When Fox Sports announcer Joe Buck missed the start of the 2011 baseball season, he told co-workers and the public a virus had caused him to lose his voice. That, he now admits, was a lie. “I was too scared and embarrassed to tell them the truth,” Buck tells Sports Illustrated. “But I’m doing it now.”
The real problem with his voice was caused by nerve damage he suffered during hair replacement surgery–a procedure Buck had been having since 1993 out of a lifelong fear of losing his hair.
“Broadcasting is a brutal, often unfair business, where looks are valued more than skill,” writes Buck. “I was worried that if I lost my hair, I would lose my job. “O.K., that’s bulls—-. It was vanity. Pure vanity. I just told myself I was doing it for TV.”
Buck says treatment helped him get his voice back, but now he wants to be totally honest about it. “People would ask, ‘Why is your vocal cord paralyzed?’ I said it was a virus. I didn’t say it was an elective procedure to add hair to the front of my head. It was embarrassing.”