louder, and my nipples tingled. Do you mean I can go to sleep and when I wake up, I will still look like a gashed-up mess, but I will be finished? Yes, please!

  Procedure number seven went well. I added a few strands to the fun and was recovered in about a week.

  I also felt more comfortable when I was on camera. You see, that’s the real reason I had hair-replacement surgery:

  For TV.

  Broadcasting is a brutal, often unfair business, where looks are valued more than skills. I was worried that if I lost my hair, I would lose my job.

  OK, that’s bullshit. It was vanity. Pure vanity.

  I just told myself I was doing it for TV.

  I am the luckiest man ever, with family and friends and a dream job, and yet I spend an inordinate portion of my life thinking about hair—not just mine, but yours. I admit it doesn’t really make sense. If you are losing hair, or have lost it, maybe you understand. I guess I am a jealous man. I cannot stand people who have better hair than I do. That’s a problem, since it includes 93 percent of the population.

  My lack of hair is accentuated by the size of my head. On social media, people mock my large forehead, but they miss the point. It’s not just the fore; my whole head is enormous. It would fit in well in a grocery bin next to the honeydew.

  The surgery really is miraculous. People don’t look at me and instantly think: “Bald!” That’s really all I have accomplished. It’s not a Nobel Prize in Physics, but when you drop your astronomy class because you are failing, you learn to shoot lower.

  Like many addicts, I was able to manage my addiction for a while without any serious consequences. I felt good about it, and my career kept rolling. In February 2011, Troy Aikman and I called Super Bowl XLV,* our third Super Bowl together, and I accomplished my main goal for the night, which was not screwing up. That’s the top priority when you do a game of that magnitude: Don’t screw it up.

  Troy and I had something in common: He wore number 8 with the Cowboys, and I was getting ready for hair-plug operation number eight. By that point, getting new hair was old hat. But I was a ball of stress heading into the operation, and it had nothing to do with my hair.

  —

  After nearly two decades of marriage to my former high school girlfriend, I was embroiled in a divorce. It was draining me both emotionally and financially. The night before the procedure, I got into a nasty fight on the phone with my soon-to-be ex-wife. My then-fourteen-year-old daughter, Natalie, got dragged into it. It was not good for anybody.

  I am a worrier, and on the morning of the operation, all I could think about was Natalie, who had been dragged into a dumb argument unnecessarily. I just wanted to go in, get a nice nap while the guy with the NPR fetish went to work, and leave with more impressive hair in time for baseball season.

  When you are a worrier, you don’t enjoy waiting for a doctor. A million thoughts shot through my mind: “What if I don’t wake up? What if, when I go to sleep, the doctor puts a couple of clumps where they don’t belong?”

  To avoid confusion about where the hair goes and where it doesn’t, you have one final consultation right before you go under. You sit there and he marks, with a surgical marker, exactly where the new follicles will go. It’s like designing a golf course. We’ll put a bunker here, some rough over there, and make sure any putts on your forehead break right to left.

  Well, my operation went well—so well that, with all the hair he was able to move, a four-hour operation turned into a six-and-a-half-hour operation. The doctor said he was “on a roll.” Either that, or some show about seventeenth-century jousting was on NPR and he couldn’t tear away. The operation went so long that my mom and sister continually checked in with the nurse to make sure I was still alive.

  When they wheeled me out, I was totally out of it. My sister looked at my hand. It was swollen to three times its normal size. She was freaked, but the nurse said not
to worry—it swelled up because I was lying on it during my snooze.

  As it turned out, my hand was fine.

  My voice was not.

  —

  I finally opened my eyes and looked at my mom and sister in the tiny recovery room. I wanted to make a smart-assed comment, and NOTHING came out. I couldn’t talk. I could only whisper.

  No matter how hard I tried, I sounded like I was dying.

  We called the surgeon’s office the next day for assurance that my voice would return.

  I wanted to hear: “Don’t worry. You will be fine.”

  What I heard instead: “Well, this happens sometimes after a general anesthetic. It’s rare. Your voice should come back soon. Just rest and you’ll be fine.”

  Your voice should come back soon.

  Should.

  Should?

  Should is not a reassuring word to me. I am a hypochondriac. I always expect the worst. If I have a knot in a muscle, I decide it’s a tumor. If I tweak my knee, it’s a torn ACL. Headache? Aneurysm.

  No voice? Broke!

  I didn’t want to hear that my voice should come back soon. We should have peace in the Middle East, but do we? I spent the day bombarding my mom with one worst-case scenario after the next. I thought something was really wrong. It wasn’t just my hypochondria. My voice didn’t feel strained or fatigued. It felt thin, weird, and hopeless—kind of like Lindsay Lohan. I knew my voice wasn’t coming back in a matter of hours.

  The next morning, I tried a fake opening to a broadcast: “Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Major League Baseball on FOX!”

  It sounded like “Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Major League Baseball on FOX!”

  If you were writing a scouting report about me that day, you would have to include: pending divorce, heartbroken kids, legal fees, alimony, gashed head, second-to-last year on a contract, no voice, scared, mad, regretful, and yes, let’s just say it:

  IDIOT.

  People all over the world are suffering through all kinds of maladies, usually through no fault of their own . . . and with elective surgery, something I did to myself, I killed my ability to earn a living.

  I had one of the best jobs in the world. Did I risk it so I could protect my children? Feed the hungry? House the homeless? No, sir! I did it for HAIR.

  Yes, yes: Joe Buck does kind of rhyme with DUMB FUCK!

  I told my bosses, the media, and pretty much everybody else that I had a virus and my voice would come back. I was too scared and embarrassed to tell them the truth. But I’m doing it now.

  The voice that I had worked so hard to develop, command, and protect was gone. I felt like my identity vanished with it. From the time I was eight years old, I considered only one career: sportscaster. I wondered if I had blown it forever.

  Part 2

  Jack’s Kid

  Chapter 2

  The Adventures of Jasper Pennypucker

  Imagine the prototypical American childhood, with games of catch on the front lawn and the father tucking his son into bed every night.

  Mine was much cooler than that.

  What can I say? I was lucky. Around the time I was born, my dad’s broadcasting career really began to take off. The Cardinals fired their lead broadcaster, Harry Caray, making my father the undisputed Voice of the Cardinals on the radio. He also did NFL games for CBS-TV and radio for many years.

  We got along so well. When I was three years old, he would let me sit in his office while he did radio interviews on the phone, as long as I stayed quiet. I always stayed quiet. I could tell when his voice got deeper and more precise that he was doing an interview and not just talking to a friend on the phone. I was as happy as I could be, just sitting there watching him. I could not think of anything better than being with him.

  I was too worried about consequences to ever get into real trouble. He was too consumed by fun to worry about disciplining me. He mostly left that to my mom. Truthfully, even though he was forty-four when I was born, he was more like my best friend than my dad.

  When I was little, he came up with a nickname for me: Jasper Pennypucker.* But after that, he always called me Buck. He took me everywhere.

  Some kids go to summer camp. I did that and I hated it. So instead, I went to Cardinals baseball games. When I was four, the Cardinals catcher saw this little guy with an enormous head bounding through the clubhouse, acting like he lived there, and he asked, “Who is this kid?”

  Somebody said, “Oh, that’s Jack’s kid. That’s Joe.”

  That was the first time I met Tim McCarver.

  When I was three or four, I got excited about something at a Cardinals game, which was only a problem because (a) I knocked over a Coke, (b) I was in the press box, not in the stands, and (c) the Coke landed on my father and his radio partner while they were on the air. They didn’t know what happened. They thought somebody came in and just threw something down on them.

  They turned around in the middle of the broadcast and looked at me. I burst out crying, thinking I’d just ruined everything for everybody. But they kept doing the game.

  All I wanted, as long as I can remember, was to be him. When he was home, we’d eat dinner, go downstairs, and play pool against each other. He treated me like his buddy.

  At other times, we would get in the car and drive to this other house in town. We would walk up to the front door, and when it opened, there would be a woman and some older kids inside.

  They were my dad’s first family.

  We were there to drop off a check for alimony and child support.

  I was scared to death. Everybody there gave me the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that I wasn’t wanted. I didn’t understand why at the time, but I represented something painful in their lives.

  —

  When my parents met, my mom was a Broadway actress and my dad was a married man. My mom’s name was Carole Lintzenich (stage name: Carole Lindsay), and she was doing a musical with a touring company in her hometown of St. Louis. He was talking to her on a pay phone outside of the Chase Park Plaza hotel, home to one of the hottest bars in St. Louis in the sixties, when she told him she was pregnant.

  “I feel like my knees are melting into the pavement,” he said.

  He already had six children with his wife, Alyce. He left her—and, by extension, them—for my mom. They got married in March 1969. One month later, she gave birth to a boy with a large head who cried a lot, probably because he was born bald.

  That was me, obviously.

  To use the indelicate term of those times: I was a bastard child.

  It was 1969. The public did not talk about the sex lives of famous people like they do today.* So there was no major scandal or significant public fallout. But there were some deep wounds, and some tense moments for me and my sister, Julie, who was born three years after me.

  The memory of helping deliver those alimony checks is still painful. To this day, I don’t know why my dad made me go with him. Maybe he thought it would force everybody to be civil. He was nonconfrontational to the point of being avoidant. My presence gave him a better chance of getting out of there without a fight.

  I didn’t really interact with my half siblings often—just enough to make me feel incredibly uncomfortable. My dad would put us all on KMOX, the fifty-thousand-watt radio station where he worked, on Christmas morning. Sometimes we did the show from my house—entertaining the people of St. Louis instead of wondering what Santa brought down the chimney. When I was around twelve, I played the trumpet on the KMOX show in the studio. I felt like my half siblings were glaring at me. I was fat and I sucked at the trumpet anyway, and now I was playing “What Child Is This?” for people thinking, “Yeah, Dad, what child is that?” I didn’t want to play—not on the radio, and especially not for them. What a great Christmas! Happy birthday, Jesus! Can you take me now? Or take them? I was
not mad at my father, but I was embarrassed at having to perform in front of these people.

  My half brother Danny was a really good local football player and a big, strong guy, and one day at his house, he said, “Come here, Joe, let’s go dive into the pool.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Danny put me on his shoulders. I was this dopey fat kid. He dove in, which made me smack the water. It took everything I had in me to not cry. But it hurt. It hurt on a lot of levels, but I mean, it physically hurt. I got out of the pool, and my skin was red. I’m sure my face was red with embarrassment, too.

  I went inside, and my father’s ex-wife was cooking hot dogs.

  She said, “Do you want a hot dog?”

  I said, “Yeah, that would be great.”

  And she said, “What do you like on it?”

  I said, “I just like ketchup. The only thing I don’t like is mustard.”

  She gave me a hot dog with mustard all over it. That’s a little thing, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I smiled and ate every bite of that fucking hot dog. But I felt miserable. And that stuff was always gurgling under the surface whenever I saw them. There was this undercurrent of deep-seated animosity, and I understand where it started now, but I didn’t get it then. To me, my dad was the greatest guy in the world.

  —

  With the tension with my dad’s ex-wife and older kids hovering, he bought my mom a bracelet with two words on it: So What!

  I’m sure my dad didn’t have a ton of money to spend on jewelry. When he gave her that bracelet, I think it hit home with my mom: So what if they’re not nice to you? If people are talking about us in St. Louis, so what? It doesn’t matter.

  He wanted us to enjoy our lives, and we did. He felt he had missed too much time with his older kids because he was working, and he vowed not to make that mistake again. He was still on the road a lot, but he took me with him when he could—to make up for at least some of the time we missed.