Bob Costas: Finding Strength Through Family Struggles | Forward Progress

Sports broadcasting icon Bob Costas remembers his upbringing, including anecdotes from his father’s gambling addiction. Costas talks of his dad passing away at an early age due to a heart attack and unexpectedly receiving an envelope containing $6,000 in cash at the funeral. He ponders what life would be like if his dad were alive to witness his career growth and remembers his mom Jayne for her good-natured, self-deprecating humor, among other things.

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Hey, it's Graham. Our past in depth guests have
shared so many inspirational stories about overcoming
adversity and tackling the darkest and most challenging
times in their lives. We're sharing one of those
moments in today's Thursday podcast in the hope that it
provides A blueprint for any difficulties you might be facing
this week. Bob Costas.

(00:24):
Dad was pretty hard on you. He thought you should study
criminal justice, and he also never thought you were ambitious
enough. Why is it?
He thought that wanting to be a broadcaster was, you know, sort
of a quixotic notion and that maybe if I studied criminal
justice that that would be something that was a more

(00:48):
practical career path. So he encouraged me to take that
up at Syracuse University. But part of the reason, a large
part of the reason Syracuse appealed to me, was that I knew
that Marty Glickman and Marv Albert had gone there.
He didn't live long enough to see me even matriculate at
Syracuse when he died. It's like May of my senior year

(01:08):
in high school. So he never saw or heard
anything I did. And I've often wondered, what
would it be like? I could take him to Yankee
Stadium. I could take him to Lambeau
Field or Wrigley Field, or if he'd lived that long, take him
to the Olympics. And you don't have to have a
bet. You don't need to be trying to
strike it rich. We're good.

(01:29):
I got you. Or would it be, you know, that
he'd be pumping me for information.
Or would he? And that's, like, almost comical
to think about. Would he curse at me through the
television? Would it be, you know, hey, my
own kid is bringing me bad news.And how would he kind of
indirectly involve you in his gambling?

(01:50):
Well, my father was an inveterate gambler, big time
gambler, the mortgage literally riding on the outcome of his
bets. And he didn't gamble at the
racetrack or casinos be bet on ball games.
I liked watching the games with him.

(02:10):
I liked following it. I liked actually the
exhilaration of it. We're winning or we're losing.
And so if my mom and sister fled, a lot of times I would
stick with him. And why would they flee?
Because he had a volatile temper.
And if the if the games were notgoing his way, and if the the

(02:32):
Christmas money or whatever it was, was going down the drain,
it wasn't pleasant. In volatile temper means what?
Volatile temper means throwing things, cursing, yelling, just,
you know, not not good, not good.
But I'll say this, my dad was aninteresting guy.
My dad was like out of a movie, or at least so I thought he was

(02:56):
funny. He was charismatic.
He was very smart at his best, if if he was flush with, with
cash, he was very, very generous.
So, you know, I wanted to be close to him and that was a way
in which we could be close. So you're 18, a high school
senior, and the police come and knock on the door.

(03:20):
What do they say? It was a Friday afternoon, May
15th, 1970, and I opened the door.
My mother was right behind me and the cop looked past me and
said Mrs. Costas and she said yes.
And he said please sit down. And she said my husband's dead,

(03:41):
isn't he? And he said, yes, ma'am, he is.
And he had had a heart attack walking through JFK airport.
From what we can surmise, he wasdead before he hit the floor.
Sunday at the wake, a gambling buddy of his walks in.
Guy's name was Steve Collins. And he handed me an envelope, a

(04:04):
thick envelope. And he said your father was up
when he died. Give this to your mother now.
A bookie will never pay a dead man.
So when Steve learned that my dad had died, he went to the
bookie and said John sent me to collect.
We got the money. There was $6000 in $100 bills.

(04:25):
That was my father's entire estate.
How did you handle his death as well as your mom and sister?
Well, he was a difficult man. To this day, if you don't
resolve in some sense, a primaryrelationship in your life, you
think about it. He put my mom through the

(04:45):
wringer. She obviously loved him.
So it wasn't any anyone emotion.But certainly among those
emotions is I'll never know. I'll never know how he would
have reacted to me as an adult and to the life I could have

(05:06):
made him part of. I'll never know.
So it's 1966 and your mom's driving and gets in a car
accident that nearly takes her life.
What happened? Rainy day or night, she's the
only passenger car skids off theroad, smack head on into a tree.

(05:31):
The doctor later told my dad that he had never seen someone.
We're not talking about illness,but with traumatic injuries to
that extent. Who survived?
I mean, every bone in her body was practically was broken,
cranial injuries, everything. But somehow she she survived it.

(05:54):
The the pain and discomfort thatshe not only put up with and
lived through, but laughed through very often, had a happy
fulfilled life despite what she had been through was an amazing
thing. What do you think he learned
from her? She had a great sense of humor.
She was self deprecating. She took a great deal of

(06:15):
pleasure from the fact that she could turn on the TV and see her
son. And I wasn't fully aware of
this. And one time I was in some kind
of storage room in her house, and she had stacks and stacks of
VHS tapes, Bobby on Hollywood Squares, Bobby on Johnny Carson,

(06:37):
Bobby on World Series. But she had like 300 of them
that she'd cataloged herself. And she got you a tape recorder
at 16. Oh, yeah, a Christmas present
when I was 15 or 16. And sometimes I would sit in
front of the television set and,you know, turn the sound down

(06:59):
and try and broadcast the Yankeegame with or the Met game.
And my initial thought then was this is much harder to do than I
ever imagined. One quick favor before you
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