Joe Buck has called six Super Bowls and 23 World Series. He’s a member of the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame and has received the Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Buck has been the voice of some of American sports’ biggest moments over the past several decades. He has faced numerous challenges along the way, but he told GOLF’s Subpar Podcast that nothing compares to the challenge of calling professional golf.

Buck worked for FOX when the network acquired the rights to the U.S. Open and started broadcasting the major championship in 2015. Starting that year at Chambers Bay, he discovered that calling professional golf, especially if you’re only doing it once or twice a year, is a different beast than calling the NFL or MLB on a weekly basis.

“Easily the most challenging thing for me to do,” Buck told Subpar co-hosts Drew Stoltz and Colt Knost. “I remember when FOX got the rights and Johnny Miller was pissed off and everybody at NBC was mad. I was like indignant, like, ‘How could they be mad its network to network?’And Johnny Miller was like, ‘You don’t just fall out of a tree and do a U.S. Open.’ It upset me. I was like, ‘Well, we’re going to do great.’ He was right. He was dead right.

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“It’s hard to pick up the PGA Tour and do our national championship having not done anything else to that point and trying to act like you’ve been there every other week,” Buck continued. “It’s like when I do baseball. I just did a Dodgers-Mets game. I haven’t done a game in a year. It’s hard when you’re not there on a day-by-day basis, and you haven’t kind of walked through the recent history and been there and been attentive to it and known who is hot coming in and you don’t have to research that stuff.”

For Buck, the most difficult thing was that he wasn’t seeing what he was calling with his own eyes. He had to rely on what he saw through monitors and heard through his earpiece.

“Then you add to that the layer of, I’m not looking at any of this with my own eyes,” Buck said. “I’m sitting with my back to the course. I love that game. That doesn’t mean anything. That doesn’t make me any more qualified to do it than anyone else, and I’m not watching it with my own eyes.

“I’m looking forward at cameras and at monitors, and I’m going off information I’m getting out of my ear or from the back of the studio. That’s a weird sensation for me. I usually have the best seat in the house; it’s generated out of my mind for better or worse, I’ve seen it with my own eyes, I can put my own thoughts to it, and now I’m just going off the information [I’m getting through my earpiece].

“You’re trying to put all that together, maintain the scoreboard, trying to create a narrative of why certain players are ascending, why guys are falling apart, remembering the previous shot that happened. It was way more than I ever thought it would be.”

Buck felt that he and his FOX team got the hang of calling golf around Year 5, when they called Gary Woodland’s win at Pebble Beach. But FOX sold the rights back to NBC after that tournament, and Buck’s time calling the U.S. Open ended.

To hear more from Buck, check out the entire episode on YouTube.

As he stares down his 46th birthday this summer, Justin Rose is the oldest player in the Official World Golf Rankings top 50 — and that experience isn’t lost on him.

In fact, his past experience is part of the reason he feels so comfortable becoming an investor in McLaren Golf, the new venture of the F1 and Supercar juggernaut.

Rose was announced as the company’s first global ambassador on Monday at this week’s Cadillac Championship in Miami. On Tuesday, at a pre-tournament press conference, he was asked about the new partnership, with the brand is set to officially announce its new clubs at an event on Wednesday.

“McLaren Golf has been something that’s been on the back burner for a good number of months,” Rose said Tuesday at his pre-tournament press conference, his first comments since the announcement. “Obviously, to launch a brand out of the ground obviously has been going for a lot longer than a year. It’s something I’ve been involved with from the outset, really helping the engineering team, really testing the very first editions of the club. So yeah, I’ve been kind of working with the project for well over a year, probably.”

Rose himself brought up his past experience with making equipment changes. After spending the first 20 years of his career with TaylorMade Golf, he shocked the golf world when, at the beginning of the 2019 season and as the reigning World No. 1, he left the company to sign with Honma.

Although Rose won early that season at Torrey Pines — like he did this year — the partnership quickly soured and all of the Honma clubs were out of his bag by early 2020. Both parties exited the deal shortly thereafter.

Since then, Rose has been a gear-free agent and one who tinkers frequently from using lead tape on his driver shaft to using split brand set of irons or gaming seven-year-old fairway woods.

On Tuesday, Rose was asked if that freedom was worth giving up given how well he has played of late, winning twice on the PGA Tour since last August and finishing in the top-3 in the last two Masters.

Without being directly asked about it, Rose brought up the 2019 situation with Honma.

“From my point of view, no, I’m actually looking at what can be better. I’m looking to mitigate risk,” Rose said. “Yeah, I’ve done this once before as well in 2019, obviously, and I kind of learned a lot from that process. So I feel a bit better place now to kind of go down this path.

“I think yeah, I think there’s some best practices that we’re kind of, we’ve sort of put into development really that I think are giving me what I feel are a fantastic set of golf clubs. I’m looking at some of the performance data that I’m getting on the range and places like that and outperforming what I have.”

The main differences between 2019 and now are that Rose isn’t signing on with an established brand looking to push into a new market. McLaren is starting their golf business from scratch, and Rose has been along from the start. That’s why he’s also not just an ambassador; he’s an investor in the company.

He added that while he enjoyed his years as a free agent, he didn’t think what he was playing currently was the best thing for him, but he was able to form ideas about what exactly he needed.

“I think when you’re not with an equipment manufacturer, there’s a little bit of temptation just to bounce around anyway, there’s so many good options out there,” Rose said. “But at the same time, I’ve learned so much from being brand agnostic for a while that I kind of have my own preference list now. I feel like I’m in an environment where I can take all my preferences to one place where they can execute on that for me.”

For now, Rose confirmed the company’s initial offering will be two sets of irons, a blade and a cavity-back, which Rose was still contemplating the exact makeup of his set this week in Miami. He acknowledged that there will still be some growing pains as he puts the clubs in competition for the first time.

“Obviously, there’s going to be a refinement process,” he said. “You can test all you want, you got to get the clubs in play, and there’s going to be little mini situations out there, different lies, all sorts of things, just getting comfortable. But in the long-term, no, I don’t see there being an issue at all.”

But this will just be the beginning and he looks forward to building out a complete bag with McLaren.

“I got lots of ideas on every part of the game,” he added. “This is a good place for me to be able to put my ideas down and let the smart engineers go figure it out. But yeah, it’s a fun process to think of it all.”