We all remember when Joe Buck, the voice of Fox Sports, missed the entire 2011 MLB regular season with a virus in his vocal chords.
Except that wasn’t the case.
Buck has come out and admitted to Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch that it wasn’t a virus in the laryngeal nerve of his left vocal cord. No, instead, it was due to a hair transplant that left his vocal chord paralyzed.
It was actually the eighth hair transplant of his life, and Buck admits that getting them became some sort of addiction for him. He opened up about it to Deitsch:
“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 continued:
“I was lying. I think people bend the truth all the time, unfortunately. It was really for self-preservation and ego for me. As I look back, I gave partial truths. Where I lied was when I said the reason why. 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. There’s an embarrassing element to that. Any surgery done to improve one’s looks is not really something someone wants to talk about. So it’s very cathartic to get this out. There are a lot of people across the country, for as silly as this sounds, who obsess about hair loss. I would tell myself I needed to look younger, I needed to have thicker hair, I don’t want to look older than I am. The truth of it is that it was an ego thing, whether I was on TV or not.”
While there’s a lot of talk about the pressure that female TV reporters deal with to maintain their looks, it’s no different for males. Buck is just one of the only ones to come out and admit it, which is tough to do.
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