I return to the airwaves Saturday night to call the Iowa–Grant football playoff game against Kickapoo/La Farge at 7 p.m. on WPVL (1590 AM) in Platteville, WGLR (1280 AM) in Lancaster, and www.wglr.com.

The first game I covered at Kickapoo High School was a 1988 playoff game. (One of the coaches later became a grade school principal in, yes, Ripon.) At the time, Kickapoo’s press box was a row of lunch tables at the top of the bleachers. It was not warm that night.

I’ve had several instances where I’ve announced more than one game in one day. (This started on a warm March day in 1987, when I covered, in chronological order, the state boys gymnastics meet in Madison, a girls basketball sectional final in Reedsburg, and a boys basketball regional final in Madison.) The Midwest Conference has women’s/men’s basketball doubleheaders, so nearly every one of those totaled four hours of announcing. I’ve had a few instances when I did a girls basketball playoff game in one place and then a boys playoff game in another. I’ve also done one football doubleheader — a Ripon College game in the afternoon and a Ripon High School playoff game that night. And I’ve had one tripleheader, a college basketball doubleheader followed by a high school game.

I’ve had one multiple-sport doubleheader, a boys basketball game followed by a college hockey game. So that places me in the company of Fox’s Joe Buck, who on Sunday called the Giants–49ers NFL game, followed by the Cardinals–Giants National League Championship Series game. Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch reports:

Buck had previously called doubleheaders as a Cardinals broadcaster, but he’d never experienced the kind of Sunday he had in San Francisco. After Giants quarterback Eli Manning took a knee to close out the Niners, Buck darted out of Candlestick Park at 4:32 p.m. local time and arrived at AT&T Park at 5:04 p.m., about 10 minutes before the scheduled first pitch of Game 1 of the National League Championship Series. He compared his seven mile, police-escorted trolley trip — Fox rented the wheels from the Cable Car Charter Company — to another famous ride in the Golden State. “I’m in the White Bronco being driven by Al Cowlings,” Buck said from his cable car earlier in the afternoon. “This whole street car thing is a diversionary tactic. We’ll be in Mexico by midnight.” …

After the game, Buck’s voice remained strong, and he announced that he was off to grab some pizza and a seltzer. “I’m fine; it’s not like I was in the pentathlon,” he said. “I just sat there and talked. It’s cute for Fox, but beyond that, people just want to watch the game.”

In a broadcasting variation on Tony Stewart’s “double duty” drives in the Indy 500 and Coca-Cola 600, ESPN’s NBA announcers Mike Breen and Jeff Van Gundy last year called a Christmas doubleheader in two cities, beginning with an afternoon Miami Heat vs. Mavericks game in Dallas before taking a charter flight to Oakland where the Golden State Warriors were hosting the Los Angeles Clippers. Breen also called a doubleheader in 2010 at L.A.’s Staples Center, an afternoon Lakers game for ABC followed by a Knicks-Clippers tilt for MSG Network.

Keith Jackson of ABC-TV did that twice, calling the Oklahoma–Texas football game from Dallas, then game 4 of the 1978 American League Championship Series (in New York!) and game 4 of the 1980 National League Championship Series (in Houston).

This is much more common in non-national markets. One Wisconsin example is the late Jim Irwin, who announced Badger and Packer football, and Badger and Bucks basketball, many times on the same days. (Usually they were the Packers at noon and the Bucks that evening.) I suspect Marv Albert, who simultaneously announced the New York Knicks and Rangers while working for NBC, did the same.

SI has a long story about Buck, a second-generation sportscaster:

Twenty million people are about to hear Buck and Aikman call the Buccaneers’ game against the Giants. As Fox’s lead NFL and major league baseball announcer, Buck has one of the most familiar voices in America-it’s the sound track to many of the biggest football games and the World Series. To a generation of sports fans he is the voice of fall. It’s odd, then, that so many fans think he doesn’t love the games. Truth is, he loves them as much as you do-just not in the same way, because…. Well, we will explain. …

Jack Buck just wanted his son around. That’s why he brought Joe to Cardinals’ spring training in Florida before the boy turned one. Jack was the Cardinals’ radio voice. Joe was the first child of his second marriage. Jack had six kids with his first wife, and he missed too much of their childhoods because he was working. He could not believe what he just didn’t see. He told Joe’s mom, Carole, that he wouldn’t let that happen with Joe.

Almost from the beginning they seemed more like friends than father and son. Jack didn’t even call his kid Joe. He called him “Buck.” When Jack recorded radio shows in his home office, he told young Joe he could sit in as long as he was quiet. Joe would seat himself in an antique chair and wordlessly study his dad. He revered his father. When Joe greeted Jack at Busch Stadium after games, he offered to hold his coat or his drink so everybody would know he was Jack Buck’s boy.

But the real fun came when he joined his dad on the road. He sat in the booth during games. He rode on the team plane, hung out in the clubhouse. He knew that Stan Musial was a Cardinals legend, but he thought of Stan the Man as his father’s pal. …