During his 13th appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Bob Costas spoke candidly about growing up watching games alongside a father who was “an inveterate gambler,” an experience that led him to refuse to read promos for sportsbooks while broadcasting games for MLB Network and TBS.
Here’s what Costas, who retired from play-by-play work at the end of last season, had to say on those topics to host Kristen Welker:
Welker: “You write about the fact, and you’ve talked about the fact, that your father also had a really big impact on your life. He tragically passed away of a heart attack when you were just 18 years old. How did that impact who you are, the person you became, the icon that you became?”
Costas: “My father was an inveterate gambler, and I looked at him as a sort of Runyonesque character -- colorful, humorous, high-spirited. But it would be untruthful to say that it was all smooth sailing. There was a lot of trauma in our family life because he had a volatile temper and the mortgage was often riding on how his bets went. And he didn’t bet on, you know, cards or poker games or crap games or go to the racetrack. He bet on baseball, football, basketball games. And so I bonded with him by following those games. I’m sure I would have been a sports fan anyway like most of my fans, but I became even more knowledgeable. I became granularly knowledgeable because he was following all this so closely, and I was by his side.”
Welker: “Do you think the fact that everything, every sport, every game is accessible, does that take away some of the excitement?”
Costas: “It does diminish it to some extent. There are also different aspects to it as well. Gambling -- so much of it is, for at least some portion of the audience, transactional now. You got a bet on the game, you have a different relationship to how that game plays out than if you’re just rooting for your team.”
Welker: “Given your father, your background, your childhood -- you’ve witnessed this up close and personal. Is this personal for you? Are you concerned on a personal level about what sports betting might mean for some families?”
Costas: “I am. And on both the Major League Baseball Network and when I did a handful of games on Turner, I refused to read the gambling promos. They had to have someone else read them or use a ‘voice of god’ type person to read them. I just couldn’t in good conscience encourage people to do something which I know -- for some of them it’s obviously just a little recreation and it’s fine -- but there’s an insidious aspect to it that I didn’t want to be part of.”
