BOB COSTAS… AND NBC
“If this is retaliation, what are they going to do next? Pelt me with cotton balls?”
In a recent interview with ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” Bob Costas acknowledged that his frequent criticisms of the NFL — which incidentally is the most watched entertainment in America and the only one of the Big Three sports leagues to which NBC has the rights — created the friction that produced the tension which led to the end.
His end.
His departure.
Firing?
Amicable parting?
Depends on whom you ask.
Which Bob Costas you ask.
Regardless, the departure of a legend is what we’re talking about.
But shed no tears for Costas; he wouldn’t want that. Not one bit. That’s neither whom he is nor whom he purports to be.
To say that Bob Costas has done it all in the world of sports broadcasting and journalism is to understate his legacy. He has crossed-over inside and outside the sports genre so often in a 40-plus-year storied and award-winning career that you need a scorecard to keep up.***
He has called football, basketball, baseball, hockey, boxing, golf, NASCAR and Thoroughbred Racing. He frontlined Olympics broadcasts for NBC from 1988 through 2016, acting as the prime-time host of 11 Olympic Games from 1992 until 2016. He has hosted both radio and television talk shows.
In 2005 Costas was named by then-CNN president Jonathan Klein as a regular substitute anchor for Larry King’s Larry King Live for one year.
He was a correspondent for Rock Center with Brian Williams in 2011 where he won acclaim for his live interview of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky concerning the charges levied against him of the sexual abuse of minors.
He has worked at HBO, the MLB Network and the NFL Network.
He provided significant contributions to Ken Burns’ PBS miniseries, Baseball as well as its follow-up The 10th Inning.
He also appeared in another PBS film, A Time for Champions.
He has been cast in several films and has done numerous voice-overs.
He has been alluded to in popular music (hear “Mafioso” by Mac Dre; “We Major” by Domo Genesis; and “The Last Huzzah” by Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire. He was also mentioned in a Ludacris ditty).
He has appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, Colbert, Real Time with Bill Maher, Cheers and Monk and guest-voiced himself on The Simpsons and Family Guy.
He was the play-by-play announcer alongside Harold Reynolds in Triple Play 2002 during the ballgame for both PlayStation 2 and Xbox.
He delivered the eulogies at the funerals of Mickey Mantle and Stan Musial.
At the very least Bob Costas has earned the right to be outspoken. For nearly four decades he was the face and voice of NBC Sports.
His time in front of the camera and across the airwaves beginning in the early-eighties and lasting until this past year coincided with the network’s heyday due in no small measure to its Olympic coverage.
Bob Costas was NBC’s Olympic coverage; his face and Joseph Abboud fine-tailored clothing was plastered all over the package.
Yet in spite of his wide exposure and unparalleled success in this milieu, Costas had forever harbored aspirations beyond sportscasting which meant that he had opinions.
Opinions he was willing to share. Sometimes he stirred controversy and tackled delicate issues like gun control and concussions in the NFL.
Aaah the NFL.
Wasn’t Costas supposed to promote the NFL and stick to the script if he was banking that buck?
Therein lies the rub.
He insists that he was not fired from NBC (until contradictory reports surface…sometimes from him).
He characterizes the notion as “an absurd misimpression.”
Expounding he says, “In 2012, I signed a new long-term deal with NBC which allowed me, at my own discretion, after the 2016 Olympics, to opt out of both the Olympics and football if I wanted to, or continue if I wanted to.
And I let them know, in 2015, that it was my intention to opt out of both and to enter into an emeritus clause in my contract. I’d be called on for essays or commentary or special events or special interviews that would seem to be a good fit for me. And I was excited about that prospect.”
But Costas was nothing if not realistic; he knew that were he to continue advancing his opinions, particularly about concussions in the NFL amid all of the attendant fallout the ripple-effect would cast the league in a negative light and God forbid that should happen.
In the eyes of the league, Costas would own the negative light.
After all, the multi-billion dollar NFL conglomerate was the essence of a cast-iron spired gated community impenetrable and high-handed, wielding enormous power and influence.
And making all the rules while skirting accountability, unlike any other in the history of modern sports.
“They’re a sports juggernaut, an entertainment juggernaut, and, in some sense, a cultural juggernaut,” Costas has observed.
About a year into it when it became clear that head-butting would be unavoidable Costas “suggested and both parties quickly agreed, ‘You know what? This has been a wonderful relationship for nearly forty years. We’ve hit a point of diminishing returns; let’s just close it out so that I can go someplace to do the kind of long-form interviews and the kind of essays and commentary and programming that I used to do at other times in my career and would still like to do.’
This is just a square-peg-in-a-round-hole situation.”
After not having hosted a single football game for NBC in more than a year, the network asked Costas to host Super Bowl LII due to a unique scheduling conflict.
(Costas had delivered commentary during the 2017 season kickoff game between the New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs and that in effect had wrapped it up for him).
“The only reason they had asked me to host that one Super Bowl was because, in an odd bit of scheduling, NBC had the Super Bowl on Sunday and the Olympics in South Korea started on Thursday, and Mike Tirico had succeeded me in both those roles…I was only doing it because they asked me to.
And when they [later] said, ‘Look, we don’t think you’re the right person to preside over a daylong celebration of football’ — a phrase that makes me roll my eyes because basically, the entire season, every season, virtually every bit of it on all the networks, is promotion and boosterism — I agree[d].
I’m not the right guy to do it.”
Continuing, “So I happily agreed with them and we quietly moved on from it.
But if I was fired, it’s a very interesting set of circumstances since, subsequently, months later, I hosted all three Triple Crown horse races.
I did a couple of essays for them, subsequent to that.
And even when we parted company, when we settled the deal, our understanding was that, if NBC ever got baseball back, that I would return to do baseball.
As it happened, only a month later, like I kind of expected, Fox bought up all the World Series rights.
If that’s the way a person gets fired, or if that’s the way that, as the New York Times, of all places, absurdly headlined, I accused NBC of retaliating against me — if this is retaliation…?”
Taking the high road, Costas makes it abundantly clear that he bears no animus toward the NBC suits.
He characterizes the brass as “not only good guys but they’re smart, good people. I’m appreciative of them. I’m grateful to them. It’s possible to have principled disagreements and still be friends, and, if they were cast in an unfavorable light, that was not my intention.
Because, in the big picture, not only do I not feel unfavorably toward them, I feel gratitude and appreciation for them. And that’s the truth. I have no reason to say otherwise. I’m not employed by them. There’s no political or financial concern here. None. That’s how I honestly feel.
I think people have different sensibilities about sports and focus about sports.”
All of this must be squared with a CNN Business report which flatly states that Costas told ESPN in that exclusive “that the reason he was cut from hosting Super Bowl LII was because of public remarks he made about the detrimental effects of concussions on football players.”
Frank Pallotta cites statements attributable to Costas which were made at a 2017 University of Maryland journalism symposium criticizing the NFL and its role in the concussion crisis.
“The reality is that this game destroys people’s brains — not everyone’s, but a substantial number. It’s not a small number, it’s a considerable number. It destroys their brains.”
His comments quickly went viral which of course prompted a swift response from NBC.
They made clear that Costas’ opinions were his own and not representative of the views of NBC Sports, to which Costas replied that “he wasn’t being critical of NBC.”
Fuel had been added to the fire in 2015 according to Costas when NBC killed an essay he wrote pegged to the release of the movie, “Concussion.”
The film, a sports drama about the doctor who discovered the link between CTE and head trauma — and the research which produced the finding — was discredited by the NFL but Costas wanted to use the movie to address the issue on national television.
“It was a natural lead-in,” he said. “I thought that the movie would make an impact, and I thought this was a way not only for NBC to acknowledge it, but to get out in front of it.”
The network, naturally bowing to the power of the NFL and its $9 billion contract with the league, had no choice but to feel otherwise.
A continued good partnership was far more essential to NBC than it was to the NFL.
It was business and business as usual.
“I think the words were, ‘You crossed the line,’” Costas recounted to OTL. “And my thought was, ‘What line have I crossed?’”
The NFL controls what it can, what it will and what it wants because of money.
It has it. It prints it.
And how.
An oligarchy.
They’re in charge. Period. The master of all it surveys.
They hold the trump card nestled in the deck.
They have the winning hand.
Every time.
Never mind that Costas was unequivocally and unabashedly right.
His conscience and voice regarding his “misgivings about football” and his forthrightness only serve to enhance his reputation for integrity.
When told to tamp down if not tamp out his social commentary which was deemed intrusive to the celebration of the game, he said no thank you.
In the meantime the NFL straddles the fence, enacting rules albeit tortoise-like to make the game safer and paying out millions of dollars in settlements to former players locked in the deadly clutches of CTE, all-the-while promoting the game as if there was no tomorrow.
That’s their job.
Ensuring self-preservation.
Costas did what he considered to be his job and lost the one he held so proudly — and nobly — for forty years.
Does it really matter if he retired or was fired?
He did what he thought was right.
And for him it was a decision he had to make.
*** For the record Costas has won eight National Sportscaster of the Year awards from the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association and was inducted into their Hall of Fame in 2012; four Sportscaster of the Year awards from the American Sportscasters Association; and 28 Sports Emmy Awards for outstanding sports announcing. He is the only person in television history to have won Emmys for Sports, News (Sandusky interview), and Entertainment (Later — NBC). He has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame (1995). He was the recipient of the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Basketball Hall of Fame saluting members of the electronic and print media for outstanding contributions to the sport (1999).
In 2001 Syracuse University, his alma mater, bestowed upon him their highest alumni honor, the George Arents Award for Excellence in Sports Broadcasting. He was selected as the recipient of the Dick Schaap Award for Outstanding Journalism in 2004. In 2012 Costas was presented the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 2013, the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications honored him with the first Marty Glickman Award for Leadership in Sports Media. He received the Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame on July 28, 2018 and a month later the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame announced that Costas would join ten other inductees including Dick Vitale, Jim Nantz and Bud Greenspan in a ceremony taking place on December 11, 2018.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in April 2019.]
