As the sports media world reacts to the surprising report that Joe Buck and Troy Aikman got into an argument before this week’s Monday Night Football game over the status of their respective contracts with ESPN, the most confounding part of the story is that most people view the pair as very close.
The duo has worked together for 25 years, longer than any NFL broadcasting team in history, and have always spoken glowingly about each other and their friendship in the press.
Now, with the recent developments, the strength of that relationship is being brought into question.
But in a recent interview with former ESPN anchor Bob Ley at the Seton Hall Center for Sports Media, conducted after Buck signed his six-year, $100 million extension with ESPN that has supposedly caused a rift with his longtime partner, Buck offered an eloquent assessment of why his partnership with Aikman has worked so well over a quarter-century, comparing the relationship to a marriage.
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“… With Troy, you know, he’s 59, I’m 57. He’s a girl dad, I’m a girl dad. We’ve both been through divorce. We’ve been through so many things. We’ve lived 25 years of our lives as partners in the broadcast booth. And there’s no way that you can treat that any way other than a marriage,” Buck explained. “I mean, it’s— You have to put work in. And nurture the relationship and send texts, send a gift here and there, make a call when you know somebody’s going through a rough time, go to dinner and not talk about football, talk about life and talk about children and talk, you know, whatever it is.
“And that stuff, it doesn’t overtly, it doesn’t obviously come out on air. But it comes out on air because, you know, I know that he’s got my back. He knows that I’ve got his back. If I rib him for something, he knows it’s coming from a good place. It opens up so many possibilities that, you know, if I say something that’s, you know, makes fun of something he just said, he’ll laugh at it instead of being like, ‘What’s he trying to do?’ Or, ‘Why?’
“It gets back to trust. And I trust his prep. He trusts my prep. I know that if I throw something at him that I’ve never talked to him about, he’s going to have something interesting to say back. So it’s, it’s 25 years of life that just comes out on the air while we happen to be standing there watching a football game.”
Perhaps the marriage analogy is apt here. Married couples trust each other. They understand each other. They know what makes the other person tick. But married couples also have arguments. And sometimes, married couples get divorced.
From the sound of it, Buck isn’t speaking of Aikman like someone who thinks he’s headed for divorce. Quite the opposite, actually. Buck, as he often does, spoke highly of the friendship he’s built with Aikman over 25 years.
But what really matters now is how much Aikman values the relationship. He’s the one still without a contract beyond this season. And now, he’s describing himself as a “free agent.”
We’ll soon find out whether Buck and Aikman’s pregame spat on Monday was just a mundane disagreement between an old married couple, or a sign that divorce is on the horizon.
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