Clay talks with legendary broadcaster Bob Costas

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 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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.

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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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, 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

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.

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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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,

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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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

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, 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 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 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.

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. 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 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 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.

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 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, 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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

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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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, 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 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

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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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?

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 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

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 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

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

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, 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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, 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

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 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. 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

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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.