Sports announcer Joe Buck is someone who fans recognize as almost famous—or infamous—as the athletes themselves. Back in 2011, he made headlines that a virus had done damage to his vocal chords and his career could be approaching an end. This, we later learned, was only half the truth. Yes, Buck had sustained serious vocal chord damage, but it wasn’t because of any virus. It was because he’d become addicted to hair plug surgery and one surgery went terribly wrong.
What most of us didn’t realize was at the same time of this frightening vocal chord damage, Buck was also going through a divorce. Needing to relax his vocal chords and brain, he flew down to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico to take some time off.
But relaxing is far from what he did. As he relayed on the Dan Le Batard show Monday, his vacation was a haze of tequila and weed brownies. Le Batard and his co-host peppered Buck to tell his weed brownie story to see if their rookie experiences with edibles had his beat.
Joe @Buck joins us to talk about his Topps baseball card and his experience with "magic" brownies.
-Lorenzo pic.twitter.com/ukxtVqVyq6— Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz (@LeBatardShow) July 10, 2017
I’ll allow the professional set the scene:
“It was 2011, I had a paralyzed vocal chord from a bad hair plug operation. Already I have you beat, by the way. … I’m going through a divorce. I go down to Cabo to a place I have down there to try and relax. I show up thinking I’ll do yoga every day, I’ll read two books, I’m not going to drink, I’m gonna do nothing. I’m just gonna heal myself because I have this paralyzed vocal chord and my career is over. I go down there and within eight minutes I’m on the driving range drunk on tequila.”
Buck admits that he couldn’t “escape the tequila virus the entire time” he was down there. As a result, he felt he couldn’t relax. Remember his whole trip was predicated to him relaxing. His career possibly hinges upon him relaxing. So he did the responsible thing and ate a pot brownie to help himself out.
Only problem was Buck had no experience with marijuana whatsoever, especially edibles. So he made the rookie mistake so many do.
“I ate a brownie at a dinner in Cabo,” he said. “Got no reaction….I’m eating it with this buddy of mine and 45 minutes later, I said to him, ‘Do you feel anything from this?’ And he’s like, ‘No I don’t feel anything.’ I said, ‘Only I can get no reaction from eating a pot brownie. Let’s eat another half.’ So I had a brownie and a half.”
At this point of the story the radio hosts are giggling their pants off. Buck and his buddy jump in a car and have someone drive them to a bar. When he tries to text someone on his phone, he realizes the brownies were having their effect, as “the letters start flying off my phone into my face”
They reach the bar and there’s a bachelorette party going on. He’s experiencing a mild panic as can happen when someone is so green with the green in a public setting. So Buck avoids people and when he sits down, he can’t feel his legs. It’s at this point he decides to leave.
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“I somehow magically get down the steps and to the exit,” he said “I think we’re gonna go right and [my driver] thinks we’re gonna go left. He pulls my left as I go right. I pass out onto the ground, go under a rope with my head hanging off into the marina. I damn near died. I had a dream while I was down there. I popped up. I went from completely out of it to completely sober worrying that within the next four minutes it was gonna pop up on Deadspin that I just went down at a bar in Cabo.”
Let this be a lesson: If you’re going through a divorce, while experiencing career-threatening traumatic damage to your vocal chords, a problem caused by an addiction to hair plugs, and really need to relax, maybe don’t eat the extra half of that brownie.
