A defiant Joe Buck and Fox Sports are back for their 2nd try at the U.S. Open

Viewers began ripping Fox Sports’ coverage of last year’s U.S. Open from almost the moment the network signed on from Chambers Bay in its first of 12 years of coverage of the national championship. Joe Buck, for one, has had enough of it.

“I’ve never been more proud of an event that we’ve covered at Fox, period,” a defensive Buck, who anchored what commentators termed a “train wreck,” “bad golf tv,” and worse, said during a conference call ahead of round 2 for Fox this week at Oakmont.

The complaints have been well-documented, with critics ridiculing everything from too many canned features running in place of actual play, incorrect and missing player names and scores, vapid Q&As, technical snafus, and lead analyst Greg Norman’s inexplicable silence during Dustin Johnson’s 18-hole three-putt to lose the tournament.

It was a classic meltdown to which many golf watchers believed Norman (whose own devastating collapses in big moments are legend) could have, and should have, related in his role as analyst.

Buck defiantly explained that Fox did a damn decent job producing for the first time a sport that’s among the most difficult to televise.

“I refuse to come on here and apologize for 2015,” said Buck. “That’s ridiculous.”

Not surprising, since even during the festivities, Buck threw the “74 million people that are here on behalf of Fox Sports” under the bus rather than issue a mea culpa for the on-screen scoreboard that went down during Thursday’s opening round.

“The critics were unkind; that’s not a news flash. That’s the way of the world,” he added. “When you start, you’ve got to earn your position, and until you’ve done it, you have no idea what it takes to do that.”

That remark could have been a reference to NBC’s Johnny Miller, whom Buck and Norman replaced when Fox won the USGA contract. Johnny, you may recall, doubted Fox Sports’ ability to “just fall out of a tree and do the U.S. Open.”

Buck did concede that he may have gone into the gig believing that golf was “going to be slow,” only to realize “it’s actually the opposite” -- what with action occurring among a crowded field of players across 18 holes, many of which feature several cameras requiring direction. Providing a cohesive account of all the story lines -- many of them occurring at the same time -- is a challenge that seasoned broadcast teams from CBS, NBC, and ESPN have conquered over several years.

“It’s by far the fastest event when you’re sitting in the chair,” said Buck, who admitted he got bogged down “managing the scoreboard -- going from one green to the next, back to a fairway, then to a tee, and back to the green where we just saw somebody hit out of the fairway.”

Buck, a veteran of 18 World Series and four Super Bowls -- bona fides he reminded listeners of at the start -- clearly welcomed the opportunity to vent.

“To go back and say, ‘my God, I want to beg for everybody’s apologies for 2015’ -- I will never do that,” Buck vowed. “That thing could have fallen apart 50 different ways 50 different times and it didn’t.”

Buck somehow took credit for the tournament showcasing the “right winner” and “the drama” that unfolded down the stretch, both of which contributed to a huge Sunday prime-time viewership.

Repeating his pride in “everything we did,” Buck pledged that, after navigating the rapids on its maiden voyage, it would be smooth sailing for the USS Fox Sports come Thursday.

“Whatever we did in 2015,” he said, “it will be markedly better in 2016.”

Exactly how that will occur remains to be seen for a network that has had few opportunities to get things right. For one thing, the U.S. Open is the only large men’s tournament on its agenda, though Fox did televise the 2015 U.S. Women’s Open and U.S. Senior Open.

Having the Open at Oakmont is another plus for Buck, et al.

“I’m excited, first of all, for green grass and a white ball landing on green grass,” cracked Buck, with a backhanded slap at the USGA for staging the 2015 event at the much-maligned Chambers Bay, which Gary Player torched for hosting “the most unpleasant golf tournament I’ve seen in my life.”

Buck referred, of course, to how challenging it was for him and the TV audience to locate white balls lofted into the sky at Chambers Bay. Paul Azinger, riding shotgun with Buck now after Fox fired Norman, noted that the players themselves had trouble tracking their shots onto bumpy, splotchy putting surfaces that golfers likened to garden-variety veggies.

Azinger backed up his new booth buddy.

“Can I jump in for a second? Can I be honest?” he interjected. “We are at a different venue this year. We are at an old friend, an established U.S. Open traditional golf course and a big part of the story line is that people will know what they are looking at, they have seen it before many times, they can’t wait for Oakmont to see how the best in the world play it.

“That’s versus last year, which was a great, great unknown,” added Azinger, who proved to be knowledgable and forthright in his tenure at ESPN. “For me as an announcer — and I wasn’t a part of it — there was no familiarity at Chambers Bay. So, everything is going to be better because we are at a grand, old place to play golf.”

Fox is also touting its expanded use of technology, such as a mechanism to show viewers how severely sloping the greens are, as well as Protracer capability on 13 tee boxes. New this year are three radio-frequency mobile rangefinders that can supply exact yardages and tracers for approach shots into greens.

“I know exactly how we’re going to highlight the greens and bring those to life,” said Mark Loomis, coordinating producer of all USGA studio and event programming for Fox.

Often overlooked in all the problems from last year was the excellent way Fox employed audio to let viewers listen in on strategic talks between players and caddies.

Indeed, Buck claimed that he and his crew deserved “credit” for having the “discipline” and “confidence” to shut up and let “the natural sound and … Jordan Spieth talking to himself and talking to his caddie come through on your television at home.”

This year, 202 microphones on all 18 holes should pick up even more chatter across the course.

Then there are drones and virtual reality. More aerial drones will offer live, early morning course flyovers as well as mapping to show changes in daily hole locations.

It will be especially interesting to see how Fox adapts the virtual reality technology it used to create glowing pucks in hockey and the yellow line in football to such features as “visualized wind” for golf. The network will supply live, multi-camera coverage of the tee boxes and greens at holes 9, 17, and 18, a roving broadcast capability between holes 10 and 12, U.S. Open-themed video on-demand features, and live look-ins at the driving range.

But it’s a low-tech improvement that will likely prove to be the most beneficial for Fox. That, of course, is the addition of Azinger. The 1993 PGA champion has rejoined Loomis, who engineered the successful broadcasting trio of Azinger, Nick Faldo, and Mike Tirico at ABC in 2005.

Referring to all the cool tech toys at Fox’s disposal, Azinger observed that “the picture is going to be the most descriptive it’s ever been, and that leaves it for us to be informative.”

Inform away, Zinger.