ESPN's Joe Buck Explains Having to 'Stalk' Wife to Convince Her to Date Him

Monday Night Football announcer Joe Buck revealed his relationship with his wife, Michelle Beisner-Buck, got off to a rocky and contentious start. 

“She saw me on a national car rental commercial and thought I looked like a smug a**hole,” Buck, 56, recalled Tuesday, October 14, on “The Pivot Podcast.” “And now looking back on it, I think I did look like a smug a**hole. When I saw her, she was working for the NFL Network at the time and was standing against a wall. I was walking out of [Denver’s] Mile High Stadium and I saw her and I was like, ‘I think I’m going to stalk that person.’ And I did.”

Buck didn’t waste any time getting to work, employing his resources within the sports media world. 

“Rich Eisen, who’s been a friend of mine, I said, ‘Hey, what’s this Michelle Beisner all about?’” Buck asked Eisen, 56, a former NFL Network host who returned to his roots at ESPN earlier this year. “He’s like, ‘Well, think she’s got a boyfriend.’ I was like, ‘Eh, I’m not worried about that.’ Which is very unlike me because I do not have confidence in that category at all.”

Buck remained steadfast, explaining that Eisen “kind of played matchmaker.”

“When she talked to Rich, he was playing a game,” Buck said. “He was like, ‘Somebody in the [broadcast] booth wants your number.’ She’s like, ‘OK, who is it? Let’s play the game. Troy Aikman?’ He’s like, ‘No.’ She went through everybody. Like, got to Al Michaels. And Rich is like, ‘No, it’s not him.’”

As legend has it, Beisner-Buck then said, “Please don’t tell me it’s Joe Buck.”

“He’s like, ‘It is. He’s a good friend of mine, why would you say that?’” Eisen asked her. “She said, ‘You know what? I don’t know. I just know that I saw him in a commercial and he looks like a smug asshole.’ Rich was like, ‘Well, he’s not! He’s a great guy. You should just talk to him.’”

Buck added, “And now we’ve got 7-year-olds.”

The couple got married in April 2014 and share twin sons, Wyatt and Blake. Buck shares two daughters – Natalie and Trudy – with his first wife, Ann Archambault, who he was married to from 1993 to 2011. 

After his divorce, Buck admitted he wasn’t sure he wanted to get married again – until that fateful day when he saw Beisner-Buck in Denver. 

“She kind of opened my eyes to getting remarried after being married for 19 years,” he said. “The first time around having my daughters. It’s probably the last thing I thought I was going to do again. And the first thing I’m glad I did do again.”

While marriage has been mostly blissful for Buck and his wife, who now works for ESPN, a freak accident saw Buck shatter Beisner-Buck’s ankle while golfing in Mexico last year. 

“She did a headstand at the end of the tee box for good luck out and to my left,” Buck said in a video posted via X on September 11. “At the exact moment that I was teeing off, she decided, with her feet in the air, to do the splits. Thereby dropping her right leg a little bit to the side, right in my line of fire.”

With his wife’s legs in the air, Buck’s ball nailed “the inside of her right ankle and shattered it.”

As a result of the injury, Beisner-Buck was forced to undergo surgery.

“We are hoping that this is going to free up some space so I can get some blood flow through my ankle,” she said in the same video. “So that my nerves can start to work and regenerate and I can start to get back to normal and start getting back to the things that I love to do, like headstands.”