Clay talks with legendary broadcaster Bob Costas

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 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
am Pacific. We're talking with Bob Costas. This is the
Wins and Losses Podcast. I genuinely am not impacted by

(18:27):
what someone says about me online, 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 become
more all encompassing. I'm sure I've got my phone sitting
in front of me right now. If I typed in

(18:48):
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 you
want to say about him, one of the four or
five best at his craft of basketball that has played

(19:10):
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 mentions and
reading the tweets that are really taking into account what

(19:33):
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 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

(19:55):
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 down below?
What you said was a nice thing. Jason Stark, who
is an incredibly accomplished writer, was saying, to see what

(20:16):
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 it speaks
to social media in general, which is designed to make
us care what people we don't know think about us

(20:40):
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 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

(21:00):
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, 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.

(21:23):
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 in the larger point. And sometimes you
have to use your own experience, because if you're 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

(21:46):
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 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

(22:06):
larger point. And that's why we're talking about beyond me
just muttering to myself. We're talking to Bob Costas. This
is the Wins and Losses Podcast. I'm Clay Travis. Okay,
I want to get to the essays 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

(22:28):
many of your broadcasts 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 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

(22:50):
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
a year olds who would like to be the next
Bob cost Us 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

(23:14):
I learned this along the way, and it didn't take
all that long. No matter how much you would meire someone,
you can be influenced by them. I was influenced by
Jim McKay. I was influenced directly by Marty Glickman and
Marv Albert. I went to Syracuse because they had gone
to Syracuse, and because Syracuse had early on fifty years ago,
they had a genuine communications department, not just a print

(23:36):
journalism department, but a true state of the art communications department.
Now almost every university does, 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 Dick stocked In and Len Berman and

(23:57):
a few others, But now it's into dozens and does.
But no matter who, you were influenced by Jim McKay,
Vince Scully, Jack Buck. Early 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

(24:19):
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 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

(24:40):
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
McKay was perfect in that moment in munich Ino, Al
Michaels was perfect with do you believe in miracles? But
if you are a perfect actionist, that can be a

(25:01):
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 to threat over
things that other people thought were terrific. Some of the
things that people mentioned to me as among their favorite

(25:23):
things I've ever done, somewhere in the back of my
head is yeah, but if only I'd said that, or
if only I changed one word, or if only I'd
remember to include that. And eventually I came to understand,
on my own peace of mind that sometimes perfect is
the enemy of the good. A lot of what I've

(25:43):
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 analyze yourself? Well? Then
you know, in the seventies, if you're listening to radio

(26:05):
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, quote it up for you.
I bought one of the very early VHS machines. Uh,
three quarter inch tapes an hour at a time, so
a whole ball of ball game was three tapes. I

(26:28):
remember the Sandberg game in the legendary Cardinal Cub game,
where Sandberg 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 games get now. Um, And it's

(26:49):
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 at your fingertips and you can
review it. Uh. Yeah. I used to go back, and
I remember being discouraged early on the first time I

(27:12):
heard myself on the air at w A E Er,
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, reedy kind of penny voice.
And then shortly after that I heard the twenty six
year old Al Michaels just a year or two after
that on the radio on the two World Series between

(27:37):
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 I'm along run. So
that's amazing. Take me through your career path as a
young guy. You're at Syracuse. How do you get in

(27:58):
because you've 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 at Syracuse who took an active interest
in me. He would identify a handful of kids each

(28:22):
year who he thought had the potential to be good
if they worked at it. And he was a caring
but merciless critic to the point where and no joke here,
Clay in the until the mid eighties when I was
on NBC and pretty successful, I would still hear from
him after the baseball and football broadcast. That was good,

(28:44):
but you know, he was still critiquing me, and and
he helped me with projecting, with 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 too much here. Ace is important. Try
to pace yourself. Uh, don't feel like you have to

(29:04):
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 are in the first period of a hockey
game or whatever it is, wait till the time where
it really fits and the audience doesn't know whether you've
used or a hundred percent of what you came into
the boothworth as long as what you use was appropriate

(29:27):
and it was good. So I think that with his
help and being at w A e R, which is
a legendary campus radio station, and you're surrounded by like
minded people, some of whom are really quite talented, and
we fed off each other's energy, I think I became
pretty good early. I must have had some precocious level

(29:47):
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 that was sort of
a baptismal um. I wasn't that good at it right away,

(30:09):
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 X and St. Louis on a lark, the
Carolina Cougars of the Old A B A had become
the Spirits of St. Louis. They would last only two

(30:31):
years until the ABA folded and only four of the teams.
The nets dispersed, 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 applicants on real to real tapes, and Jack Buck

(30:51):
liked my tape and I got brought into St. Louis
for an interview, and perhaps my willingness to work cheap.
Eleven dollars was my salary for that first year at
km X, and I would have paid them eleven thousand
and So I'm at k X, I'm twenty two years old,
and I'm not a colleague of I wouldn't be so presumptuous.

(31:13):
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. They're
both in news and in sports. They were all. They
could have stopped the network with the quality of the
talent that was there. And you got to kind of
pick up your game if you're going to keep pace.

(31:35):
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, powerhouse station and

(31:56):
many of their announcers Joe Garagiola, Harry Jack Buck, later
Gary Bender, and Dan deardorfan 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 Michaels is
at CBS. It's September and he signs with ABC in

(32:21):
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 calls Bob Highland,
who ran km OX, and says, we need somebody. Well,
Buck already had an assignment. Kelly 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.

(32:42):
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 worthy of the time capsule,
but it was good enough. The They brought me back
for occasional games, maybe three or four small regional games

(33:04):
a year in football or backed 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 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,

(33:25):
we really liked 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 seen that words. He goes, how much older
do you think you would look if you grew a beard?
And 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,

(33:48):
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 outom
line of it is if you have any talent at
all and you get thrust into situations. Brian Gumbel left
Sports to go to the Today Show. They didn't have

(34:09):
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
hosting the experience at all. The first five years. I've
never used a telepopter at all. I just ad lived everything.
But I just found my way, and you become more

(34:30):
and more comfortable with it. I think of the luck involved.
NBC hires Ben Scully, Joe garg Joel and Tony Kubec
had been a legendary pair. They put Joe with them.
Then has to be on the a game. He is
the greatest I inherit. Tony Kubeck the backup game becomes
a much more important thing. And then I started hosting

(34:52):
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,
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 sportscaster

(35:15):
and to do mock commentary on elevator racist Mark Albert
is the guy. He wants Marvis out of town doing
a nick game. I'm sitting in the office. They go,
we got this kid here, Bob Costas send them up
again on the elevator on 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

(35:35):
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 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

(35:56):
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 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

(36:17):
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. We're talking to Bob Costas.
I'm Clay Travis. We're here with the Wins and Losses Podcast.
How nervous were you going to Green Bay to call
that game? At twenty four years old? Shaking like a

(36:40):
freaking leaf. And the analyst on the game with someone
that only older listeners would remember firsthand, 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

(37:01):
no bar, no bar on, Yeah, that's amazing. And then
went and then went to the single helmet thing, 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

(37:21):
the on camera open. He couldn't remember what he wanted
to say. And I'm twenty four years old. Nobody outside 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 be he ever did. So I was

(37:44):
nervous to begin with, and I was damn near panic
stricken by the second quarter. But but I muddled through.
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

(38:04):
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 Oldmeyer was bigger than life.
He and Dick Ebersol, who was even more important in
my career, were proteges of run Ledge. Run Ledge is
of course, still viewed as the single most important person

(38:26):
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 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

(38:47):
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 of Dick Eversol,
not only did he elevate me from late night host
of the Olympics to primetime host. I've been the late
night host, he made me the primetime host in in Barcelona,

(39:11):
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 Letterman in NBC's late night lineup,
and showed a different side of me because only maybe
five of it had to do with sports. Most of
it was other walks of life. So ohmy are at

(39:34):
the beginning hiring me, having some confidence in me, giving
me big assiglence. I mean, in the first year I
was there, when Dick Enberg 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

(39:57):
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 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

(40:21):
of NBC e Er Seinfeld, Uh, Cosby, Show, Um whatever, Friends,
whatever it might have been, when NBC was the unquestioned
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

(40:43):
them sometimes because sometimes I have a mind of my own,
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

(41:04):
a room, you knew that you better snap to it
and 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 space.
You mentioned going on David Letterman. So as a kid
growing up in Nashville, I would watch baseball all day long,

(41:25):
right when I was home in the summers, in particular,
I'd watch w g N with Harry Carey and Steve Stone.
In the afternoons, I would watch the late night at
the time ESPN games. And 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

(41:45):
to be an unbelievably compelling television present who, as you
mentioned earlier, broke pretty much every rule that would 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.

(42:05):
What was working with him? Like you said, you went
on a show a bunch as well, and you've later
followed his show. What did you find him 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, I didn't
want anything to be cookie cutter. You go on other shows,

(42:29):
they do a pre interview and you talk about a
few areas that you might discuss, and you give them
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

(42:50):
least that was my assumption that if he just painted
by the numbers, that he couldn't be David Letterman. So
you never knew. He could get bored with what you
were saying, or you could want to alan j 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

(43:10):
very kind to me, said nice things about me, and
when he went to CBS UM after he didn't get
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,

(43:31):
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,
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.

(43:51):
They were reacquiring baseball. I was the host of the Olympics,
and so if the offer had come at a different time,
I said, who would have taken it? And I certainly
appreciated 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

(44:12):
magnificent and he had a certain saboaf 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
era of television. He was beyond cool. But David actually
going forward was more influential. Because everybody as wonderful as

(44:33):
Conan is or or Kimmel or Fallon or Colbert or
whoever you want to name, they all are influenced by
David Letterman. Follow them. There's no doubt at all. And
all of this kind of leads into this question, which
I think is is important also for people out there listening,
and I'm Clay Travis. We're talking with Bob Costas on
The Winds and Lost his podcast. Being able to do

(44:55):
sports well requires an ability to see sports as part
of a larger landscape of American and world life, 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

(45:19):
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 just
based on our conversations, 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

(45:39):
them to a large extent. It's a perceptive question, you know.
You listen to Vince Scully through all those years and
then obviously was steeped in baseball history, but he knew
something about the world beyond that you could gracefully bring
it in. I knew Jack Buck very well. Jack Buck

(46:02):
was wounded at the bridge at Remagen during World War Two.
He got either the Bronze Star or Purple Heart, I
don't remember which. He had worked on the docks. He
had grown up relatively poor in Massachusetts, one of six
or seven kids. He was a Depression era kid um.

(46:22):
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, it was really
on the Cardinals day in, day out, night and night out,

(46:45):
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. I've always used

(47:06):
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, great writing about

(47:27):
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 hope that over
time That's what my career has been and where I

(47:51):
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, and so there

(48:12):
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 one's going to put it in a time capsule
of the twentieth century, but from the mid eighties too,

(48:34):
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 Atlano and even Carson on one occasion,
or Nightline or Meet the Press or Charlie Rose, or

(48:54):
doing pieces for the NBC news magazines, and then the Olympics,
of course, and then my spint 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 because it was

(49:14):
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 Costas 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 people say about me,

(49:37):
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 a game

(49:58):
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,

(50:19):
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 four 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 not love me all the time, but they know

(50:40):
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,
grand paw, aunt, uncle, whatever it might be, you in

(51:02):
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
is not necessarily known. You don't have you've got the

(51:22):
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 it's kind of the opposite of
what I've got now, where the people who listen, we've
got a good size audience, but they really feel like

(51:43):
they know me. Whereas when you're talking to million people
on television or seventy five million or whatever the biggest
number was that you ever spoke to, they kind of
see you and and and and you're a sphinx of sorts.
They project up on you what they think of you.
You know, that's so insightful, And it's one of the
subtexts of this conversation. And as an aside, one of

(52:07):
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 the eighties,
nineties and early part of the two thousands, I think

(52:30):
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 role on Sunday
Night Football, working alongside Al Michaels and Chris Collinsworth, they're

(52:53):
doing what they were put on Planet Earth to do,
and Fred Goodelly the producer, and Drew Sakoff the director,
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 on NBC, and I
don't know that that really uh personified anything that I

(53:14):
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 Olympics, the same thing. I think the first
seven or eight that I did pretty much we're close

(53:36):
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 were times little windows where maybe
you could hit a great note, but those windows seemed

(53:57):
to me to be fewer. And 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 I'm not complaining. But
there is a widespread misimpression, perhaps especially among your audience

(54:24):
or audiences that have a certain predisposition. There is a
misimpression that I'm somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders
or Noam Chomsky. And 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

(54:46):
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 with cancel culture. I have a
problem with political wreckness. 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

(55:08):
large extent um. But I have classic liberal views, but
I also have many views that could be characterized as conservative.
But a few things kind of hope a bear uh
in the right wing blog of sphere and Fox News
or whatever. And it's part of the business model there

(55:30):
to say 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 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.

(55:52):
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 is part of the left wing
media machine. 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 a position you actually hold,
and you should if you actually hold it, But how

(56:15):
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. 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

(56:38):
often one inch one inch deep. Right, you can punch
right through it, but the caricature itself is so large
that it isn't 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

(56:58):
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 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

(57:19):
people have to do now. A big part of your
becoming what I think it would be fair to say,
is a 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

(57:41):
a feat liberal. Uh, Mom 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
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 J Ring Sunday Night Football, What exactly happened there?

(58:03):
What was the experience? What would you change if anything,
about the way that that was presented. First of all, I,
to some extent fumbled it, and I've always owned up
to it. Jovan Belcher, linebacker for the Chiefs, murders his
fiance in front of their two year old child, uh

(58:26):
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 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 and halftime to looking at this

(58:48):
issue still evolving. They had a lot of people from
the chiefs with poignant commentary. Dan Patrick and Rodney Harrison
and Tony Dunge were handling it back in the studio.
UM usually I would 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,

(59:09):
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 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

(59:31):
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 for
our purposes here is seen as a conservative voice. He's
on Fox, he's on OutKick. But Malason had written a
large article about this part of which decried what he

(59:55):
called the gun culture in sports. And the gun culture
in sports had been something which had been written about
and talked about well before the Belcher incident. ESPN had
done a big thing about it. There has been takeout
stories in the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and the

(01:00:16):
USA Today about a gun culture in sports. And all
you have to do is google athletes and guns, and
there's a litany of criminality, tragedy, folly associated with athletes
and guns. And while certainly it has happened in society,
it has happened infrequently, if at all, that a prominent athlete,

(01:00:37):
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 was a gun culture.
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

(01:01:02):
Jason was concerned about, an attitude towards guns, a misplaced
notion of street cred or manhood, and the easy accessibility
to guns which leads very often to tragedy, no one
in the right mind thinks that that Javon Belchi couldn't
have strangled his fiancee or beaten her to death or

(01:01:24):
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 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

(01:01:47):
up the building, but you do have mass shootings that
involve guns. So now 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

(01:02:07):
rang true to me, and I thought wrongly that the
audience would understand the point, so I quoted a portion
of it because they didn't have time to write my
own thing. I quoted a portion of it. It was
misunderstood as a plea for gun control or an anti
Second Amendment position. That's my fault, And in retrospect, Clay,

(01:02:33):
I'm a good enough broadcaster. I knew this an hour
later when the 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

(01:02:53):
really what I was thinking. Every time a tragedy intersects
with sports, we hear one 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

(01:03:16):
for some perspective in the aftermath of this tragedy, then
a serious conversation should ensued, including but not limited to
domestic violence and are those who play a violent sport
more inclined to it than 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

(01:03:39):
then in the short term, emotions and impulse control can
be affected by head trauma, especially when mixed with alcohol.
Performance enhancing drugs or pain killers, whatever it might be,
and the whole idea of athletes and guns. And I
should have said, and would have said, not talking here

(01:04:00):
about anyone's responsible, lawful exercise of their legitimate Second Amendment rights,
but there is an irresponsible attitude 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

(01:04:20):
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 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

(01:04:43):
serve their purpose. So somebody on box says, Bob Costas
is a hypocritical buffoon. He 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

(01:05:05):
I should, especially now, but I never have. I said,
there's massive security. Of course, 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
I football. Apart from that, I have never had personal

(01:05:26):
security a day in my life, on the job or
going to the restaurant or walking down the street. What
was the way that was fun? 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,

(01:05:47):
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 or she uses a gun
to defend themselves and their family, I applaud it. I
applaud it. If someone breaks into your home, you don't

(01:06:07):
have time to evaluate what is it here at sixty
if you're if you're a woman who could 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

(01:06:27):
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, and whatever happens,
I'm okay with it. I do not want to see
the Second Amendment revoked. I think there should be reasonable

(01:06:48):
guns safety laws. UM. Looking at rules about cars um
would be a good template. Uh. Nobody says that because
or speed limits, and because you 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 going to

(01:07:10):
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 are reasonable restrictions
which don't get in the way of people's basic rights. Um.

(01:07:32):
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 history of the country,
and that was the short lived prohibition against alcohol. The

(01:07:52):
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 that kind of paranoia that that
that's it worked there this, this person who is prominent,

(01:08:14):
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. So once once that
was in place, and I thank you for giving me
this much time, Clay, And I also know that no

(01:08:35):
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 do you think had to
do with your opinion came out during a football game?

(01:08:55):
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 had expressed
the exact same opinions, I don't know that it would
have been characterized in the same way as it was

(01:09:17):
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, and they don't really want
to see or have to confront larger societal issues for

(01:09:40):
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 grating too many
people because this is their escape from the real world.
So I think that also actored in in a big

(01:10:00):
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 enough time. It's better
off being addressed in a larger and different forum. I

(01:10:24):
didn't do that. That was my mistake. Look, a guy
who wins a gold glove can food a routine groundball.
It happens. This is live television in the heat of
the moment, and I made a mistake in judgment. But
that does not mean that my views should be perpetually
mischaracterized and grotesquely caricatured. But I think if I had

(01:10:48):
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
it gratuitously because these issues had intersected with with football

(01:11:09):
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
commentary about it, trying to lay out the distinctions in

(01:11:32):
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, an insult. No such
definition applies to chiefs, braves, warriors. So I'm not a

(01:11:52):
political correctness guy, even though it was handy for people
to luck me in there, because after the gun thing
then there 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
of conservatives, including the late Charles Krafhammer, Kathleen Parker, Phil Mushnik,

(01:12:15):
who is viewed as being writer 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 among
people who are fans of mine and who might have

(01:12:35):
agreed with what I've said, But the notion, well, he
really leaned into politics. He politicized everything. They 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 Manning
or art Model or al Davis dies and you do

(01:12:57):
some sort of assessment and a pre creation or what's
right or wrong about the overtime rules? That's what it was. Herry.
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
in Sochi, which was widely viewed as one of the

(01:13:20):
toughest ever directed towards the head of state and toward
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 again
in two thousand and eight, pointing out that China was positioned,

(01:13:44):
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 eight and another common areas
small little snippets, judicious small percentage of the overall coverage.

(01:14:05):
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 is.
Most Americans knew it that I first saw in nineteen.
It's been transformed. It's a modern city, it's there's lots

(01:14:26):
of commerce. They're not a communist 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 London for anniversary of

(01:14:48):
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 dark this day
in Olympic history and here's the key. I wasn't talking
about Newtown. I wasn't talking about um Sandy Hook. I

(01:15:09):
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

(01:15:29):
I said, all the 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? Yeah, and you're and you're open to
doing that in the years ahead. You know, who knows
who's gonna be running in That might surprise people who
are convinced that you're a left winger. Right, you're open

(01:15:51):
to voting for either side 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,

(01:16:12):
if Republicans of those 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 Republican. Be sure to catch live editions about
Kicked the coverage with Clay Travis weekdays at six am Eastern,
three am Pacific. We're talking to Bob Costas. I'm Clay

(01:16:35):
Traviss is the Wins and Losses podcast. This ties in
a bit with cancel culture, which you said you are
not a fan 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.

(01:16:56):
It's like tap dancing at times above a razor, particularly
in social media era, what I would say often happens.
And this is what my position on the n r A.
I think many people in the n r A are
terrified that if they've given 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,

(01:17:16):
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
variety of opinions. I'm a big history buff grew up
in the South. 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,

(01:17:39):
regardless of where they come down on that issue, would
say it's crazy to tear down the Washington Monument, 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 one. If

(01:18:00):
you told me, hey, you can give away the Redskins
name and we'll never have an argument about the 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 Yeah,

(01:18:24):
I don't want to go uh full board to try
to defend the fighting Irish nickname because 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

(01:18:45):
the logical extension of offense. And the problem with political
correctness and progressive culture to me in 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

(01:19:08):
by the obsession with finding the two 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 historically discriminated against groups.

(01:19:33):
Often are not very respectful of the totality of a
person's life, are 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 towards being
a more tolerant and sensitive society without without needing notches

(01:19:57):
on our belt. We canceled this guy, We canceled that
in stitutional 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.

(01:20:19):
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 and be so unself aware as not
to realize the generations from now. If this continues, you
will will be viewed just as harshly and perhaps just

(01:20:41):
as unfairly. You think you've reached the endpoint of evolution
in sensitivity 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 career gator. That's

(01:21:01):
what history teaches us, and 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 you do in live

(01:21:24):
sports business? How would you contextualize that? It's it's 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, history and current circumstances of the

(01:21:45):
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 of Rulan Gardner feeding the seemingly invincible

(01:22:09):
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 if it hadn't happened, it wouldn't have
been on in prime time. But it was such a
big upset that eventually we throw it on the air

(01:22:31):
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 some sense. But if you
go into an Olympics thinking you have to know every

(01:22:51):
Rulan gardener, and you have to know every platform diver
from Peru or every crush country skier from Norway. Your
head will explode. Ken Jennings of Jeopardy fans, the front
Fame couldn't possibly, you know, hold all of that information.
At a summer Olympics, you've got two hundred countries and
over ten thousand athletes. So be a good generalist, be

(01:23:14):
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 too often, and it applies
across the political spectrum. But in this case it was
the right wing that got me in Sochi. NBC put

(01:23:40):
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 influential leader, bumping Barack Obama
to two. They didn't say was the best. They didn't

(01:24:00):
say he 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 be kind policies, that it was

(01:24:22):
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 SoC games on the surface
might obscure just how problematic and often vicious and criminal
Blutin's Russia was. Okay, Fox News decides that I have

(01:24:49):
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 of Vudo.
I had known McCain who was 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,

(01:25:09):
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 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,

(01:25:34):
and before I could even say hello, he says, my friend,
I'm sorry. I saw what you said in full context.
I tweeted out an apology. What 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

(01:25:56):
make an issue out of Bob costas sympathy, as is
with Vladimir Putin. If it was important enough to make
an issue out of it, wouldn't it 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

(01:26:20):
everybody from the New York Times to the National Review
take exception to that. Why 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 wouldn't
fit our business model. Um and that that, along with

(01:26:44):
other things and coupled with social media, is why some people,
including some people of goodwill who just don't have the
media literacy to navigate this think, Yeah, you know Bob
cost this, I've always liked this sports broadcasting, but he's
really kind of a political guy and he's really out there.
Are on the left, not sho. That's fantastic what you

(01:27:05):
mentioned starting to cover the Olympics in 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 m b A
at a time that the NBA was just stratospheric with

(01:27:25):
the Jordan's era, and I think you 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

(01:27:47):
out there who now think about the Lebron versus Jordan's debate.
Jordan was and unbelo 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

(01:28:08):
had all those intangible things. His presence was 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

(01:28:30):
some portion of the audience. Everything about him 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,

(01:28:53):
those guys are great. That's probably the best studio show
in the history of television sports. And my Breen is
breaming 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 r And and

(01:29:15):
all the rest um and 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

(01:29:38):
texture and how visible 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 on is

(01:30:00):
an all time great 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

(01:30:21):
beyond numbers or even the specific 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

(01:30:43):
think I still would 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

(01:31:06):
a media personality as he 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 and Dick Eversoul was talking about it. I mean,
he's such an incandescent personality that that part didn't surprise me.

(01:31:26):
Because we're running short of time here, and I thank
you for giving 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 you can do for
a podcast or or radio. A couple of points that
I wanted to make. One that relates to one of

(01:31:48):
your earlier questions when you're talking about having a sense
of things beyond stats and numbers. Somebody mentioned to me
the 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,

(01:32:10):
besides the 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 sever through a tenant in complete game in Game four,
and Kuzman went all the way in the clincher in
Game five. But those are just differences in strategy as

(01:32:31):
the game evolved. 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 Gully,
it's this. You would have had to have been there.
The sixty nine Mets came out of nowhere. Not only

(01:32:53):
were they never good, they were comically bad. They were
synonymous with lovable ineptitude, and they've never had a win 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

(01:33:13):
attached themselves to 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 Campanella and Robinson and Willie Mays,
they became Met fans. The Yankee dynasty had just ended.

(01:33:36):
Mantel retired after the 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

(01:33:57):
Arios had Frank Robinson and Don view Heard 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 those games got a

(01:34:20):
higher rating than even a Game seven would get today.
Leave aside 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
got a higher rating than a game seven would likely
get today. I think part of your job as a
broadcaster isn't just to know what stat cast tells you

(01:34:41):
the exit velocity is or what someone's ops 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 what it was in raw statistical or objective terms.

(01:35:05):
How did it steal? What did it look like, what
did it steel like? What was the humanity of it
that was That's a point that I would make if
someone asked me about the sixty nine Mets. It's different
than just comparing Tom Sieber's e r A to Charlie
Morton z r R. That's incredibly well said, and I
think it is a fantastic way to end. I know

(01:35:27):
you have to go get changed for your job on
the Major League Baseball Network, Bob Costa, this 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 I've had my platforms, and so I
do what I do as a as a sports broadcaster.

(01:35:49):
UM So, so there 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
you love to this huge roster of great episodes. They
are timeless. That's the goal of the Wins and Losses Podcast.
If you enjoyed this one, it's a really good chance

(01:36:09):
you're gonna like a lot more of them. Thirty four,
thirty five dubb Do you know how many we've totally done.
I think it's thirty five of these at least an
hour in length, uh, 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
Losses Podcast. I'm Clay Travis. Check back frequently and in
the meantime, go check out the archives of our long

(01:36:30):
form discussions here. 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.

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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;}Clay talks with legendary broadcaster Bob Costas

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