Bob Costas

have spoke about the entire episode. Uh. Instead, we touch on it a little bit. You see, Bob is a hero of mine professionally because he, throughout his career has seen these injustices in the world in our country and been unable to just ignore them. He has to talk about them, even if it affects him professionally, and it has, and that's a big deal, and we talk about it

a bit. We also bring up Minnesota a little and what he thinks the responsibility is of a broadcaster or uh sports analyst and and all that stuff is incredible and and listening to it now resonates even more. But I wanted you to know where we were when we recorded it, and we hope to get Bob back on to go more in depth about the revolution that we see in our country right now that I think is a long time coming. But I hope everyone who listens is safe, sound, and strong. And now my interview with

Bob Costas. My name is Jensen carp and I'm a sports fan and I'm ready for teams to come back as long as everyone's guaranteed safety and I can handle total silence during games. It's gonna be crazy to have no fans cheering during time outs enough to hear like Matt Shoemaker cough in between pitches or make out the click of Terry Stott's pen. Imagine Century Link as quiet as a library. Melvin Gordon's right, though, he'll have it way easier with no fans because he's already played for

the Chargers. Well, luckily you're here listening to me talk to athletes and sports industry professionals about what they're doing in quarantine, hoping to figure out if famous competing as much as I miss watching it. This is the no Sports Report. It would be near impossible to find an important sports clip from the past four decades that isn't

narrated by the unmistakable voice of broadcasting legend. Bob Costas, the twenty three time Emmy Award winner, has put words to timeless moments like Jordan's Game six final shot, Derek Jeter's last game walk off base hit, where the infamous O. J.

Simpsons split screen high speed Chase. He frontline the Olympics as host for almost twenty five years and has covered Super Bowls, the Stanley Cup Finals, the NBA Finals, the US Open, all three legs of the Triple Crown, NASCAR final races, and Championship boxing matches, and he still found time to appear in theatrical masterpiece Basketball. He had his own talk show on both NBC and HBO, interviewing guests like Paul McCartney, Martin Scorsese, Jerry Lewis, and David Letterman.

He's now currently working at MLB TV, focusing solely on his true passion of baseball, after a somewhat mysterious departure from NBC, a network he worked at for almost forty years, but had recently come under fire for on air comments that were labeled as political and critical of sports leagues. There isn't much Bob Costas hasn't done. Except survive a pandemic.

We talk about what he's up to, the importance of sports for normalcy, and why it's just impossible for him to keep quiet when he knows there's an elephant in the room. For this episode, I'm honored to talk to an idol of mine, sportscaster Bob Costas on the No Sports Report. How from Bob Costas to accept Press one. Hello, Mr Costas, Hello, how are you gentsen? I'm well, Thank you for doing this. I'm so excited to have you on.

Thanks very much. Well, I want to start off by asking you where you're quarantined at and with who and how have you been doing? Well? We're doing fine. My wife and I are in southern California, in Orange County, where we have a home. Most of the year we're in New York, but we happen to be here when COVID nineteen reached critical mass, so it was best to just stay here. So we're safe. We're healthy, so too is my entire family. Miss seeing family and friends in person.

But we're doing fine. Going on two and a half months. Yeah, it seems like much longer. For some reason. For the past four decades, you've had an assignment basically every day of your life. I can't see much more than a week or two that maybe was a vacation. What does it feel like to have the entire sports world for you come to a halt. Well, not as odd as people might assume. I'd already elected to take her off and leave some of the assignments that I've had for

a very long time. So actually, at this time of the year, I would have been doing baseball ordinarily for MLBM, and that would mean one game a week, but that isn't happening at all now. And if they resume, I don't know whether we would do the games virtually from a studio or even from home watching on a monitor. I'm not sure what the circumstances would be. But luckily, one of the few upsides of this situation is that

we have the modern technology. We have Skype, we have Zoom, we have FaceTime and other modalities that we can use uh to put programs on. So I've been able to be on the air on MLB, N on CNN, on MSNBC, on ESPN fairly regularly over the last month to six weeks. Well, how have you been passing the time outside of sports, not able to go into the wild or anything like that,

like other than the MLB work. What have you done, you know, just like us regular Joe's Yeah, And as people would imagine, I like to go into the wild under normal circumstances, deep sea diving, bungee jumping, hunting wild boar with a crossbow. That's pretty much a costUS kind of thing to do. So I'm deprived of that pasttime. Actually, what I've done, there's always we all have books on the show that we've been meaning to read. Those books come down from the ol. We've got a stash of

old movies to watch. I have capta into some of the archival stuff that the various networks are showing. So I've watched Old Masters on CBS, and Old World Series on n O b N, and old NBA Finals on NBA TV, and I'm sure all sports fans have done

at least a bit of that. As a matter of fact, this weekend on MLB N there's a Derek Jeter Parathon which I host, showing the entire broadcast of thirteen different milestone Derek Jeter games, The Flip Play, the Mr November Homer, his three thousand face hit, a game in which he went five for five, his walk off hit and his last at bad at Yankee Stadium, the play where the kid reaches over in right field and he gets a

home run out of it. Out of those thirteen games, I happen to have called four of them, so I'm connected to those more than the other nine. But in each case I introduced them and then have something to say about the game on the back end. But we will show the entire broadcast as it happened on whatever network showed it. Yeah. I mean that that is the thing that people have sort of connected with, and we saw it with the Last Dances, that people are feending

for sports and they will watch the watch replays. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean the Last Dance I think would have been a big hit no matter what, even had it run as scheduled during the NBA Finals in June, which they expected, of course would be the case. I think it would have had an impact no matter what. But now, especially so because it's original programming, and it was compelling original programming,

so people um really gravitated toward it. Well, I wanted to ask you because you obviously had a front row seat for you know, sports in general since the eighties, and I guess I never truly realized how much society like looks to sports for normalcy. It's almost like everyone right now is just waiting for the basketball playoffs, are, like you said, the baseball season, to look at each other and say, see, it's safe out there. Why why is it that that everyone is looking to sports to

tell us that. Well, I think you said it, Gentsen. It's part of what is for many people the normal rhythm of their lives. The biggest games, the biggest events of course stand out, but just the idea, whether you're paying close attention or not. But there's a baseball game, especially baseball, because baseball plays every day. Your team plays virtually every day from spring through early fall. So the idea that the ball games on on the radio on television,

you're half paying attention to it, half not. Then when the biggest games come, you're really bearing down on it um And the same thing is true. You don't have to watch every play of a football game or basketball game or hockey game, but you know it's there and the highlights on Sports Center or reading about it in the paper or on the internet. That's part of people's lives, and when that's taken away, it's just one more example

of what feels normal that isn't there anymore. For the time games, I'm really honored to talk to you today because you've been an idol for me with how much in your career you've decided to speak your mind and if you feel something is wrong, to say it, and sometimes you've paid a price for it with your work. And we're hearing more and more about these athletes like Dame Lillard and Blake Snell, guys who are raising concerns

about returning to sports. Do you see players having a responsibility right now to the game if if they're being asked to sort of in other words, be guinea pigs for what's been going on, Well, they have a responsibility in a broad sense in these times and other times they have a responsibility to the game, the institution, uh

to promoting the game. In some sense, some players are better situated to be able to do it than others, but they all have some responsibility to the game, and they all should understand that they have an interest in the business doing well. But that doesn't mean that automatically you make yourself a guinea pig. There are a lot of vagaries here, a lot of needles to be threaded, um or is it thread a lot of needles to pa to pass? It's a fasting fabric. Yes, yeah, there

there you go. And and so it's right for the players and their representatives to raise legitimate questions. If you're talking about NASCAR or golf or tennis, non team sports, it's easy to see how they could social distance and as long as they're careful and responsible, come back more

readily than team sports. So it isn't just a matter of compensation or what the playoff format is going to be in the case of the NHL or the NBA, it's a matter of do we feel confident that it makes sense, because sure we have a responsibility to the game. Sure we have a responsibility to our employers, the teams, but we also got a responsibility your families and our loved ones and other people around us. So we've got to be as a group, we've got to be assured

that this makes sense before we go forward. And we're talking in a week when there's major civil unrest in Minnesota regarding racial tension. I guess my question to you is why was being heard as a sports reporter so important to you? As you know, a journy to listen a broader sense. But why did you always want to be heard with what you were thinking? I thought it was a matter of a responsibility to the audience. UH. I wanted to respect their intelligence. A lot of this

stuff is right out in front of them. It wasn't so much that I was doing investigative reporting. That wasn't my role, and we didn't have the resources and wherewithal to do that at NBC Sports. Neither do the other networks. ESPN does. They've got a different situation. But this isn't front Line on TBS, this isn't Nightline. But I thought that an element of journalism and commentary UH done judiciously

at the right time. I thought an element of that should be part of the presentation, and that people might have expected because of the various roles I had played, mostly in sports, but sometimes outside sports, that people might have expected something different from me than they would from others. And I just could not ignore elephants in the room. You're doing an Olympics from Sochi, Russia or Beijing, China. It's impossible not to acknowledge that these are authoritarian states.

It's impossible not to acknowledge when political differences and and long simmering national and ethnic resentments overlapped into the Olympics. No matter how wonderful the Olympics may be, overall or more of it should just be about the joy of the competition and the drama and the human emotion. But anyone who thinks that the Olympics have ever been free of politics might as well be living on another planet. And there have been times, not a lot, but enough

to take note of. There have been times when sports was where societal issues have played out, often as regards race. So those who say stick to sports never heard of Jack Johnson. They never heard of Joe Lewis and the way he was positions so that white Amarica could feel more comfortable with it. They never heard of Jackie Robinson or Arthur Ash or Billy Jane King or Tommy Smith and John Carlos. They never heard of CTE in football,

steroids and baseball. They never heard of uh states and municipalities um purposing tax dollars for stadiums and other benefits for teams, which may or may not be the right thing to do, but certainly should be discussed. I guess they never heard of any of that, and they just want to hear here's the groundball to short stuff. Well

that's the case. They got the wrong guy. And me, well, I genuinely from my heart, hope there are more of you when we return back to the field after this, because I think it's it's extremely important with what we're facing right now, and thank you, and with the Major League Baseball that leads us directly into what you do now at the network, and Baseball seems to be inching closer and closer. There are major hurdles still on the

players union side, as you know. Do you think no matter what happens here though, even if they come to a conclusion this is an ASTERIX season, of course it is. Even if everything was fine, even if there were no concerns everyone believed they had buttoned up in terms of the health and safety aspect, even if there were no financial issues. It has to be because you're playing at most half a season, you're playing it under odd conditions.

People have hit four hundred over the course of eighty games, whether it was overlapping one season to the next, that that's happened since Ted Williams, but no one has done it for a full season, and if someone happens to do it, that's just one example. Happens to do it now, that would have an asterisk next to it, and a

championship would certainly have an asterisk next to it. You have a new playoff format, and teams that get into the playoffs prior to this have always been vetted for a full season, or as in the case of when they missed some games because of the labor stoppage, or even where I think eighteen games were locked off the beginning of the season before they finally got them back on the field, those were always close to full seasons.

They didn't play the full one fifty four in because of the flu pandemic, but they played enough of the season for the championship to be legitimate, and nothing's ever been close to this. So I think people will have an asterisk in their minds after it, even if the record book doesn't officially note it that way. But they'll also be understanding. If it happens because of a labor and money squabble, they won't be understanding. But if they're

only able to play. However, many games that they're able to play and play them under the altered circumstances made necessary by this unique set of conditions. I think people will be happy to have sports back in some way, and they'll be understanding of the differences, and they'll put it in the category of a one off. Sure, And and the Olympics obviously decided to do something else. When it comes to the Olympics. There's no host or analyst or reporter or any of those roles you've played for

the games that come to mind more than you. For Americans, it survived terrorist attacks, it survived Boycott's Do you still fear this gathering even? I mean, in the past you've sort of hinted to the idea of what a Petrie dish it is. Anyway, now you're adding on a pandemic that we might not yet have a cure for. Yeah, had they gone ahead, and I didn't think there was

ever much of a chance, and they would. But had they gone ahead this summer, of all the sports that should not have returned, or all the events, the Olympics were at the top of that list, because you would have brought competitors from virtually every country on the globe into one place from Pete together to live close to one another in the Olympic village. Plus everybody on their delegations in theory, the spectators, in theory, the media, and

then go back. There are one hundred plus respect two hundred plus in the case of the Summer Olympics respective countries more than ten thousand athletes. Um, you don't have to be an epidemiologist to realize that that would be a true Petrie dish for the thing exploding once again when we look one when they hope to be able to hold it. Tokyo, I'm not Dr Fauci, I'm not an expert. As he has said about this and other circumstances.

We don't make the timetable, the virus timetable. So uh, if they can responsibly do it a little more than a year from now, great, but we gotta wait and see after this more with broadcast legend Bob Costas. Right now, Feeding America is working tirelessly to ensure our most vulnerable populations, like students who are out of school, the elderly individuals whose jobs are impacted, and low income families continue to have access to food and other needed resources during the

COVID nineteen pandemic. The Feeding America Food Bank Network is committed to serving communities and people facing hunger in America, and their greatest need is donations and support of local food banks. This podcast is committed to donating a portion of the proceeds from the show to Feeding America and we hope that you can join us in this effort to find out how you can help Eating America dot org backslash COVID nineteen. Now here's the rest of my

chat with American Treasure Bob Costas. You have been all over the place doing some you know, last dance press here and there. You obviously were the voice for Michael Jordan and many of his big games. I wanted to know what you thought of this past two weeks of some former teammates coming out and sort of starting to question the series narrative and what Jordan's kind of expressed and who he really was. I mean, you were there, what what do you think of of some of these

new conflicting reports. Well, I was there for all the games and for some of the interviews surrounding the games, but I wasn't there day to day. I wasn't in Chicago, like the reporters who covered the team day to day at the practices and privy to all of that sort of stuff, and I don't I don't think any one reporter was privy to all of it. A lot of it happened in their personal interactions. So Horace Grant can have his take, Scotty Pippen can have his take, and

they're entitled to it. I thought that the the series did a very good job with the abundant material they had. Nothing is definitive nothing. Even the best of ken Burns doesn't have every voice, every perspective on whatever subject he's covered. But when you look at the Last Dance, you realize that this is an excellent piece of work. It had elements of journalism in history, but mostly it was just

it was a wonderful bit of storytelling. And when something that is that widely seen, obviously the principles those involved are going to have an interest in how they're perceived, and they have every right. Even though the Carsman, for example, was interviewed for the Last Dance, but he has every right to try to further his perspective or clarify whatever he thinks has to be clarified in the aftermath, you said you've been watching some of the old broadcasts in

the past during pandemic. I want to know. You've been with so many incredible voices in the booth over the years, as a partner, as a team. Now that you have revisited, do you feel like there's anyone that you jelled with the most. I was very fortunate. I jelled with almost all my partners. A Madrashad and I didn't call games together, but we worked in the studio on football. He was the guy on the sidelines and a very good sideline reporter, underrated.

When I was doing the basketball games, A mod and I always jelled personally and professionally. I got Bob Eucher from the very start. I knew how to set him up. I knew how to get out of his way. Doug Collins was a wonderful basketball analyst, in my opinion, the best on the NBA ever. And Doug and I, you know, fell right in to a rhythm. And I'm happy to say it, almost everybody. I worked with Tony Kubec in

the eighties on the baseball Game of the Week. All of the people I've mentioned and more remain close friends and I remain in contact with all of them, So that tells you what you what you need to know. But I wouldn't put anybody at the at the top of the list because it would slight too many others. A mod and you remind me of of some great NBA games, And as we wrap up, there's no baseball historian that means more to me than you. Thank you.

Do you think the Astros got the right punishment? What what? What would have what would have been your call? And also is this break going to help them? I think the break will help them because other things have taken center stage and everything else is put into a different perspective in terms of how much importance we give it. And they're not going to be any fans of the stand. So when the Astros, in theory play a road game, nobody is going to be booing them. They'll get around

to it. They'll still boot them in and beyond. But time tends to to take some of the edge off of that. And I think that to a certain extent, Rob Manford has gotten a bad rap. Five million dollars was the maximum penalty allowed by the terms of the agreement. Five million was the maximum find that he could levy on Jim Crane, the owner, and then he hits Hinge and Luna with the suspension of the year and Crane

immediately fires them. He needed to get the honest testimony me of many players in order to have the information necessary to reach his conclusion. If he had been able, he would have wanted to punish the players, but he couldn't have that fight with the players Association at this

point and still get the information he needed. As I've said before, I'm pretty sure that in the upcoming cb A, just as eventually Baseball and the players agreed that they should codify testing and penalties if you use performance dancing drugs. I think that there will be specific penalties for players if they engage in this type of activity going forward. So I think that Manford, under the circumstances, did pretty

close to as well as he could have. His biggest mistake actually came after the fact when he referred to the trophy, well, it's just a piece of metal, whether we're taking it away. That seemed too cavalier. He realized that afterwards and apologize. You know, I understand the anger on the part of players and a part on the part of fans, but if they were in Manford's position, he was constrained to a large extent. I think he did pretty close to as much as he could have

under these circumstances. But I think the circumstances will be different going forward. Do you think there's anything in the pandemic that we've taken on as a sort of new plan, a new strategy that you hope sticks around once we're free and ready to go back out there and hunt with you. I'm I'm gonna end with this. I've always thought. I've always said, why don't we do as they do in Asian cultures? Why don't we bow towards people? Just smile?

Just under normal circumstances, you're whomever while through the airport, you're recognizing the person you want to be nice. People want to shake your hand. You shake two hund hands a day. It's nothing against you, it's nothing against any individual out of us two hundred. The low beverages says you're gonna catch a cold him. So even when there's not a single COVID nineteen patient left on the planet, that's what That's something I think we can do without

going forward. We can fist bump, we can elbow bump, we can smile, we cannot. I think that's a good idea. Well, thank you and your your voice even calms me during this time, so I appreciate it, and thanks for talking about take care of good talking with you too. The No Sports Report is produced and distributed by tree Fort Media. The show was executive produced by Kelly Garner, Lisa Ammerman,

Matthew Coogler, and me Jensen Carr. Tom Monahan is our senior audio engineer and sound supervisor, with production and editing by Jasper Leek. Additional production help from Tim Shower, June Rosen, and Hayley Mandelberg. Our theme music is composed by Spilkis.

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