Joe Buck and Troy Aikman Mock Military Flyover
Oct 20, 2020
RUSH: This next story. I saw this, and I really couldn’t believe this. Here’s the headline. “Joe Buck and Troy Aikman Caught on Hot Mic Mocking NFL Military Pregame Flyover.†This was Sunday afternoon in Tampa. They were doing the Fox broadcast of the Green Bay Packers at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Aaron Rodgerses at the Tom Bradys.
I know both of these guys, and I was just… I was in a state of disbelief, and then I got really sad. It was kind of like when I saw what Kaepernick was doing and what it was causing, and when I realized the NFL was never, ever again gonna be just a pure sports enterprise, that it had become politicized. Now these guys have made me feel just as sad as I did that day.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So I saw message from a friend last night, and I said, “This can’t be. Somebody’s gotta be misunderstanding what happened here.†I looked at it and looked at it. It turns out to be true. Troy Aikman and Joe Buck… I know both of these guys. I haven’t seen them in a while. But Aikman… I remember when I was hired by ESPN all those many years ago now to appear on their Sunday NFL Countdown show.
That’s the infamous show where for two days nobody had a problem with what I had said about Donovan McNabb, and then on the third day the world melted. I got a telegram from Aikman congratulating me. I’d run into Aikman at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic or other charity golf tournaments. He would go out of his way to come up and say hi.
I remember there was some opening in Dallas. Bruce Willis and his gang were opening some restaurant down there. I went down for that, and that’s the first time I met Aikman. He was there. Arnold Schwarzenegger and whole bunch of people flew in there. Nice as he could be! And Joe Buck. St. Louis Cardinals baseball play-by-play. His dad was the great Jack Buck.
Joe had a celebrity golf tournament in St. Louis for a number of years that I didn’t miss. I was honored to be invited to it — and, I mean, I never talked politics with these guys, but I assumed that they were not a bunch of, you know, commie SOBs because they were not at all reluctant to have me in their company.
You know, liberals don’t want anything to do with me, and if they do find themselves in my presence, they’re not nice. They’re snarky and mean. So when I saw this, I said, “This can’t be. It just can’t be.†But it happened. It’s only 13 seconds of audio. This is Sunday before the NFL game on Fox, Green Bay-Tampa Bay, Troy Aikman and Joe Buck caught on a hot Mike discussing the military flyover of the stadium right after the anthem.
AIKMAN: That’s a lot of jet fuel just to do a little flyover.
BUCK: That’s your hard-earned money and your tax dollars at work!
AIKMAN: That stuff ain’t happenin’ with Kamala-Biden ticket! I’ll tell you that right now, partner.
RUSH: Now, they say that this was an open mic, that they were caught on a hot mic, meaning they didn’t know that what they were saying could be heard. I don’t know. I know hot mics, and this doesn’t sound like one. It sounds like they knew. It sounds like they wanted this stuff to be heard. They said it in such a way that they didn’t mind that it be heard. The first voice was Aikman.
“That’s a lot of jet fuel just to do a little flyover,†and next up was Buck. “That’s your hard-earned money and your tax dollars at work,†and then it was Aikman who said, “That stuff ain’t happenin’ with a Kamala-Biden ticket! I’ll tell you that right now, partner.†Kamala-Biden ticket.
Now, I don’t know. I don’t know whether he… (chuckles) I don’t know if he’s a political neophyte and just doesn’t know that Biden’s the top of the ticket or if he does know it but realizes Biden’s not long for the office even if he does win. But it’s just one of those moments, folks, where it just made me sad.
So many things like this in the past three years have just made me sad. These great institutions that I used to love, I never once tried to politicize them. Whenever I talked to the NFL here, I’ll occasionally, yeah, we would do the environmentalist wacko version of picking the winners, but that was to try to help the libs understand what we were doing.
That was all done in fun. But the NFL isn’t what it was, and I don’t know if they can ever get it back. Professional sports in general. You know something else, folks? Everybody was expecting, in the middle of the pandemic, that when live professional sports returned to TV, that the ratings would be through the roof, and they aren’t. They haven’t been.
Individual games, some of them are pretty hot. But on balance, the NBA had one of the worst playoff and NBA Finals audience ratings ever. The World Series starts tonight on Fox. I asked Brian, “Are you looking forward to the World Series?†“Nah, nah. (grumbling) I didn’t care about for a long time.†The World Series… Do you know where they’re playing the World Series? (interruption)
You don’t even know where they’re playing! (interruption) Do you know the two teams in the World Series? (interruption) You have the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Tampa Bay Rays, and they’re playing it in Texas. They’re playing it in Arlington, so they have a bubble. They’re playing at the Texas Rangers stadium across from AT&T Stadium, the Cowboys stadium.
Now, the costs involved in a military flyover. Yeah, jet fuel’s expensive, and “flyovers are fairly expensive … military officials say they treat them as part of pilot training and the costs are drawn from training budgets. Newsweek: ‘The costs of flyovers are deducted from the training budget of the branch that takes part, and the time involved does count towards pilots’ training, however limited and simple the flyby may be.
“Past flybys have been criticized as a waste of money, especially after the 2011 Super Bowl in Dallas, when jets flew low over the stadium’s closed roof at a reported cost of $450,000.'†It says here, “NFL fans were pretty shook [sic] by the Buck-Aikman hot mic moment.†I still ask, “Hot mic?†It doesn’t sound like a hot mic. It sounds like they intended this to be heard.
“That stuff ain’t happenin’ with a Kamala-Biden ticket! I’ll tell you that right now, partner.†Well, maybe he’s right. Maybe in a Kamala-Biden administration, there isn’t gonna be any tribute to the U.S. military. Maybe there isn’t gonna be any tribute to first responders. Maybe there isn’t gonna be any tribute to the police.
Well, that’s right!
These are the people that want to defund the police. That’s right. These are the people think the police are the problem in America. That’s right. These are the people who believe the police are racist pigs. That’s right! How could I have forgotten? So, yeah, military flybys? “That ain’t happenin’ in a Kamala-Biden ticket, partner.†All I can tell you is this†My first flyby, the first one I ever saw… I just told you the story last week.
I was in San Diego and it was the Washington Redskins. They were still called the Redskins then. It was the Washington Redskins versus the Denver Broncos, and the Redskins wiped the Broncos out. But, anyway, the Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego. It’s a bowl, but one end of it is open, and the jets in the flyby… I was sitting in the closed end zone area with a friend of mine, Ed Tatosian, Sacramento Police Department SWAT unit.
He was my security. And we’re sitting there. Great seats right there at the — we’re in the second level right in the middle of the end zone. So we could see the jets that were in the flyby. Herb Alpert was doing the national anthem. There was nobody was singing it. It was just Herb Alpert and trumpet. And we could see the jets. He couldn’t hear ’em ’cause there’s noise in the stadium and Herb Alpert’s trumpet is going at a thousand decibels.
But we could see the jets coming, see the jets, and we could see the timing. The jets would turn on the downwind, they’d turn on base leg, parallel to our end zone, then they’d turn on final, right for us. We could see them coming for a minute or two coming right for us. We couldn’t hear ’em yet because Herb Alpert’s trumpet was at a thousand decibels.
But we knew they were coming. They kept getting bigger and bigger in our vision. They kept coming. We couldn’t hear ’em. Kept staring, kept looking at Herb Alpert, finally realized what was going on. Herb Alpert had to make sure that he hit the final note and could hold it for as long as necessary to get those jets to fly right over the middle of the field at the time he hit the last note. The timing ended up being impeccable. Herb Alpert had to hold the last note a little longer than usual. Good thing he had good breath control.
And then those jets flew over, and they’re not very high, and, folks, I’ve never heard a roar like that. I have never heard that kind of roar. And you could see the jets, almost so close you could reach up and touch ’em. And I was moved, and I was blown away. We were all standing. And I turned to Ed, and I started beating him on the back. “Do you believe that? Do you believe what you just saw? How in the world can anybody be a Democrat after seeing that?â€
There’s some Democrats standing right in front of us from Washington. And they turned around, and they gave me the snake eyes. I don’t care. It was one of the most uplifting moments I had ever experienced in my life. That was 1980-something, 1987, 1986. ‘Cause I was still in Sacramento then. I had not moved to New York to start this show.
We’re a little over 40 years later, and now we’ve got TV announcers making fun of the flyover, complaining about the cost of the jet fuel and assuring us that in a Kamala-Biden ticket you can kiss these days good-bye. And then I had to realize exactly, we’re gonna be kissing a lot of American traditions good-bye. We’re gonna have all kinds of defining American traditions, institutions, holidays, you name it, taken away from us if these people happen to win. It’s just sad.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I’ll tell you, those guys, their comments about flybys, flyovers, that isn’t gonna be happening with a Kamala-Biden ticket, partner. Just more reasons, folks, to get out there and vote and preserve the American way of life.
Because that’s what’s on the ballot: preserving the American way of life. A man who believes this country is good and decent. A man who believes this country is the best with room for improvement. A man who believes the people who make this country work are the best, also with room for improvement, versus who? Well, whoever’s behind Joe Biden, we are up against a bunch of people who do not believe America is good. They don’t even get close to believing America is good.
They believe America’s bad. They believe America is racist and bigoted and homophobic and all these other crazy, woke things. They think America is the problem in the world. They think America is guilty, unjust, immoral. They think America is still a slave state. That’s what’s on the ballot. We don’t want to elect people who do not believe in the United States of America, as founded.
Okay. Time to get started on the phones. State College, Pennsylvania, this is Cameron. Great to have you, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. I just loved your description of that flyover. It reminds me of 9/11/16 when I took my boy down to the Eagles game, Eagles-Browns. The flag was as big as the field, the national anthem, the flyover. If you aren’t moved by that, something is the matter with you. It was just unbelievable. And as an Army vet, awe, it was so special.
RUSH: Right. I was happy that the flyover happened. I didn’t mind, you know, I was happy to be part of the cost of the thing. And somebody said to me, you know, days later I was telling the story at a function, and somebody said, “Well, you know what that was, right? That was the sound of freedom you heard.â€
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: You heard the sound of freedom. That’s what you’re reacting to. That was the sound of freedom, my man.
CALLER: What a phenomenal moment. Never forget it. Once in a lifetime.
RUSH: You know what? I had recorded the game at home on my state-of-the-art VCR at my starter home up in Sacramento. I couldn’t wait to get back ’cause I knew the flyover would be part of the pregame show, I couldn’t wait to get back and hear it. You know what? Microphones do not do it justice. Microphones cannot come close to capturing — live microphones can’t come close to capturing the actual sound of those jets flying over at 500 feet, maybe a little — I don’t know what the actual altitude is, but I mean they are low, folks.
And there is there is no way, especially back in 1987 or ’86, whenever this was, there’s no way television microphones could in any way pick up the sound. So if you’ve only seen one of these flyovers on TV, you have not heard what it sounds like.
