Wins & Losses – Clay talks with legendary broadcaster Bob Costas - 2 Pros and a Cup of Joe

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Wins and Losses with Clay Trevis. Clay talks
with the most entertaining people in sports, entertainment and business.
Now here's Clay Travis. Welcome and Wins and Losses podcast.
I am Clay Travis. We have got I don't know

(00:24):
what the number is now, thirty five of these long
form conversations. If you're new to us, i'd encourage you
to go check out the entire library. The idea is
these conversations are just as good in two years or
three years, or hopefully ten years as they are when
you are listening to them and the week that they
are released. The guest this week and or this month

(00:44):
in October of twenty twenty is legendary sports broadcaster Bob Costas.
And Bob, I've been watching you literally my entire life,
and I feel like there are a billion things we
can get into, but you reached out to me most recently.
First of all, you participated and I thought a really
well done piece by Greg Couch about the struggles of

(01:05):
the n b A when it came to the ratings
this year, UH and trying to analyze where the league
goes going forward. And I appreciate you being involved in
that OutKick article because certainly I watched you for years
and years be associated with the NBA, and we'll get
into that in a little bit as well. But in particular,
I sent out a tweet one of my listener, one

(01:25):
of my listeners, one of my readers out there, grabbed
in uh, probably thirty second segment that you had done
on Don Lemon CNN show dealing with the return of
college football, and I saw it and what immediately jumped
out to me was that CNN had mischaracterized the return date.
They had gotten it wrong. We are actually talking today

(01:47):
on the day that the Big Ten will return. There's
a Friday night football game between Illinois and Wisconsin later tonight,
and uh, but last week's CNN said that the that
the Big Ten was returning that weekend, and it was
an interesting conversation, and so I popped it out there,
and then you reached out to me. We've never talked before.
We had a good private conversation. You said you'd like

(02:08):
to come on and do the show. So we've got
a lot to get into, but we'll start there with
what you felt. And I think this is a fair
fair position is at times we live in a social
media era maybe all the time, where small clips can
be characterized that are not necessarily representative of the entirety

(02:29):
of a statement that was made. And that's why I
like having long form conversations with people here. So welcome
to the show, and we'll start right there with the
tweet that I sent and the hit that you did
on CNN with Don Lemon. Thanks Clay, and I appreciate
the opportunity to speak here at some lane. First of all, um,
as you know, I couldn't see the graphic that was incorrect.

(02:51):
Somebody at the production level at CNN, and it's not
a sports operation, got that wrong. If I had seen it,
I would have subtly corrected it. But what I said,
Don asked me about the return of college football, and
I made all I think the necessary stipulations. I'm sure
that they've got all the protocols in place, etcetera, etcetera.

(03:14):
But to me, there's something, if you take a step back,
something about this that exemplifies how big time college sports
football the most, but college basketball also big time college
sports has for so long been so out of perspective
and so out of proportion that the whole thing is
a sham, And well, I shouldn't say it that way,

(03:36):
and I didn't say it that way, that it is
too often a sham. And what I said was in
light of for example, Dan Mullen, the Florida football coach, saying,
we need ninety thousand people for our game against l
s U. We need to have the swamp full. Ironically,
he's the one who drained the swamp. He tests positive,

(03:57):
a good portion of his team test positive. And what
I'm saying is a lot of people are so obsessed
with football, be at the NFL or college football, they
just have to have it no matter what. And you
know as well as I if you could give truth
serum to many college football fans, especially in certain parts

(04:18):
of the country, and you gave them the following proposition,
over the next ten years, your university will more or
less mirror Stanford. You'll always be competitive, maybe once or
twice you'll win the national championship or be in contention
for it. You'll be good across a wide swath of sports,

(04:38):
and the the compact that should exist between academics and
athletics will be there. Or you can be in contention
for the national championship almost every year, And if a
very large number of your quote student athletes aren't really
students at all, and if many of them recruited despite

(05:01):
dubious and sometimes criminal backgrounds, and if many of them
will in fact misbehave and and bring some rather dubious
attention to the program, but you'll be in contention for
the national championship every year. We know damn well which
of those two choices would be most appealing to a

(05:21):
huge percentage of college sports fans. And in that sense,
to me, it's out of whack. And this notion that
we have to have college football no matter what. We
gotta travel, we gotta intermingle. We know how large the
size of the rosters are and all the auxiliary personnel,
even if life on campus is nothing like normal. The

(05:42):
one thing that's going to be as close to almost
we can possibly make its football. So that's what I said.
I said, I think the exact words were too often,
not always, too often, football, or in this case, college
football isn't just pleasing pastime or an interest of some kind.
It is too often a mindless of obsession. Now people

(06:05):
object to that, fine, but that's what I said, all right,
I think so much of what you said is obviously fascinating.
I have spent a ton of time arguing for the
return of college football. Uh and everybody out there who
is listening right now to this program knows that I've
advocated as aggressively as I can possibly for it. So
I'm not going to make that argument right here, because

(06:25):
we've done it a ton about the importance of it.
What I will say is I agree with your larger
context that college football fans uniquely and I think it's
actually the most American of all sports. By the way,
if you actually strip it back and consider all of
the different conflicting loyalties and hypocrisies and challenges, and both
incredible highs and incredible lows, it is in many ways,

(06:48):
I believe, a metaphor for the larger American experience rich poor,
the difference between the big schools and the small schools,
the difference and resources. I mean, there are just so
many fascinating to me representation of college football that reflects
both the good and bad of American life in general.
I do agree with you on the big precept there
that that basically you dove into, and I've said this

(07:09):
for a long time college football fans are selective moralist,
and what I mean by that is they want other
programs to behave morally, but they will forgive anything that
their school does if it makes them more likely to
win a football game. And I didn't really think about this,
uh Bob a lot, and thanks for being on with
us here until I started doing local radio. And that's

(07:30):
kind of the warrior background in me. Is if somebody
when when you looked at an n C double A violation,
for example, the first way I would think about it
is as I analyzed the case, and I make no book,
bring no bones about it. Right. I I am a
University of Tennessee fan. My grandfather played for General Neiland.
I started going to games when I was five years old.
I'm actually going up to watch Alabama probably absolutely obliterate

(07:55):
Tennessee this weekend and Kneeland. But what was thinking about
it was I always say, okay, if my school is
accused of wrongdoing before I figure out what my opinion is.
What would my opinion be if it were Alabama or
Florida or Georgia one of the rival programs that was

(08:16):
accused of doing the same thing. If my response is
not the exact same to those accusations. That is a
way to test my own fan bias. And so what
I would always say on the radio anytime we had
a story was I would say, Okay, what would your
response be if Alabama was accused of this and you're
a Tennessee fan, Well, Alabama they cheat, you know how

(08:37):
they are. And I said, okay, but if you're defending
Tennessee and you believe it immediately if you were Alabama,
then that's an example of bias. And to me, what
has happened in a large sense, I'm not surprised about
any of the arguments I see on social media in
the country now, because basically the country has become a
college football fan, right. You will you will defend to

(08:57):
the end of the earth anything that your school does,
or your party does, or your guy or girl does.
But if the other side does it, it's an outrage.
And so what bothers me in general is not the
decisions that are made. It's the hypocrisy because, as I
told you one of our conversation, as my listeners know,
I kind of consider every opinion that I have to

(09:19):
be almost the equivalent of a judicial opinion. This is
the lawyer in me speaking, there has to be a
precedent that connects my opinions across the board or else.
I'm guilty of what I accuse others of, which is hypocrisy.
And I'm not saying I'm perfect. Certainly I make mistakes
in the way that I analyze cases and facts and
everything else, like any other human out there. But I
do believe that there is a logical basis behind most

(09:42):
of my opinions. And if you went back and looked
at what I wrote in two thousand twelve, it would
make sense in two thousand twenty. And if you, for instance,
you know to to bring in multiple conflicting areas, If
you looked at what I said about Duke Lacrosse and
you compared it with Brett Kavanaugh, it would cross O right.
It would make sense logically in the Kavanaugh case the

(10:04):
same way that it did in the Duke Lacrosse case,
or in the Ezekiel Elliott case, or the O. J.
Simpson case, which I know you were involved in a
big way. There are so many different interesting threads there.
But that's what jumped out at me about the first
thing that you said there well as you were presenting
your argument. In the last couple of minutes, I was
thinking about something you got to, which is that that

(10:26):
sort of tunnel vision about college football. Uh, mirrors what
we see in our politics, where a relative misdemeanor by
the other side is in fact an outrage but a
certifiable felony, not a matter of opinion, but it's objectively
true if our guy or our side did it, either
it can't be true, or will ignore it, will soft

(10:47):
pedal it. And this is just one example. I don't
want to get overly partisan politically here, because I'm much
less partisan than a portion of your audience likely thinks.
And we'll get to that later. And I'm sure you
could find an example of this that is the equivalent
from the other side. But when Janine Pierro, with a
straight face, says, by my new book, don't lie to me,

(11:10):
and all the lives that outrage her, of course come
from the left or from Democrats, well, if she doesn't
just defend she venerates Donald Trump, who, regardless of your
political affiliations, as objectively one of the most dishonest people
in modern American political history. You can you can barely
fact check him in real time. He lies so frequently,

(11:30):
and the irony of that is lost on Sean Hannity,
are on Janine Pierrou. That's just the world we live in,
all right. So this is this is fascinating in general. Um,
and I do think this this goes into my analogy
that I've been making for a long time. What matters
to me is whether or not there is a logical

(11:52):
basis to reach a conclusion. And let me explain what
I mean for everybody out there who's listening, and I
think you'll follow along too. And I like to use
this in all g in sports. Uh. And we're talking
to Bob Costas. Appreciate him joining us. If I tell you, hey,
I don't think that Tom Brady is going to win
the Super Bowl this year. And I said this to
you in my conversation recently, and I said, you know
you might listening right now, say, Okay, I agree with you.

(12:13):
Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Bruce Arians never done it before. NFC
is gonna be tough, NFC South, you got Drew Brees. Uh,
You've got a lot of challenges there. But if I've
said I don't believe Tom Brady is going to win
the Super Bowl because he's never been there and won
it before. You might agree with my conclusion, but the
facts upon which I based that conclusion are completely wrong.

(12:34):
And one of the things that troubles me most about
society today is the basis of facts. And I think
there are lots of politicians of both parties that agree
with me here, and unfortunately they don't have a prominent
of a platform in their parties. In general, we can
disagree about conclusions, which are basically opinions about ways to
address problems, but when we don't agree on the most

(12:56):
basic factual level, then we can't in any way have
a legitimate marketplace of ideas. And worse than that, we
have people who look at the conclusion and say, oh,
I agree with where that person he or she got
from a political purpose, but they don't understand that the
facts upon which that was based are quicksand and there's
nothing there and therefore the essence of the argument is

(13:19):
not legitimate, and that bothers me in a big way
by by and large, And this is a generalization, and
it's more true in the social media world than it
is and what still passes from more traditional forms of media,
which is anything that aligns with my predispositions and or resentments.

(13:40):
I'm inclined to believe without skepticism. Anything that challenges that,
I'm inclined to dismiss. The mainstream media has many flaws
that should be held to account. But when you've got
an all purpose intellectual will get out of jail free
card that says it's all news, which really has come

(14:01):
to mean anything I don't want to hear, and anything
that doesn't align with my prejudices, or anything that is
critical in a responsibly journalistic way of someone I don't
want to see criticized, I can just immediately dismiss it.
Never consider it as fake news. Okay, what happens in
the Twitter world, And that's what started this conversation, and

(14:21):
I'm glad we're acquainted through it is a fragment that
misrepresents not only is out there, but you think people,
no matter what their political affiliation is, no matter what
the rooting interest is in sports, you would think that
they had learned, They would have learned by now that
a lot of what is out there is either untrue, misleading,

(14:45):
or incomplete. And so you had people responding to what
you tweeted, Well, what about all the people who rely
on Saturday college football for the hotels and the restaurants.
Of course, I'm aware of that of co words, and
I've stipulated that many times, um this this may seem trivial,

(15:08):
and it is, except sometimes something that isn't all that important.
It's like a grain of sand on the beach. A
geologist can tell you what the beach is like by
examining that grain of sand. Jason Starr, the acclaimed baseball writer,
Hall of Fame Baseball writer. As a matter of fact,
I went to college with him at Syracuse, and he

(15:30):
wrote something very nice about my induction into the broadcasters
going in the Hall of Fame a couple of years ago,
and he tweeted out, and I'm not much of a
twitter guy, but some people called it to my attention,
he tweeted out one line from what he called my
wonderful speech or something to that effect, and that line

(15:51):
was that very often the way we recall the most
memorable moments in sports is dependent upon how they were
framed by a great writer or by a broadcaster, producer, director.
And in my Hall of Fame speech, which was about
people other than myself, I mentioned the Vince Scullies, the

(16:16):
Jack Box, the Ernie Harwell's and also the producers like
Um David Neil and Mike Weissman, and a great director
like Harry Coyle, and how they shaped people's recollections. I
used Kirk Gibson's Home Run as an example, and Gibson
himself says he was at the center of it, but
partly how he remembers it is how you now here

(16:37):
Vince Scullies call, and the way Harry Coyle directed it.
It was like a movie, right, So this one line
is there, and then I shouldn't have done it. You
should shouldn't waste your time going down these rabbit holes.
But since someone had called my attention to Jason's article
and then the tweet that accompanied it, there were a
bunch of responses. Maney of them are very kind regarding me.

(17:00):
But somewhere, oh right, Hostess says that the broadcasters are
more important than the players. Thought about the players, it's
about him. If you had seen the speech in context,
it was the exact opposite of that. It was less
about me than almost anybody I think who has ever
stood there behind that podium. It was about my love

(17:22):
of the craft and my love of baseball. But wouldn't
you think that by now somebody wouldn't think that they
could go off and voice an opinion based on a
fragment of something. And yet that is rampant in our
media culture. So people, including some people of goodwill, believe
a lot of things that just are not so, are

(17:43):
not so factually, or are not so about the beliefs
and motivations of people they either support or opposed. All Right,
this is fascinating to me what that whole story in general.
I I have said for a long time that my
biggest talent to the in that I have one is
and my wife says this, Drives are crazy about me

(18:04):
one of many things. By the way, we've been married
sixteen years, so they're basically everything I do. Drives are
crazy at this point. But welcome, Yeah, welcome to the club. Indeed,
be sure to catch live editions about Kicked the Coverage
with Clay Travis week days at six am Eastern three
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(19:52):
the Winds and Losses podcast. I genuinely am not impacted
by what someone says about me on line, positive or negative.
I don't know why that is, I but I think
it's been important in allowing me to basically continue to
plow forward in my career, even as social media has

(20:13):
become more all encompassing. I'm sure I've got my phone
sitting in front of me right now. If I typed
in my name, I could go through and there would
be ten awful things that have been said about me
today already that I just haven't seen. And so you
are one of the most accomplished broadcasters in the history
of sports on television. Kevin Durant, for example, is whatever

(20:35):
you want to say about him, one of the four
or five best at his craft of basketball that has
played in his generation, right, I think that's probably fair
to say. Yet, I do believe that there are many
people out there who are wildly accomplished, like yourself like
Kevin Durant and I'm we're using athletics in particular. But
I think it could be the president. I think it
could be other people who are, you know, reading the

(20:57):
mentions and reading the tweets that are really taking into
account what other people say. And and my perspective on
that is, if I'm one of the best in the
world at anything, I don't care what someone who is
not in my field thinks about me at all. And
I don't know why that is. I care about people

(21:18):
who know me right, people who have interactions. But for you,
I don't know. Like I told my mom, never read
the comments to anything that I say. Read it, have
your own opinions. I almost have never read any comment
that people have put after my articles in my entire life.
Same thing is true for Twitter at this point. I
barely read the mentions. I share my opinion. What do
you think it was about that that made you click

(21:41):
down below? What you said was a nice thing. Jason Stark,
who's an incredibly accomplished writer, was saying, to see what
people you didn't know we're saying about what he had
said about you. You mentioned rabbit holes. To me, that's
like that's like going all the way in the rabbit
hole to China. Like you, you've gone really far at
that point. And truth, that took about five minutes. And
but it is fascinating and it's seductive, and I think

(22:03):
it speaks to social media in general, which is designed
to make us care what people we don't know think
about us all day long, whether you're a celebrity like
Bob Costas, who's one of the best sports journalists of
all time, or whether you're somebody's grandma who's going on
Facebook and making a comment and then it goes viral
and a lot of people she doesn't know suddenly respond

(22:23):
to it and she feels compelled to read what they
say to Yeah. I think the key here, Clay is
I'm trying to make a larger point, and you'll have
to take me at my word here. I am well aware.
I hope I have enough perspective to be well aware
that on the worst day of my life, I am
more fortunate than most people will ever be. And I'm very,

(22:43):
very appreciative of all the nice things that have been
said and written about me, and about all the breaks
and great experiences I've had in my career. I truly
feel blessed, and so I'm not losing any sleep over
this and I'm not spending undo time on it. But
where it interests me is the larger point. And sometimes
you have to use your own experience, because if you're

(23:04):
an honest person, you're going to be credible about your
own experience. You're going to know the wise and wherefores
of your own experience. And if it illustrates something larger
that is of some importance beyond yourself, then I think
it's legitimate. And so we may talk, for example, about
the gun thing from eight years ago on NBC and

(23:27):
how you know, I wish it hadn't happened. I wish
people didn't have a misimpression. I wish I had done
a better job in that moment. But I also think
it illustrates a larger point. And that's why we're talking
about beyond me just muttering to myself. We're talking to
Bob Costa. This is the Winds and Losses podcast. I'm
Clay Travis. Okay, I want to get to the essays

(23:48):
and everything else, but I want to start here. You
have won a legendary career as a sports sports broadcaster.
There are a lot of people out there right now
who have experienced many of your broad casts over the years.
There are also a lot of young people who listen
to this podcast because one of the goals with the
wins and Losses theme is to discuss the best and

(24:09):
worst parts potentially of one's career and the wins and
losses along the way. So I want to start here,
take you back to when you are in college. If
you are able to go back and tell twenty year
old Bob Costas things that you have learned along the
way in your career that you think would have been
very important. There are twenty year olds who would like

(24:31):
to be the next Bob Costas listening to this podcast
right now. What do you think you have learned that
you didn't know when you were a college kid or
maybe a high school kid trying to become what you became.
I think I learned this along the way, and it
didn't take all that long. No matter how much you
would mere someone, you can be influenced by them. I

(24:52):
was influenced by Jim McKay. I was influenced directly by
Marty Glickman and Marv Albert. I went to Syracuse because
they had gone to Sir accused because Syracuse had early
on fifty years ago they had a genuine communications department,
not just the print journalism department, but a true state
of the art communications department. Now almost every university does,

(25:13):
but Syracuse was ahead of the curve. And since I
got there, a legion of notable sports broadcasters have followed.
And some had preceded me, Marvin Marty and Pick stocked
In and Len Berman and a few others. But now
it's into dozens and dozens. But no matter who, you
were influenced by Jim McKay, Vince Scully, Jack Buck. Early

(25:36):
in my career I was in St. Louis at km
O X. One of the things I learned was do
not copy them. They're great because they are distinctive, because
they are not generic, and if you try to copy them,
you'll only be a pale imitation of the master. Early on,
it's inevitable you'll copy somebody. You've got to have a

(25:58):
starting point, but eventually you've got to be able to
develop your own style, otherwise you won't get very far.
And the other thing I learned early on was that
there's no such thing as a perfect broadcast, and not
even I think Vince Scully would tell you the same thing.
As close to perfection as you could get, maybe have
perfect moments. Jim Mackay was perfect in that moment in

(26:22):
Munich In two Al Michaels was perfect with do you
believe in miracles? But if you are a perfectionist, that
can be a good thing because it keeps you working hard,
and it makes you concentrate on the fine points and
never be satisfied. But it can also cost you sleep
unless you get a handle on it. Because I used

(26:45):
to fret over things that other people thought were terrific.
Some of the things that people mentioned to me as
among their favorite things I've ever done, Somewhere in the
back of my head is yeah, but if only I
had said that, if only I changed one word, or
if only I'd remember remember to include that. And eventually
I came to understand, on my own peace of mind

(27:09):
that sometimes perfect is the enemy of the good. A
lot of what I've done has been pretty damn good.
Only occasionally if you reach perfection. Did you go back
early in your career and study your broadcast, listen to
yourself to pick out flaws or so and how would
you do that and be effective in being able to

(27:31):
analyze yourself? Well, then, you know, in the seventies, if
you're listening to radio broadcast on a cassette recorder, uh,
you couldn't get your television broadcasts unless you went down
to thirty Rock at NBC and somebody there, you know,
shoot it up for you. I bought one of the
very early VHS machines, uh, three quarter inch tapes an

(27:54):
hour at a time, so a whole ball of ball
game was three tapes. I remember the Sandberg game in
the legendary Cardinal cub game where Samberg get the two
home runs of Bruce Suitor late in the game, and
it was the NBC game of the week on a
Saturday afternoon when that meant something. It was a really
big deal. Sometimes the Saturday afternoon game of the week
got higher ratings regular season game than some World Series

(28:17):
games get now. Um, and it's probably the signature game
of Sandberg's career. It took five tapes, um to have that,
And I've got those VHS tapes somewhere. Um. But it
was much harder then than it is now. Now you
can everything that your fingertips and you can review it.
Uh yeah, I used to go back, and I remember

(28:39):
being discouraged early on the first time I heard myself
on the air at w A e R, the campus
station at Syracuse, and I heard it back and there
were still vestiges of a New York accent, and it
was a thin, ready kind of penny voice. And then
shortly after that, I heard the yer old Al Michaels

(29:01):
just a year or two after that on the radio
on the two World Series between the Reds and the Age,
and I said to myself, Damn, he's only twenty six.
I'll never be that good, at least not in the
next few years. I'll never be that good. Um. And
I was discouraged, actually, but things turned out all right,
I guess in the long run. So that's amazing. Take

(29:23):
me through your career path as a young guy. You're
at Syracuse. How do you get in because you got
to the top at NBC at a relatively young age.
How did you get along that path? What happened to
allow you to advance the way that you did, and
where did you start? Very importantly, I had a professor

(29:46):
at Syracuse that took an active interest in me. He
would identify a handful of kids each year who he
thought had the potential to be good if they worked
at it. And he was a caring, merciless critic to
the point where and no joke here, Clay. In the
until the mid eighties, when I was on NBC and

(30:08):
pretty successful, I would still hear from him after a
baseball or football broadcast. That was good, but you know,
he was still critiquing me. And and he helped me
with projecting, with getting my voice into better shape. I
never took speech classes, but he kind of gave me
some tips, um, and he told me, you're you're rushing

(30:29):
too much here. Pace is important. Try to pace yourself. Uh,
don't feel like you have to use all your preparation
early on. It's normal to be anxious when you're young,
so you come in really well prepared. But if you
empty the whole bucket in the first few innings or
in the first period of a hockey game or whatever
it is, wait till the time where it really fits

(30:49):
and the audience doesn't know whether you've used or a
hun of what you came into the boothwith. As long
as what you use was appropriate and it was good.
So I think that with as Hell and being at
w e e R, which is a legendary campus radio station,
and you're surrounded by like minded people, some of whom
were really quite talented, and we fed off each other's energy.

(31:12):
I think I became pretty good early. I must have
had some precocious level of talent, and I worked to
refine it. And then when I was a senior at Syracuse,
I got a job broadcasting minor league hockey in the
Old Eastern Hockey League, the league that the Paul Newman
movie Slap Shot is based on thirty bucks a game,
five dollars a day meal money on the road. But

(31:34):
that was sort of a baptismal um. I wasn't that
good at it right away, but I came became pretty
good at it by by mid season, and I thought
that I'd come back for a second season of that
UH and finish up the remaining credits at Syracuse. When
I sent a tape to K M Elecs and St.
Louis on a lark, the Carolina Cougars of the old

(31:57):
A B A had become the Spirits of Louis. They
would last for only two years until the A B
A folded and only four of the teams, the Nets
to Spurs, the Nuggets, and the Pacers got absorbed and
the Spirits went away. But those two years were big
for me. Uh somehow, some way, Jack Buck, who was
the sports director of the station, they had some two

(32:18):
hundred applicants on real to real tapes, and Jack Buck
liked my tape and I got brought into St. Louis
for an interview and perhaps my willingness to work cheap.
Eleven thousand dollars was my salary for that first year
at k m o X, and I would have paid
them eleven thousand. And so I'm at cab X, I'm

(32:38):
twenty two years old, and I'm not a colleague of
I wouldn't be so presumptuous, but I'm in the same
place as Jack Buck and Dan Kelly, who until Doc
Emer came along, was the gold standard of hockey announcers,
and everyone was terrific there, both in news and in sports.
They were all They could have stopped the network with
the quality of the town that was there, and you

(33:02):
got to kind of pick up your game if you're
going to keep pace. And I think that accelerated my
development as well. And I'll try to make this as
concise as possible, but I've already failed in that regard.
People love these stories, don't don't worry about that. Km
o X was not just an affiliate. It was a
CBS owned and operated station when that really made a difference,

(33:24):
powerhouse station. And many of their announcers Joe Garagiola, Harry Carry,
Jack Buck, later Gary Bender, and Dan dierdorfan of course
later Joe Buck and Dan Kelly on hockey. These guys
had gone to the network while remaining at km o X,
So it was kind of a feeder system. So al

(33:45):
Michaels is at CBS. It's September six and he signs
with ABC less than a week before the first game
of the season, and he was supposed to do San
Francisco at Green Bay. And so the president of CBS
Sports call Bob Highland, who ran km X, and says,
we need somebody. Well, Buck already had an assignment, Kelly

(34:06):
had an assignment. He said, we got a kid here.
He's twenty four years old. He looks like he's four team,
but he's pretty good off. I go to Green Bay.
I had never done except for a half of two
football games. On the radio. I've never done a football game.
I go to Green Bay. Jay Randall showed me how
to make a spotting board. I go to Green Bay.
I do this game. I'm sure it wasn't a game

(34:27):
worthy of the time capsule, but it was good enough
that they brought me back for occasional games, maybe three
or four small regional games a year in football or
back up basketball games on the NBA and don Olmire
at NBC, even though none of those games ever went
into the big market of New York. He became aware
of me, and he hired me when I was twenty

(34:48):
seven full time at NBC. And after I was there
for only a month or so, he calls me into
his office and he says, you know, we really like
to work. We think you have a future here. Let
me ask me something. How old are you he said?
He said, God, damn it, you look like your fourth
team that words. He goes, how much older do you
think you would look if you grew a beard? And

(35:09):
I set out five years at least, and he perks up.
He goes, really, I said, yeah, because that's how long
it would take to grow it. So you know, somehow,
somehow it worked out um. Even when I was hosting
the Olympics when I was forty. I'm sure I didn't
look the part exactly, but people accepted it and and
it worked out, and I think I think the bottom

(35:30):
line of it is if you have any talent at all,
and you get thrust into situations. Brian Gumble left Sports
to go to the Today Show. They didn't have anybody
in mind to host the Football show, and that eventually
became hosting the NBA on NBC and hosting the Olympics.
I got thrust into it. I had almost no studio

(35:50):
hosting the experience at all. The first five years. I
never used a telepopter at all. I just ad lived everything.
But I just found my way and you'd be come
more and more comfortable with it. I think of the
luck involved NBC hires Ben Scully, Joe gart Joel and
Tony Kubec had been a legendary pair. They put Joe

(36:12):
with them. Then has to be on the A game.
He's the greatest. I inherit Tony Kubeck, the backup game
becomes a much more important thing. And then I started
hosting the World Series and in the years where we
had both LCS is Tony and I would do the
American League. That put me on a much bigger stage
than I would have expected at that point in my career. Now,

(36:33):
if an opportunity comes along, you have to be able
to take advantage of that opportunity. Uh. David Letterman starts
his show at NBC one night. He wants a sportscasting
to do mock commentary on elevator races. Marv Albert is
the guy. He wants Marvis out of town doing a
nick game. I'm sitting in the office. They go, we

(36:56):
got this kid here, Bob Costas send them up again
on the elevator on the sixth floor. I do this
thing for David Letterman. He likes it because I kind
of get where he's coming from and what he wants.
This mock serious thing. He brings me back to sit
down next to him. At the end of the show.
I'd say something that makes him laugh. He says, you're
really funny. Would you like to do this again? Of

(37:17):
course I would. You're David Letterman. Even then, he's David Letterman.
I was probably on two dozen times, and those things
not only introduced me to a different audience in a
different way. But early on, when you're trying to find
your way, you get some laughs there or you get
some good notices for what you're doing in the sportscasting world.
It increases your confidence and it makes you feel like

(37:40):
you can be more spontaneous and show more of yourself,
not just color between the lines, for maybe color outside
the lines a little bit. Fox Sports Radio has the
best sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of
our shows at Fox Sports Radio dot com and within
the I Heart Radio app search f s R to
listen live. And we're live here outside the Perez family home,

(38:03):
just waiting for the and there they go, almost on time.
This morning. Mom is coming out the front door strong
with a double arm kid carry. Looks like Dad has
the bags. Daughter is bringing up the rear. Oh but
the diaper bag wasn't closed. Diapers and toys are everywhere.
Oh but mom has just nailed the perfect car seat

(38:23):
buckle for the toddler. And now the eldest daughter, who
looks to be about nine or ten, has secured herself
in the booster seat. Dad zips the bag clothes and
they're off. Ah, but looks like Mom doesn't realize her
coffee cup is still on the roof of the car
and there it goes. Ah. That's a shame that mug
was a fan favorite. Don't sweat the small stuff, just

(38:46):
nailed the big stuff, like making sure your kids are
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Learn more n h t s A dot gov slash
the Right Seat visits h s A dot gov slash
the Right Seat, brought to you by MIZZA and the
AD Council. What grows in the forest trees? Sure you
know what else grows in the forest. Our imagination, our

(39:07):
sense of wonder, and our family bonds grow too, because
when we disconnect from this and connect with this, we
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Find a forest near you and start exploring. I Discover
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(39:30):
be you and you could be me for just one hour,
if you could find a way to get inside each
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and for some that feeling lasts more than a moment
we can change that. Learn how it belonging begins with

(39:51):
us dot org. Brought to you by the AD Council.
Welcome mile in Machines. We're talking to Bob Costas. I'm
Clay Travis. We're here with the Winds and Losses podcast.
How nervous were you going to Green Bay to call
that game? At twenty four years old? Shaking like a
freaking leaf? And the analyst on the game was someone

(40:16):
that only older listeners would remember first hand, Hall of
Fame receiver Tommy McDonald, who had been a big deal
at Oklahoma and then primarily with the Philadelphia Eagles, one
of the last to play without forget about a mask,
no no bar, no bar on. Yeah, that's amazing, Yes,
And then went and then went to the single helmet thing,

(40:38):
and he was quite a single bar and he was
quite a character. But however nervous I was, he was
a hundred times more nervous. He has since passed away,
and I say this with affection play. He literally froze
on the on camera open. He couldn't remember what he
wanted to say. And I'm twenty four years old. Nobody

(40:59):
out side St. Louis has any damn idea who I am?
And so I basically I'm doing the whole broadcast by myself.
There were times when he couldn't complete sentences, and that
was the last game b he ever did. So I
was nervous to begin with, and I was damn near
panic stricken by the second quarter. But but I muddled through.

(41:22):
They brought me back. So either I was very lucky
or I was a little bit better than I feared. Okay,
other question, Don Olmeyer, I know that he was incredibly
important for a lot of different people in the world
of sports. What did he mean for you and for
people who do not know him? Who was he and
why was he important? Don Olmeyer was bigger than life.

(41:46):
He and Dick Ebersol, who was even more important in
my career, were proteges of run Ledge. Run a Ledge
is of course, still viewed as the single most important
person in the history of sports television who wasn't on
the air, although I think Dick Eversol could rival him
for that. Uh So, first Don and then Dick headed

(42:07):
up NBC Sports, and they each had a tremendous influence
on me. And the very fact that they liked me
and saw something in me that maybe others would not
have seen at least that quickly that elevated my career.
They put me in positions to succeed or I guess fail,
and luckily each of those worked out. In the case

(42:30):
of Dick Eversol, not only did he elevate me from
late night host of the Olympics to prime time host.
I've been the late night host, he made me the
primetime host in in Barcelona, but he also created a
late night talk show for me in conjunction with Brandon Tartakoff.
Uh later with Bob Costas, followed Johnny Carson and David

(42:53):
Letterman in NBC's late night lineup, and showed a different
side of me because only they five of it had
to do with sports. Most of it was other walks
of life. So Omire at the beginning hiring me, having
some confidence in me, giving me big a silence. I mean,
in the first year I was there, when Dick Enberg

(43:14):
had an overlap and there was a college basketball game
and a football game, he'd go to the football game
and Ollmyer threw me right in there with Al McGuire
and Billy Packer, a legendary combination in college basketball, back
when a college basketball game on a Saturday or Sunday
afternoon was a different thing than it is now. The
media landscape was so different. So Don threw me into

(43:35):
those things, and basically it was sink or swim, and
I might have sunk a few times, but I made
it to the other side of the waterway, I guess
to strain that metaphor. And then when Don went off
and eventually became the head of entertainment at NBC in
the nineties, in the heyday of NBC e Er Seinfeld, Uh, Cosby, Show, Um, whatever, Friends,

(43:57):
whatever it might have been, when NBC was the question
number one. Eversol is running NBC Sports and NBC Sports
is clearly number one in that area, and all Myer's
running NBC Entertainment, and luckily I'm their boy. I mean,
I'm sure that I aggravated them. I know I aggravated
them sometimes because sometimes I have a mind of my own,

(44:17):
So I may have pissed them off now and then.
But what they did for me, uh is something I
can never fully repay. And they were both so charismatic
and dynamic. They themselves were as big a star, at
least among those who knew them as any of the
broadcasters were. They had tremendous presence. When they walked into
a room, you knew that you better snap two and

(44:38):
pay attention because there was just something about them something
you know, intelligence is one, thing inside is another, but
presence in charisma, and they had it in spades. You
mentioned going on David Letterman. So as a kid growing
up in Nashville, I would watch baseball all day long,
right when I was home. In the summers, in particular,
I'd watched w g N with Hair Carry and Steve Stone.

(45:01):
In the afternoons, I would watch the late night at
the time ESPN games, and I one of the great
things about being a kid and being able to stay
up late, and I've always kind of been a night
owl despite the fact that I have an early morning show,
is I would watch David Letterman, and I just found
him to be an unbelievably compelling television presence who, as
you mentioned earlier, broke pretty much every rule that would

(45:23):
have existed in television. Right if you had gone through
and said, how would you design a late night show?
Uh that they came up with basically the everything that
they would tell you not to do, and it worked
flawlessly for Letterman. What was working with him, Like you said,
you went on his show a bunch as well, and
you've later followed his show. What did you find him

(45:44):
to be like off the air as opposed to on
the air, And how would the show be constructed? And what,
if anything could you take from that? Well, David didn't
want anything to be cookie cutter. You go on other os,
they do a pre interview and you talk about a
few areas that you might discuss, and you give them

(46:05):
a few anecdotes that you have that are sure to
get laughs and be interesting. And David would have that,
but he'd depart from it. Jay Leno would pretty much
stay with it, and Jay was successful for his own reasons.
But Letterman thought there was an integrity in that. At
least that was my assumption that if he just painted
by the numbers, that he couldn't be David Letterman. So

(46:27):
you never knew. He could get bored with what you
were saying, or you could want to challenge you, it
could throw something out. So you really had to be
on your toes when you were on with David Letterman.
But David was great to me. Um he was always
very kind to me, said nice things about me, and
when he went to CBS UM after he didn't get

(46:49):
the Tonight show and Jay Leno did. Part of his
deal was that he controlled the hour after his show,
and eventually Tom Snyder got that hour, and later Craig
Kilborn and Craig Ferguson. M Snyder was the first month,
but only after David offered it to me. I was
very tempted because it was David Letterman, and because it
was a full hour and it was an hour earlier,

(47:11):
twelve thirty instead of one thirty. But NBC had the NBA. Uh,
they still had the NFL, although I was I was
transitioning out of the NFL, but still that they had it,
they were reacquiring baseball. I was the host of the Olympics,
and so if they offer had come at a different time,
I certainly would have taken it, and I certainly appreciated

(47:33):
that David thought enough of me to offer it to me.
Um he remade late night television. You know, his his
idol was always Johnny Carson, and Johnny was magnificent and
he had a certain savo off there that almost no
one else could match. For his time period. I don't.
I don't mean time period at night, I mean that

(47:53):
era of television. He was beyond cool. But David actually
going forward was more influential. Because everybody as wonderful as
Conan is or or Kimmel or Fallon or Cold There
or whoever you want to name, they all are influenced
by David Letterman. Follow them. There's no doubt at all.

(48:15):
And all of this kind of leads into this question,
which I think is is important also for people out
there listening that I'm Clay Travis. We're talking with Bob
Costas on the Wins and Losses podcast. Being able to
do sports well requires an ability to see sports as
part of a larger landscape of American and world life,

(48:35):
and certainly you had to do that at the Olympics.
Do you believe sometimes that people who do sports get
so wrapped up into the essence of the sport itself
that they lack the ability to understand the larger context.
And how has that mattered and been an asset to
you in terms of the growth of your career and
what you were able to do understanding sports. But also

(48:58):
just based on our conversation, I know that you have
a lot of interest outside of sports. Sometimes there are
guys and girls in our field where it's like all
they know is sports, and I think that can sometimes
constrain them to a large extent. It's a perceptive question.
You know. You listened to Vince Scully through all those
years and then obviously was steeped in baseball history, but

(49:23):
he knew something about the world beyond that you could
gracefully bring it in. I knew Jack Buck very well.
Jack Buck was wounded at the bridge at Remagen during
World War Two. He got either of the Bronze Star
of Purple Heart, I don't remember which. He had worked
on the docks. He had grown up relatively poor in Massachusetts,

(49:48):
one of six or seven kids. He was a Depression
era kid um. He'd scuffled a little bit. He'd lived
the light. He was a reader. He was someone that
that got out there, you know, he was. He lived
a textured light, and that came across in his broadcast.
As great as people perceived Jack being from his network broadcast,

(50:12):
it was really on the Cardinals day in, day out,
night and night out, where his sly wit and his
frame of reference and his texture as a person came across,
and that's that's what you want to emulate. I don't
know if you ever fully get there, but it's that
in your own way that you want to do if
the circumstances allow it. You want the broadcast to be textured.

(50:36):
I've always used this example. Over time, maybe you can't
get it into every broadcast, but over time you hope
to do what a really good um issue of Sports
Illustrated does. Some of it is a celebration of sports.
It's excitement, it's beauty, even the poetry of it, great photography,

(50:57):
great writing about a big event. Some of it's quirky
and humorous. Some of it's historical and when called for
and in proportion, there's journalism and there's commentary, and taken
all together, it's a mosaic. It isn't just one thing,
or isn't just primary colors. There's different shadings. And I

(51:17):
hope that over time That's what my career has been
and where I got frustrated, and it's nobody's fault. NBC
does not run for my benefit, did not run for
my benefit. But in the last ten years or so
of my career there they had lost baseball. They had
lost the NBA, my two favorite things. I've done a
dozen Olympics, and the formats became more and more constricting,

(51:42):
and so there was less of a chance to do
the very thing that your question implies. And so if
you think about younger viewers, they may not have the
full sense of what I might have been about. And
I don't think it matters all that much. I mean
it matters to me. No, no one's going put in
a time capsule of the twentieth century, but from the

(52:04):
mid eighties too, I don't know, early two thousand's the
combination of the late night show of the n b A,
of the baseball coverage, of the early hosting of football,
of showing up on Letterman and Lano and even Carson
on one occasion, or Nightline or Meet the Press or

(52:24):
Charlie Rose, or doing pieces for the NBC news magazines,
and then the Olympics, of course, and then my stint
at HBO. I think that almost everything I did that
was true to me as a broadcaster and as a person.
And you know, no one's going to be universally popular,
but I'll stand by that and be comfortable with it

(52:45):
because it was true to me. I think some of
what happened over the last decade at NBC didn't perfectly
exemplify who I was, either personally or professionally. But that's
nobody's fault. Just the way it goes. Talking to Bob
costs and I'm fascinated by so much of what you
just said, and I told you this off the air.
One reason I think I don't care very much what

(53:07):
people say about me, and this also goes to a
larger conversation, is when you do daily radio for three
hours a day, fifteen hours a week, I basically get
to have therapy in public for anything that bothers me. Right,
I get to tell you exactly what I think. And
it can be about being a father of three young boys.
It can be about being married. It can be about

(53:29):
a game that didn't go away the way I anticipated,
or a bet that I lost, or whatever else. I
think people who listen to my radio show, and it's
obviously you know this, it's never as many as you
want them to write. I wish that more people listen
to the show continues to grow and everything else, But
when you're in this space, you always want to have more, right,

(53:49):
Like that's kind of in the universe in which we live.
If you're ambitious and you want to continue to grow,
you think you're pretty good and you'd like to have
as many people paying attention as possible. And we're one
of the or five biggest radio shows now, but I
think you know, we should be the biggest. And the
point on a larger scale is though we have a
big enough audience now where I feel like people may

(54:10):
not love me all the time, but they know me right.
I am an authentic person to them on many different ways,
both good and bad, as the people that we all
know in our day to day lives are. And we
have found that I bet you have found too. Oftentimes
it's not the talents that make people like you, it's
your flaws, because they humanize you, whether dad, mom, grandma,

(54:30):
grandpa and uncle, whatever it might be, you in an
interesting way. At least in the last you know, fifteen
twenty years, for many people who are listening to us,
had a massive audience, the Olympics, big sports, all of those.
But you're within that television window where the larger context

(54:50):
is not necessarily known. You don't have you've got the
massive audience. Everybody may know you when you walk through
the airport, but at times you're almost an enigma that
people can project up on to choose to believe what
they would like to believe about you. Is that a challenge?
In many ways? I would think it's it's such an interest.
It's it's kind of the opposite of what I've got now,

(55:11):
where the people who listen, we've got a good size audience,
but they really feel like they know me. Whereas when
you're talking to million people on television or seventy million
or whatever the biggest number was that you ever spoke to,
they kind of see you and and and and your
sphinx of sorts. They project up on you what they
think of you. You know, that's so insightful, and it's

(55:33):
one of the subtexts of this conversation. And as an aside,
one of the obvious reasons why I've taken advantage of
this format uh and gone on at greater length that
I almost ever have a chance to go on on television.
And going back to the last comment I made, I
was very comfortable with what I put out there in

(55:56):
the eighties, nineties and early part of the two thousands.
I think that those who paid even casual attention had
a pretty accurate idea of where I was coming from
professionally and personally, And if in more recent years they
had followed me on HBO or on the Baseball Network,
then that would also be true. But on NBC, my

(56:19):
role on Sunday Night Football, working alongside Al Michaels and
Chris Con'sworth, they're doing what they were put on Planet
Earth to do, and Fred Goodelly the producer, and Drew
Sakoff the director, and everybody else what they were put
there to do. And I was there because I had
equity and NBC and people associated me with big events

(56:39):
on NBC, and I don't know that that really uh
personified anything that I truly cared about. There were moments
perhaps that I was able to contribute something worthwhile that
was um if not unique to me, than at least
distinctive about me, But for the most part it didn't
serve that purpose. And on the empics, the same thing.

(57:02):
I think the first seven or eight that I did
pretty much we're close to the bullseye nothing as we
started out this conversation saying is ever truly perfect, but
pretty close. And then after that the formats and viewer
expectation and everything else. Um changed the role, and I
think I still handled it professionally and competently. And there

(57:24):
were times little windows where maybe you could hit a
great note, but those windows seemed to me to be fewer.
And now you coupled that with social media, and that's
what brought us together here and this point. And again,
I'm not saying it's the end of the world. And
I'm one of the luckiest guys on the planet, so

(57:44):
I'm not I'm planing, But there is a widespread misimpression,
perhaps especially among your audience or audiences that have a
certain predisposition ship. There is a misimpression that I'm somewhere
to the left of Bernie Sanders or Noam Chomsky. And

(58:08):
the truth of the matter is that anybody who knows
me knows that that isn't even close to true. That
I'm an ala carte guy, that I have many views
that could be called old school liberal, not progressive or leftist.
I have a problem with that. I have a problem

(58:28):
with cancel culture. I have a problem with political correctness.
I have a problem with identity politics. If it's blind
identity politics. I have a problem with what I understand
is going on in academia to a large extent um.
But I have classic liberal views, but I also have
many views that could be characterized as conservative. But a

(58:49):
few things kind of hope a bear uh in the
right wing blogosphere and Fox News or whatever. And it's
part of the big is model there to play to
the resentments of the audience, not so much the enlightenment
of the audience. And so someone like me, relatively visible
and well known, is useful if you can make a

(59:12):
straw man out of me. Now I'm not I'm not
as useful as Nancy Pelosi or somebody like that, and
neither am I aligned necessarily with Nancy Pelosi. But but
in passing there were times when I served the purpose.
And the purpose was not let's see what he really
thinks and let's get into shades of gray and nuanced. No,
the purpose was he's part of the left wing media machine.

(59:35):
And it's very hard, as you said, I don't have
a show like yours. It's very hard to answer that
you can defend the position you actually hold, and you
should if you actually hold it, But how do you
defend or explain a position that's been assigned to you,
and motivations and a constellation of beliefs that people have
extrapolated from one thing that they misunderstood to begin with.

(59:56):
How are you supposed to defend or unravel all of
that when none of it is true to who you are?
What I always say on my shows is social media
creates fifty foot tall caricatures that are often one inch
one inch deep. Right, you can punch right through it,
but the caricature itself is so large that it isn't

(01:00:17):
in any way representative and all of us out there,
regardless of whether you're a Democrat, Republican, independent, everybody listening
to this right now has beliefs that conflict with their
party if they are intellectually honest. And I always say,
if you agree with everything that a political candidate is saying,
then you aren't listening very hard. And I'm not even

(01:00:38):
sure if I were running for president or political office
that I would agree with everything I say, because I'm
constantly evolving and recalibrating what I believe on a day
to day basis. That's what I think intelligent people have
to do now. A big part of your becoming what
I think it would be fair to say is a

(01:00:58):
is a figure of of of an easy target, right,
because you work at NBC, you seem like, you know,
you've got the glasses on, you seem professorial at times.
You can imagine how you could play the role of
a feat liberal uh, mob costas right like you. You
kind of they put up the picture and they can
kind of take advantage of you. Your global You've been

(01:01:20):
doing the Olympics, all these things. A lot of that
came out of and you can correct me if I'm
wrong here, But in essay you did about guns on
NBC during Sunday Night Football, What exactly happened there? What
was the experience? What would you change if anything, about
the way that that was presented. First of all, I,

(01:01:43):
to some extent fumbled it, and I've already always owned
up to it. Jovan Belcher, linebacker for the Chiefs, murders
his fiance in front of their two year old child,
uh and his mother in law, and then goes to
the Chiefs training center and in front of his coach
and general manager, commits suicide. All right, I do not

(01:02:07):
think that I'm going to be called upon to do
anything in essay form that Sunday Night. Uh. They had
devoted almost the entire pregame at halftime to looking at
this issue still evolving. They had a lot of people
from the chiefs with poignant commentary. Dan Patrick and Rodney
Harrison and Tony Dungee were handling it back in the studio.

(01:02:29):
UM Usually I would write my essays sometime after the
opening kickoff, and I presented to them so that they
could put some b roll on it, with about I
don't know, seven eight minutes to go in the second quarter.
In this case, with about three or four minutes to
go in the second quarter, it's we're gonna need a
minute to ninety seconds from you and a producer. I

(01:02:52):
take responsibility not blaming it on him, because I'm the
last line of defense. I gotta sign off on it.
A producer hands me a column written and here's the
irony written by your colleague and partner, Jason Whitlock, who
now is seen as although it's a caricature, and I
have more regard for Jason than to caricature him, but

(01:03:13):
for our purposes here is seen as a conservative voice.
He's on Fox, he's on our kick. But Calason had
written a large article about this, part of which decried
what he called the gun culture in sports. And the
gun culture in sports had been something which had been

(01:03:34):
written about and talked about well before the Belcher incident.
ESPN had done a big thing about it. There's been
takeout stories in the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and
the USA Today about a gun culture in sports. And
all you have to do is google athletes and guns,

(01:03:54):
and there's a litany of criminality, tragedy, folly associated with
that plates and guns. And while certainly it has happened
in society, it has happened infrequently, if at all, that
a prominent athlete, by virtue of having a gun has
turned the situation around for the better, where any sensible
person would say, thank goodness, he did that. So there

(01:04:17):
was a gun culture. I think Gilbert Arenas pulling a
gun on a teammate in the Washington Wizard's locker room.
Think Ray Caruth, Think Tank Johnson, think a long, long list.
And that's what That's what Jason was concerned about. An
attitude towards guns, a misplaced notion of street cred or manhood,

(01:04:42):
and the easy accessibility to guns which leads very often
to tragedy. No one in the right mind thinks that
that Javon Belcher couldn't have strangled his fiancee or beaten
her to death or stabbed there. But we know that
a gun not only makes it easier, but that the
survival rate with a gun, whether it's attempted suicide or

(01:05:05):
attempted murder, is the survival rate is less than by
other means. And if we're also just talking about guns
in general, you don't have maths instances of people throwing
people off the roof or up the building, but you
do have mass shootings that involved guns. Okay, So now

(01:05:25):
this producer hands me this article. I look at it,
and what Jason was saying was obvious to me. He
was talking about a gun culture, out about gun control,
out about the Second Amendment. It rang through to me,
and I thought wrongly that the audience would understand the point.
So I quoted a portion of it. Because it didn't

(01:05:47):
have time to write my own thing, I quoted a
portion of it. It was mis understood as a plea
for gun control or an anti Second Amendment position him.
That's my fault, And in retrospect, Clay, I'm a good
enough broadcaster. I knew this an hour later, when the

(01:06:08):
response started to come in and people were outraged that
they wanted me fired, and the n r A goes
nuts and he's anti American, he's anti Second Amendment, etcetera, etcetera.
I should have off the top of my head, I
should have said, because this is really what I was thinking.
Every time a tragedy intersects with sports, we hear one

(01:06:31):
of the dumbest cliches in sports. Well, that really puts
it all in perspective, But in fact, that perspective has
a very short shelf life because we're right back to
obsessing about the same sports issues we were concerned with
fifteen minutes ago. If we're really looking for some perspective
in the aftermath of this tragedy, then a serious conversation
should ensued, including but not limited to domestic violence and

(01:06:56):
are those who play a violent sport more inclined to
it then they're athletic peers and contemporaries the effects of
football itself. We're learning about the long range effects of CTE,
but we're also beginning to learn that in the short term,
emotions and impulse control can be affected by head trauma,

(01:07:17):
especially when mixed with alcohol. Performance enhancing drugs or painkillers,
whatever it might be, and the whole idea of athletes
and guns. And I should have said, and would have said,
not talking here about anyone's responsible, lawful exercise of their
legitimate Second Amendment rights, but there is an irresponsible attitude

(01:07:39):
toward guns that is part of the sports world, and
we'd be better off taking a serious look at that.
If I had said that, the n r A types,
the absolutists still would have come after me, but a
larger portion of the audience would have understood what I
was saying. I clarified it after that, almost immediately after that,
I went into the Lions. Then I went on with

(01:08:01):
Bill O'Reilly. I went on with Howard Kurtz. But again,
if it's part of the business model, no one comes
on and says, oh, okay, he clarified it, we get
it now. No, that wouldn't serve their purpose. So somebody
on box says, Bob Costa is a hypocritical buffoon. He

(01:08:21):
has armed security, but he doesn't want you to have it.
So I said to Howard Kurtz, who's their media reporter.
I've never had armed security. I've never had personal security
in my entire life. Maybe I should, especially now, but
I never have. I said there's massive security, of course

(01:08:43):
at an Olympics, where the President of the United States
has to go through the same security that someone holding
a ticket has to go through, and there is one
security person assigned to NBC something in football. Apart from that,
I have never had personal security a day in my life.
On the jaw or going to the restaurant or walking
down the street. What was the way that was fun?

(01:09:05):
Bob Costa says, because I don't personally pay for it,
an NBC does. I'm not a hypocrite, even though I've
got all of this personal security. If I could make
this any clearer than this, I don't know how I
could look. When I hear about somebody whose home is
broken into, they're in some kind of danger, and he

(01:09:27):
or she uses a gun to defend themselves in their family,
I applaud it. I applauded. If someone breaks into your home,
you don't have time to evaluate what is it here
at six if you're if you're a woman who could

(01:09:47):
be overpowered, or you're a guy who calculates the odds,
and I don't like my chances here in hand to
hand combat and my kids are asleep upstairs. If there's
even a five percent chance of one percent chance that you,
your wife, your kids are in danger, that person who
broke into your house put him or herself in jeopardy,

(01:10:09):
and whatever happens, I'm okay with it. I do not
want to see the Second Amendment revoked. I think there
should be reasonable guns safety laws. UM. Looking at rules
about cars um would be a good template. Uh. Nobody
says that because there are speed limits and because you

(01:10:32):
have to register your car or have a license, nobody
says that means that we're going to have to go
to Grandma's house and a horse and buggy on Thanksgiving
because they're gonna take our cars away. And nobody says
also that you um that you should be allowed to
drive the same car that they use them that they
Tonify hundred or at Indie on a city street. These

(01:10:57):
are reasonable restrictions which don't get in the way of
post basic rights. UM. And when someone says they look
to take the Second Amendment way, they're going to take
the Second Amendment away. Anyone who could pass a civics
test knows just how difficult it is to revoke a
constitutional amendment. Exactly one has been revoked in the entire

(01:11:18):
history of the country, and that was the short lived
prohibition against alcohol. The steps you'd have to go through
to revoke a constitutional amendment are so extensive that hill
is so high to climb. And nobody I know that
has any credibility has suggested it. Certainly not me, but

(01:11:38):
that kind of paranoia that that that's it worked there, This,
this person who is prominent, has said something that perchs
your resentment. And it's not in our best interests really
to clarify it or to acknowledge the shades of gray,
because this works for us, this works in our business model.

(01:11:59):
So once once that was in place, and I thank
you for giving me this much time, Clay, And I
also know that no matter how carefully I've expressed myself,
how truthfully and how much nuance, there are some people
who just don't want to hear it because it doesn't
align with what they want to believe. Bob Costas here
Clay Travis wins and Losses. How much of the reaction

(01:12:21):
do you think had to do with your opinion came
out during a football game? Oh a lot, a lot
of it did, And In other words, if you had
gone on Meet the Press, you know, let's say that weekend,
because they had wanted to talk about violence in football,
and you would expressed the exact same opinions. I don't

(01:12:43):
know that it would have been characterized in the same
way as it was because it occurred at halftime of
a football game, and whether or not people wanted to
see a serious analysis of Jovan Belcher in that situation
a lot of people, and this has been, you know,
kind of what I've focused on for a long time.
I try to think about the average guy or girl
out there watching a game. They just want to have
a beer, and they want to watch a football game,

(01:13:05):
and they don't really want to see or have to
confront larger societal issues for any reason. And so I
think sometimes the juxtaposition of frivolity, which is in general
football and gun control or racial oppression or whatever it is,
that is grading too many people because this is their

(01:13:27):
escape from the real world. So I think that also
factored in in a big way here, which goes to
you having a relatively short amount of time to suddenly
get thrown into the deep end to the pool where
you have to address something that is freighted with incredible
difficulty and complexity in the middle of something that's otherwise privilege.
They asked me to do it, and I should have
said I had enough standing to say, look, there isn't

(01:13:49):
enough time. It's better off being addressed in a larger
and different forum. I didn't do that. That was my mistake.
A guy who wins a gold glove can foot a
routine groundball. It happens. This is live television, the heat
of the moment, and I made a mistake in judgment.
But that does not mean that my views should be

(01:14:12):
perpetually mischaracterized and grotesquely caricatured. But I think if I
had done what I mentioned a few minutes ago, starting
with domestic violence and the effects of football, and then
framed the gun part of it as I just suggest
that I should have, then it would have been less jarring,
and it would have been understood that I wasn't doing

(01:14:34):
it gratuitously because these issues had intersected with with football
that weekend, just as when NBC asked me to do
a commentary on the red Skins team name that had
become a big issue that week. The President had been
asked about it. Goodell had been asked about it, Dan
Snyder had been asked about it, and Washington was playing
Dallas on our air, and I delivered a very measured

(01:14:58):
commentary about it, trying to lay out the distinctions in
my mind between Redskins and names associated with Native Americans
like chiefs, braves or warriors. By definition every dictionary, by definition,
Redskins is derogatory, pejorative, a slur, and insult. No such

(01:15:20):
definition applies to chiefs, braves, warriors. So I'm not a
political correctness guy, even though it was handy for people
to luck me in there, because after the gun thing
then they were poised to believe um that I was
some sort of crazy leftist Um. Now, I think some
people view the Redskins thing differently. Even then, a lot

(01:15:40):
of conservatives, including the late Charles Kraufhammer, Kathleen Parker, Phil Mushnik,
who is viewed as being right of center media columnists
in the New York Post, Tom Cole, a Native American
but Republican congressman from Oklahoma, a lot of them agreed
with me at that at that time. But what also
came out of that play was this this notion, including

(01:16:03):
among people who are fans of mine and who might
have agreed with what I said. But the notion, well,
he really leaned into politics. He politicized everything. There were
well over a hundred of those halftime essays. Two the
two we've just discussed guns and redskins could even be
construed as political. Everything else was Tom Brady and Peyton

(01:16:25):
Manning or Art Model or Al Davis dies and you
do some sort of assessment and appreciation or what's right
or wrong about the overtime rules? That's what it was, Rye.
And if I'm such a left wing guy as opposed
to the ala carte guy I really am, What would
it count for? The essay I did about Vladimir Putin

(01:16:48):
in Sochi, which was widely viewed as one of the
toughest ever directed towards the head of state and towards
a host nation, What would account for me? Asking the
heads of the IOC repeatedly, what is it with the
IOC and authoritarian nations like China and Russia? What would
account for me? Twice in the opening ceremonies, and and

(01:17:11):
again in two thousand and eight, pointing out that China
was positioned, had the motivation and the means to replicate
the old Eastern Bloc sports machine, complete with all the
cheating that that implies, and pointing out both in an
interview with President Bush in two thousand and eight and
in other commentaries small little snippets, judicious small percentage of

(01:17:35):
the overall coverage. But look, there's no freedom of speech here.
There's a firewall on the internet. Yes, China has opened
up to the world. Yes, the Beijing that I'm visiting
in two thousand eight is much different than the p
King as most Americans knew it that I first saw
in ight. It's been transformed. It's a modern city, it's

(01:17:57):
there's lots of commerce. They're not a commun in this
country by economics anymore. But they are still an authoritarian country,
often often a terribly tunitive totalitarian country. Is that a
left wing thing to say? Is it a left wing
thing to say that? The two thousand twelve Olympics in

(01:18:18):
London for anniversary of the Munich massacre, when the Israeli
delegation came in to point out that the IOC, for
reasons of its own, would not acknowledge this, not commemorate
the darkest day in Olympic history, and here's the key.
I wasn't talking about new Town. I wasn't talking about

(01:18:38):
um Sandy Hook. I wasn't talking about something that happened
outside the context of sports, that was relevant in the
context of the Olympics and on that occasion. And it
took about thirty seconds. But I don't think many other
broadcasters in my position would have done it. But it
certainly wasn't a left wing position. I think I'm a
common sense guy who has, as I said, all the

(01:19:01):
cart positions, some that could be characterized on either side
of the central dividing line. Have you voted for Republicans
for president as well as Democrats in your life and
you're and you're open to doing that in the years ahead,
you know, who knows who's going to be running in
That might surprise people who are convinced that you're a
left winger. Right, you're open to voting for either side

(01:19:24):
of the political equation. Sure, sure, Now I want to
make it too political, but I'll just say this this year,
if if a Republican like John McCain or John Kasik,
or Mitt Romney or or others, if Republicans of those

(01:19:45):
of that stripe, we're running this year against Joe Biden,
who is a decent man, clearly a decent man, but
has certain deficits I would seriously consider voting Republicans. Be
sure to catch live editions about Kicked the cup Ridge
with Clay Travis week days at six am Eastern three
am Pacific. Look for your children's eyes to see the

(01:20:07):
true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them.
You look and see a tree. They see the wrinkled
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They see treasure and pebbles. They see a windy path
that could lead to adventure, and they see you. They're fearless.
Guide is this fascinating world? Find a forest near you

(01:20:28):
and start exploring a Discover the Forest dot Org brought
to you by the United States Forest Service and the
ad Council. Look for your children's eyes to see the
true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them.
You look and see a tree, They see the wrinkled
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They see treasure and pebbles. They see a windy path

(01:20:51):
that could lead to adventure, and they see you. They're fearless.
Guide is this fascinating world. Find a forest near you
and start exploring. Discover the Forest dot org brought to
you by the United States Forest Service and the AD Council.
We're talking to Bob Costas. I'm Clay Traviss is the
Wins and Losses podcast. This ties in a bit with
cancel culture, which you said you are not a fan

(01:21:13):
of live television or live radio or any form of
live broadcast. You have done it as well or better
than almost anyone when you consider the number of hours
that you're going to do it. Everybody out there who
listens to the radio show knows it's difficult. It's like
tap dancing at times above a razor, particularly in the
social media era. What I would say often happens, and

(01:21:34):
this is my position on the n r A. I
think many people in the n r A are terrified
that if they give an inch, somebody's gonna take a mile,
right and that uh, and that the perspective on you
may you may, you and I may have different agreements,
or many people out there may have different agreements on
what should happen with the statue of Robert E. Lee right,
um and uh. And certainly many people could have a

(01:21:56):
variety of opinions. I'm a big history buff grew up
in the South. Uh. I I abhor the idea of
taking down statues. I think it's a bad precedent to set.
I think oftentimes the statues the museums don't want them,
which is a usual thing to say. But I think
most people, regardless of where they come down on that issue,
would say it's crazy to tear down the Washington Monument,

(01:22:17):
or to blow up the Lincoln Memorial or the Jefferson
Memorial or things like that. But to me, the problem
with cancel culture is it's the progressive tip of the spear.
They never stop right there. There's never like your point
on the Redskins name is I think a good one.
If you told me, hey, you can give away the
Redskins name and we'll never have an argument about the

(01:22:37):
Chiefs or the Braves or the Florida State Seminoles or
any of those tribes, that's the end of the discussion.
Right As a reasonable person, I would say, Okay, I'll
give you the Redskins. Let's just table all other mascots
and whether or not they're offensive. I don't want to
be from Yeah, I don't want to go uh full
board to try to defend the fighting Irish nickname because

(01:23:00):
somebody is upset that it's a caricature of an Irish
person who has you know, so much too much to
drink and wants to get into a fight. I'm okay
with it, right, let's just yes, right. At some point
you have to just say, in my opinion, okay, we
kind of reached the logical extension of offense. And the
problem with political correctness and progressive culture to me in

(01:23:21):
many ways is then it can't happen because they wouldn't
have a reason to exist, right, And so I understand
some of the pushback on those issues. But as someone
who does live television as much as you have, and
and has done as many different live radio events, are
you as troubled by the obsession with finding the two

(01:23:42):
minutes that somebody has that may be the least accurate
reflection of their career and insisting that we cashier them
for it and that they can no longer do what
they've done for so long. Absolutely, um. People who demand
respect and compassion, and rightly so, for marginalized groups or

(01:24:02):
historically discriminated against groups often are not very respectful of
the totality of a person's life, or very compassionate about
a mistake that doesn't necessarily reflect the depth of someone's feelings. Um,
you know, I think that we can we can work
toward being a more tolerant and sensitive society without without

(01:24:27):
needing notches on our belt. We canceled this guy, we
canceled that institution, We canceled this, that and the other thing.
Um with without with failing to recognize that the things
took place in a different context. The idea that some
twenty five year old kid is going to stand here
in and judge something that happened decades and centuries ago.

(01:24:51):
Judge the people. Judge the people, not necessarily the attitudes,
because attitudes evolved, and rightly so, but judge the people
and what they did and said in the context of
their time, and be so unself aware as not to
realize the generations from now. If this continues, you will
will be viewed justice harshly, and perhaps justice unfairly. You

(01:25:13):
think you've reached the endpoint of evolution, intermsativity and awareness,
but you haven't, Jack, you haven't. And if you played
this game eternally, eventually it's going to come back and
and like Frankenstein's Monster, it's gonna, it's gonna, it's going
to kill its creator. That's what history teaches us, and

(01:25:34):
that's why having an understanding of the scope of history
is so important. I've just got a few more questions
for you. Uh the Olympics. You've hit on several different times.
What is it like for people out there who don't
know the procedures and the processes and what is involved
to do in Olympics? Is it the hardest thing that

(01:25:54):
you do in live sports business? How would you contextualize
that It's it's very, very difficult. But what helped me
was the advice that Jim McKay gave me and then
my own experience, which was that the host of the
Olympics must be a very good generalist. You have to
have a very good grasp of the history of the Olympics,

(01:26:14):
history and current circumstances of the host city and the
host nation, and you have to know about the handful
of events and sports and competitors that are likely to
be part of the focus of prime time coverage. You
know that the researchers are so good that if somebody
or something pops out out of nowhere, like I think

(01:26:36):
of Rulan Gardner feeding the seemingly invincible correll In, who
was so good that that competitors feared going in against him.
Um he was a mythic figure, and Rulan Gardner beat
him for the gold medal in Sydney in two thousand,
even though he was an American competitor. I didn't know
who the hell Rulan Gardner was until this happened, And

(01:26:57):
if it hadn't happened, it wouldn't have been on in primetime.
But it was such a big upset that eventually we
throw it on the air as quickly as possible, and
in the space of about five minutes, the researchers give
me his bio. And something you have to be good
at is that you have to be able to take
a briefing briefly, quickly and assimilate the information, understand what's
worth emphasizing. See if there's a narrative here that makes

(01:27:18):
some sense. But if you go into an Olympics thinking
you have to know every Rulon Gardner, and you have
to know every platform diver from Peru or every crust
country skier from Norway, your head will explode. Ken Jennings
of Jeopardy Fan the front Fame couldn't possibly, you know,
hold all of that information. At a summer Olympics, You've

(01:27:40):
got two hundred countries and over ten thousand athletes. So
be a good generalist, be able to see the big
picture and then be able to say, hone in on
the particulars, if and when they rise to the top.
Here's another example, Clay of the business model that applies
to Auten and it applies across the political spectrum. But

(01:28:04):
in this case it was the right wing that got
me in Sochi. NBC put together a piece that explained
Vladimir Putin's influence in Russia, and part of that said
that Forbes, not Mother Jones of the Nation. Forbes had
named Vladimir Putin the year before as the world's most

(01:28:28):
influential leader, bumping Barack Obama to two. They didn't say
it was the best, they didn't say it was a
good guy most influential. So I had said that. Immediately
after narrating that piece, there was a panel discussion which
made it clear that he was a former KGB agent,
that he was no friend of the West, that he
was aligned with uh, with very questionable and that's to

(01:28:51):
be kind policies, that it was a repressive regime, etcetera, etcetera.
And subsequently I did a commentary which talked about all
those things and talked about how the success of the
socie games on the surface might obscure just how problematic

(01:29:11):
and often vicious and criminal Putin's Russia was. Okay, Fox
News decides that I have praised Vladimir Putin, and they
make an issue out of it because that moves the
needle for their audience. John McCain comes on the next
day with Neil Cavuto. I had known McCain who was

(01:29:33):
a sports fan. I'd have friendly relationship with him. I'd
interviewed him on a couple of occasions. You know more
than your audience does, Clay, how these things work. They
kind of briefed the guests, these are the topics, and
this is what so and so said, and McCain was
sometimes shot from the hip, said, you know, I really
like Bob Costas. I enjoy his sports broadcast, but he

(01:29:54):
doesn't know what he's talking about. He should stick to sports. Okay. Subsequently,
the Olympics are over with McCain calls me out of
the blue, calls me before I could even say hello,
He says, my friend, I'm sorry. I saw what you
said in full context. I've tweeted out an apology. What

(01:30:14):
you said was contextualized. It was all good. Okay. Now
I go on Bill O'Reilly, And I mentioned this to O'Reilly.
Now you would think it was important enough for two
or three days to make an issue out of Bob
cost of sympathizes with Vladimir Putin. If it was important
enough to make an issue out of it, wouldn't it

(01:30:36):
be important enough to cite that McCain reversed field. Wouldn't
it be important enough to note that? Wouldn't it be
important enough to say, look, if an American broadcaster really
praised a foreign adversary, wouldn't everybody from the New York
Times to the National Review take exception to that. Why

(01:30:57):
is it only in these little echo chambers that this
was mentioned? Maybe because we mischaracterized it and made something
out of nothing, and now we don't feel compelled to
correct it because that would fit our business model. Um
and that that, along with other things, and coupled with

(01:31:17):
social media, is why some people, including some people of
goodwill who just don't have the media literacy to navigate this.
I think, yeah, you know, Bob cost this, I've always
liked this sports broadcasting, but he's really kind of a
political guy and who's really out there on the left
not so that's fantastic what you mentioned starting to cover

(01:31:37):
the Olympics. Many of the people listening to us crazily
are so young they don't remember the dream Team. That
was for me one of the best moments as being
an American sports fan was the Dream Team. You also
covered the NBA at a time that the NBA was
just stratospheric with the Jordan's era, and I think you

(01:31:59):
were featured in some of the documentary surrounding the Jordan era,
and if you weren't just watching yeah yeah, the Last Dance.
Just watching that made me think back to all of
the games that you had been involved in. What was
it like to cover Jordan's I don't know what kind
of relationship, if any, that you had with him, but
for people out there who now think about the Lebron

(01:32:20):
versus Jordan's debate, Jordan was an unbod. He was like
the sun in my life growing up. You know, it
was an inescapable object that was almost always present every day.
What was it like to cover him? I had a
good relationship with him. He was a magnificent player, but
he also had all those intangible things. His presence was

(01:32:44):
the presence of a star. He was handsome, He carried
himself with incredible grace. Although he's not a small man
he's six ft six, but in the context of basketball,
he wasn't so big so overwhelmingly strong as to be
unrelatable to some portion of the audience. Everything about him

(01:33:05):
was like a ten on a ten scale. Plus the era,
the Dream Team, the NBA factor in my bias. The
NBA was on NBC, and prior to that in the
eighties that have been on CBS. Now primarily it's a
cable product. This is no knock on the quality of
the coverage. The coverage is great. You know, Ernie and
Charles and Shack, those guys are great. That's probably the

(01:33:25):
best studio show in the history of television sports. And
My Breen is Breen is terrific, and Kevin Harland is
exciting to listen to. And Marv still does the games,
but it isn't as much a part of the cultural
conversation as it once was. The promos for the NBA
on NBC. We're on during Seinfeld and Carson and Letterman
and e Er and and all the rest um and

(01:33:48):
the games were all the playoff games, all the weekend
playoff games were on NBC, doubleheaders, triple headers, primetime games.
It was just a whole different thing. And even though
the Bulls won all those titles, there was a constellation
of stars. Just think of the roster of the Dream Team.
It's only Jordan and Pippen from the Bulls. Think of
the others. Think think of the texture and how visible

(01:34:11):
Um Stockton and Malone were, and Barkley and Isaiah at
the tail end of the Pistons run and Clyde Drexler
and Patrick Ewing and pat Riley, even the coaches. It
was a whole group of stars. Now Jordan was at
the center of it. Here's the way I feel about
the Lebron Jordan comparison. Lebron is an all time great,

(01:34:34):
and if you want to call it a toss up,
I put it this way. Let's say Lebron is equally excellent,
and his prowess is equal in its own way to
Jordan's basketball prowess. He is equally excellent, but not equally great,
because Jordan's greatness went beyond numbers or even the specific

(01:34:55):
outcomes of games or championships. His impact on the league,
his global impact. Just what mentioning his name conjures up.
It's intangible, but you know it when you see it
and you feel it. So Jordan's was greater than Lebron,
not necessarily better, although I just think I still would

(01:35:15):
give him an edge of the basketball player. But he
was greater than Lebron. It's so well said. We're talking
to Bob Costas, this is the Wins and Lost his podcast.
I'm Clay Travis. Charles Barkley. You mentioned there, and you
mentioned that that NBA Inside the NBA Studio show maybe
the best that's out there right now. Did you foresee
Barkley becoming as good of a media personality as he

(01:35:39):
has become when he was a player. I don't think
he could perceive ahead of time that it would be
this big, but you knew that he would be a
star on television. Money was an active player. We were
talking about how we could use him. Dick ever Saw
was talking about it. I mean, he's such an incandescent
personality that that part didn't surprise me because we're running
short of time here, and I thank you for giving

(01:36:01):
me the platform and for being so patient with me
while I took advantage of it in the way that
I did. Um, I actually have to run off and
do something for the Baseball Network about a half hour
from now, which means I have to change clothes as
opposed to what we can do for a podcast or
or radio. A couple of points that I wanted to make,
One that relates to one of your earlier questions where

(01:36:21):
you're talking about having a sense of things beyond stats
and numbers. Somebody mentioned to me the nine Mets and
would the raise be like the sixty nine Mets raise
against the Dodgers, Mets against the Mighty Baltimore Orioles. And
one of the things that came to mind, besides the

(01:36:42):
obvious statistical comparisons, UM Tyler Glass now and Blake Snell
have never thrown a complete game. Tom Seb and Jerry
Kuzman through eighteen and sixteen respectively in that season, and
Seb through a tenant incomplete game in Game four, and
Kuzman went all the way in the clincher in Game five.
But those are just differences in strategy as the game evolved.

(01:37:04):
But if I were to answer that question, and I
think that this is part of what makes a good broadcaster,
I'd like to think this is what Red Barber would say,
or whatever it might have been that you brought to
Jim McKay's attention or Vince Scully, it's this. You would
have had to have been there. The sixty nine Mets
came out of nowhere. Not only were they never good,

(01:37:25):
they were comically bad. They were synonymous with lovable ineptitude,
and they've never had a winning season. Then they go
all the way and they win the World Series. But
it's more than that. The Dodgers and Giants were only
half a generation removed from being in New York, and
many of those Dodger and Giant fans attached themselves to

(01:37:46):
a National League team because Willie Mays and those guys
were still coming through New York to play the Mets,
and so there was a National League feel that predated
the Mets. People who had rooted for Snyder and Newcombe
and Campanelle and Robinson and Willie Mays, they became Met fans.
The Yankee dynasty had just ended. Mantel retired after the

(01:38:08):
preceding season. Now the town belonged not to the Yankees.
It belonged to the Mets, And not incidentally, I'd make
this point. It's not really a political point. It's just
a fact that factors into the texture of it. Mookie
Betts happens to be the only African American in this
year's World Series either team. The Arios had Frank Robinson

(01:38:30):
and Don Buford and Paul Blair and el Rod Hendricks.
The Mets had ed Charles and Cleon Jones and Tommy A.
G and Don Clendennon, and their manager was Gil Hodges,
who was attached to Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn Dodgers. There was
a texture to it and the World Series. Even though
every game was on in the afternoon, every one of

(01:38:50):
those games got a higher rating than even a Game
seven would get today. Leave decide that this is a
weird season. Sixty games, neutral field, almost no fans in
the stands. Even if this were a normal season, every
one of those games at a higher rating than of
Game seven would likely get today. I think part of
your job as a broadcaster isn't just to know what

(01:39:12):
statcast tells you the exit velocity is or what someone's
O p S is. That's important. But if you can't,
if you can't capture what the weather was, you know,
that's kind of a catch all. Tell them how the
weather was, meaning in the biggest sense, what were all
the dynamics that were at play here? Not just what
it was in raw statistical or objective terms. How did

(01:39:36):
it feel? What did it look like? What did it
feel like? What was the humanity of it that was
That's a point that I would make if someone asked
me about the six nine Mets. It's different than just
comparing Tom Seeber's e r A to Charlie Morton z
r A. That's incredibly well said, and I think it
is a fantastic way to end. I know you have

(01:39:58):
to go get changed for your job on the Major
League Baseball Network. Bob Costas has been a lot of fun.
Are you on Twitter? How can people reach out and
give you feedback from this podcast if they wanted to
do so? No, no social media whatsoever. I just don't
see that much of an upside. Yeah, for me, I've
had my platforms, and so I do what I do
as a as a sports broadcaster. UM So, so there

(01:40:22):
you have it. That's Bob Costas. He just told you.
He's not on social media, so you can't reach out
and let him know what you thought. But I think
you guys are going to have completely loved this huge
roster of great episodes. They are timeless. That's the goal
of The Wins and Lost His Podcast. If you enjoyed
this one, it's a really good chance you're gonna like
a lot more of them. Thirty four, thirty five dub.

(01:40:44):
Do you know how many we've totally done. I think
it's thirty five of these at least an hour in length,
from a variety of different perspectives. I hope you can
enjoy and learn from them as much as I have.
This has been the Wins and Lost His Podcast. I'm
Clay Travis. Check back frequently, and in the meantime, go
check out the archives of our long form discussions here.
Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk lineup in

(01:41:06):
the nation. Catch all of our shows at Fox sports
Radio dot com and within the I Heart Radio app
search f s R to listen live.

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Wins & Losses – Clay talks with legendary broadcaster Bob Costas

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Wins & Losses – Clay talks with legendary broadcaster Bob Costas