Joe Buck Nearly Ruined His Career With His Hair Plug Addiction

And then he lied about it because he couldn’t face the shame.

Joe Buck is a liar. In 2011, the Fox broadcaster said he developed a virus in his vocal cord that damaged his voice and prevented him from hitting “the high inflections at times during excitable moments.” Terribly sad story.

The part about the damage was true, but the virus was made up. Buck’s vocal cord was actually at risk because of a hair transplant procedure. Just before the start of a 2011 baseball season, Buck underwent a six-hour transplant. When he woke up from the anesthesia he had a paralyzed vocal cord, probably from a cuff used during the procedure.

He was so embarrassed by how he hurt the cord, that he covered it up.

“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,” Buck told Sports Illustrated.

In his upcoming memoir, where Buck tells the whole truth about the vocal cord incident, he writes that he first became addicted to hair plugs at 24. He justified the addiction, which he seems ashamed of, by telling himself that if he were to go bald in the TV business, he’d be out of a career. But when he was being honest with himself, he knew that was a lie. “It was vanity. Pure vanity. I just told myself I was doing it for TV.”

This story is so perfectly Joe Buck. He concocts a dumb lie to cover up something he thinks is embarrassing and ends up only embarrassing himself more. Without a doubt, this is now the second most awkward thing to happen to Buck. The first? Glad you asked…