A leisurely day on the golf course ended with ESPN commentator Joe Buck and his wife, Michelle Beisner-Buck, making a surprise trip to the emergency room.
When the couple — who have been married since 2014 — hit the links in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, in July, they were involved in a freak accident. Beisner-Buck decided to do a headstand, which her husband said she has “been known to do” throughout their marriage, but things took a dangerous turn.
“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 Wednesday, 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 beelined “into the inside of her right ankle and shattered it.”
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The veteran sports broadcaster described the event as “a total freak accident,” but he still found himself full of remorse.
“Needless to say, my guilt is off the charts,” Buck said. “I wake up still in the middle of the night hearing that sound. It makes me sick. It was a bad sound.”
Beisner-Buck, a feature reporter for ESPN’s Monday Night Football, sat next to her husband in the video and managed to have a good spirit about the entire painful ordeal.
“If you were having a competition, you would never, ever be able to do it,” she said. “This was like God or the universe directed this ball right into my ankle.”
After six weeks in a hard cast and two and a half weeks in a walking boot, Beisner-Buck explained why the rehabilitation process has been so arduous.
“Not only was it a shatter and an impact break, [but] there’s a nerve that runs right under your ankle bone called the tibial nerve,” she detailed. “It goes right under your ankle through your foot. That was severely damaged.”
After attempting various nonsurgical remedies, Beisner-Buck lamented that “nothing has worked.” Ultimately, she was forced to undergo surgery to have her tibial nerves decompressed.
“We are hoping that this is going to free up some space so I can get some blood flow through my ankle,” she continued from outside the surgery center. “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.”
Beisner-Buck gave an update on Friday, September 13, posting a picture of her right leg propped up in bed via her Instagram Story.
“Day 2. Post surgery,” she captioned the photo. “Foot up. Head down.”
