The names Buck and Shannon carry a lot of weight with St. Louis Cardinals fans. Mike Shannon was the analyst on the team’s radio broadcast from 1972 to 2021. During that time, both Jack Buck and then Joe Buck had tenures as the play-by-play voice of the team.
Following Shannon’s passing over the weekend, 101 ESPN gathered as many influential St. Louis sports voices as it could find on Monday to join the station’s morning show. Joe Buck called into The Opening Drive. Host Randy Karraker guessed that Joe could not remember his life before Mike Shannon was a part of it.
“Mike would have been coming over to our house to, I guess, go through broadcast 101 with my dad. That was 1972, so I was three,” Buck answered. “I considered Mike almost like a second dad and I think Danny and Tim Shannon considered my dad like a second dad.”
Joe Buck added that he was lucky to have grown up going to Busch Stadium and sitting in a broadcast booth with two of the most iconic voices in baseball.
He added that he was also lucky that Mike Shannon was willing to work with him at all. The younger Buck began calling Cardinals games at 21 years old. While he acknowledges that nepotism probably played a role, he has realized in hindsight that Shannon played an even bigger role.
“Had Mike not been into that, like ‘I’m not working with Jack’s kid’ or anything like that, I never would have gotten up out of the ground. It was quite the opposite of that. He took me under his wing.”
While Jack Buck is an icon of the Cardinals organization, Joe says there are things about being a professional that his dad could not teach him. Much of how he learned to interact with players and conduct himself on the road came from his time working with Mike Shannon.
“I am so indebted to that man for so many things, and that is right at the top of the list,” Buck said.
