Bob Costas Goes for the Gold

When he was eight, he said he wanted to be President of the United States--"or at least a lawyer." By the time he was 11, he had decided that announcing sports might be a better way to spend his time. He amused himself by practicing play-by-play in his bedroom. His grandmother visited one day and overheard him.

"Who's he talking to?" she asked.

"Himself," his mother replied.

Bob Costas is still talking to himself; now he does it only as self-flagellation, muttering under his breath about how he could have done this or that better. He studies videotapes of his broadcasts the way ballplayers analyze their technique on game tapes, forever looking for the slightest hitch in his swing, any flaw in his delivery.

His obsessiveness has paid off. Three Emmys and four Sportscaster of the Year awards attest to that. In a profession dominated by clownish ex-jocks and theatrical egomaniacs, Costas stands apart--bright, articulate, witty and insightful.

Ironically, some of Costas' keenest skills are most apparent not in his TV sports work but in two relatively obscure interview shows he hosts. Costas Coast-to-Coast, which airs Sunday evenings, is the smartest sports conversation on radio. On TV, Later with Bob Costas features 30 minutes of one-on-one with guests ranging from Walter Cronkite to Marilu Henner to Richard Lewis to Barry Goldwater. As anyone constitutionally able to stay up after Late Night with David Letterman knows, Costas gets great guests, asks good questions and turns what could be a deadly half hour into one of the most informative, entertaining, best-kept secrets on television. Costas' mother, Jayne Costas, can muster only a modest interest in her son's sports broadcasts, but she wouldn't think of missing an edition of Later. The host himself admits that of all his current projects, he derives the most pleasure from Later.

But if Costas' skills are underexposed because of the show's inconvenient time slot, his next big assignment has no such drawback. He has been chosen to host NBC's prime-time Olympics coverage from Barcelona--a grueling task involving months of study and preparation and 14-hour workdays during the games. On opening day, he'll be on the air a marathon 11 hours.

"The thing that I want to make sure about," he says of the single biggest challenge of his career, "is that I can be myself, that my attitude and my sensibility can come across. I'm not interested in dominating the proceedings, but I want to strike a chord that's truthful for me. I just want my voice to truly be my voice."

•

Springtime in Las Vegas. Bob Costas is at the Aladdin Hotel, standing before a banquet-room dinner audience of former professional baseball stars and their wives. Garvey, Cey, Nettles, Bonds, DeCinces, Madlock, Jenkins, Fingers, Carlton--it's an impressive assemblage. Tomorrow they will meet at Cashman Field in a not-so-old-timers game billed as the Masters Baseball Classic. NBC will televise it. Costas will handle the announcing chores.

Asked to deliver a few remarks, he opts for a story about an incident he witnessed (text continued on page 140) during a 1977 Cubs-Cardinals baseball game in St. Louis. It was National Dairy Day, he explains, and befitting the occasion, Cardinals' announcers Jack Buck, Bob Starr and Mike Shannon were visited in the broadcast booth by the reigning Miss Cheesecake, who placed a serving of cheesecake in front of each announcer. This stunning woman, Costas recounts, was attired in a white one-piece bathing suit, with white high heels and a "Miss Cheesecake" sash draped across her chest. Despite so considerable a distraction, Buck unflinchingly continued his call of the game.

Costas' rendition of the story is seamless. He punches it up with a simulation of Buck's play-by-play, choosing names--Don Kessinger, Hector Cruz--true to time and place.

Finally, he says, zeroing in on the payoff, Buck says to Starr, "'Hey, Bob, what do you think of Miss Cheesecake?' And Starr, who wasn't paying much attention, thought Buck said, 'What do you think of this cheesecake?' And he says, 'I'll tell you, Jack, I'd like to eat that right now.' "

That, he declares with mock solemnity as the laughter subsides, was "better than Russ Hodges' call of Bobby Thomson's homer, better than Vin Scully's call of Koufax' perfect game. It was the single greatest moment in the history of baseball broadcasting."

•

Having delivered his cheesecake story, he takes an elevator up to his room and resumes his preparation for the next day's broadcast. While poring over statistics and player histories with an NBC researcher, he keeps an eye on a Reds-Cards game on television, occasionally scanning with the remote for other games or sports news. This is an old habit. "He'll flip through the channels, and while he's flipping, he's reading three newspapers," says a colleague. "That's where you see that faculty for taking in massive amounts of facts, just sucking them up and keeping them."

If there were a Trivial Pursuit pro circuit, he'd be the undisputed champ. The complete lyrics to the theme from Zorro are lodged in his brain. So is the Yankees' futile rally at the end of the 1964 World Series--every hitter. Ask him about The Honeymooners and he will cite story lines, dialog, the names of minor characters--even props.

Once, on Later, he impressed Dick Cavett with his detailed knowledge of Cavett's long-dead talk show.

"You're an idiot savant on the subject of that show," Cavett marveled.

"Or at least half of that," Costas replied.

Even in his early days, everything he heard, he absorbed. "He spoke beautifully," his mother recalls, "and he memorized everything I read to him. And repeated it."

On his third Christmas, his parents gave him a kiddie grocery store, a cardboard edifice big enough for him to walk inside, where there was a toy telephone.

"Can you talk on the phone just like your daddy?" his grandmother prompted. Obligingly, little Bobby clutched the instrument in his small hands and said, "Yeah, yeah, Abe, don't give me any of that shit."

A couple years ago, Costas attended a game at Busch Stadium in St. Louis and saw the Dodgers score nine runs against the Cardinals in the first inning, 14 in the game. Afterward, he stopped by the Cardinals' clubhouse to pay his respects to then-manager Whitey Herzog, whom he found standing buck naked, his great belly protruding like a sumo wrestler's. "I've never seen anything like that before," the manager said sullenly. "I don't think that's ever happened before, the first four hitters all getting two hits in an inning like that."

"Gene Stephens had three hits in an inning once," Costas offered matter-of-factly.

Apparently finding this arcane piece of baseball minutia neither useful nor amusing, Herzog fixed the broadcaster with a mirthless stare.

"The Red Sox scored seventeen runs in that inning," Costas added.

The faintest glimmer of a smile flitted across Herzog's ruddy face. Even a skipper whose foundering team had just been thrashed couldn't resist a man who knows baseball lore so thoroughly.

•

Costas' presence in Las Vegas is incongruous. This is a man who doesn't smoke, prefers iced tea or milk to a beer (he claims he has never been drunk), is careful about his diet and will walk through a casino without so much as a glance at the gaming tables. "Never gamble, Robert," his father counseled. Such a caveat from the lips of John Costas was no less contradictory than Babe Ruth inveighing against gluttony. By trade, the elder Costas was an electrical engineer; by temperament, he was a gambler who wagered year-round on whatever sport was in season.

The son of Greek parents, John Costas was an engaging, emotional man with a keen sense of humor, a volatile temper and an imposing physical presence--"a freaking horse of a guy," as Bob remembers him. The son inherited the father's humor and passion but not his temper or size (Bob is 5'7?). Father and son shared sports, the occasional game of chess, The Honeymooners and The Untouchables on TV, but they were not close. "I think my mother was more indulgent of my whimsical nature and of my daydreaming," Bob says. "My father was less tolerant of it. He felt that it had no practical benefit."

Some days, John bet as many as five games at $500 each. Bob can remember a tough-looking guy occasionally coming around the house to collect, but frequently his father won. Certainly, the Costas family never went without. During one stretch in 1966, John won an astonishing 18 consecutive baseball bets. Bob, 14 at the time, remembers accompanying his father to a doughnut shop in Brooklyn to collect the winnings from a bookie who looked like a thug from Central Casting.

Afterward, in the car, his father gleefully counted out $14,000 in $100 bills, equal to nearly half his yearly salary. The son had seen this routine before. "We've got Harmon Killebrew to thank for this handful, Robert," his dad would say. "And we can thank Mickey Lolich for this one."

Bob was 18 when his father suffered a heart attack at J.F.K. Airport and died on the spot. John Costas was 42. Bob's grandfather, his father's father, died of a heart attack at 39. The implications aren't lost on Bob, who turned 40 in March. Not all gambles are as easily ignored as those in Vegas casinos.

•

"There he is!" former Orioles center fielder Paul Blair greets Costas. "There's our slugger!" The Cashman Field clubhouse is bustling with semiclad All-Stars of a bygone era and one nattily attired sportscaster in his prime--all here for the Masters Baseball Classic. Costas worked out with them the day before, and now, knowing he's in for some harassment, he turns to Blair and takes the offensive.

"Hey, after you left, I hit a second round against him"--he points at a grinning Sparky Lyle--"and I made some good contact. I hit a three-hopper off the wall."

"Ahhh," Blair scoffs with a smile. "No witnesses. No witnesses." Lyle offers Costas no help.

Unless he is covering a horse race, Costas is generally the smallest man in any clubhouse. This bothers him not in the least. He has never been self-conscious about his size.

"With a week in the cage and a week of grounders," he tells Steve Garvey jokingly, "I think I could be ready for the Senior League."

"What a pay cut," Garvey says with a toothy grin.

As a youth on Long Island, Costas played baseball through high school. Scrappy infielder, good with the leather, but curveballs mystified him. So did fast-balls, change-ups, sliders--any white spherical projectile.

The Masters Baseball Classic doesn't hold the creative tension he is accustomed to because it isn't being televised live. It is, however, as close as NBC will come to televising major-league baseball until at least 1994. When NBC was outbid by CBS in 1989 and lost the broadcast rights for the next four baseball seasons, Costas was distraught. "A sad day, both for me and for the republic," he lamented. Privately, he chided himself for signing a new five-year deal with NBC just a year earlier without giving a moment's thought to the possibility that the network might lose baseball. "That was the dumbest thing I've ever done professionally," he says. "I just assumed that baseball was like a birthright to NBC. They'd had it all my life and virtually the life of television." He has since made it clear, not threateningly but as a simple fact, that if NBC doesn't reacquire baseball in 1994, he will leave the network.

As excited as he is to be hosting NBC's Olympics coverage, he says, "Personally, the biggest thing for me would be doing the World Series. My heroes were Red Barber and Vin Scully and Mel Allen and people like that, and I don't think they did the Olympics."

At the going rate--CBS paid nearly $1.1 billion for four years and is probably going to lose big on the deal--NBC doesn't consider baseball to be a sound investment. "It's a business decision that stands apart from Bob Costas," insists NBC Sports' executive producer Terry O'Neil. "But it would be a devastating thing to lose him."

Ultimately, Costas might have to make a choice. Does he want to be a wealthy, all-purpose network sportscaster or does he want to cover baseball, even if it means dropping out of the national spotlight? Costas has long coveted Jack Buck's job as the voice of the St. Louis Cardinals. The word in St. Louis is that Costas is the only broadcaster who could succeed the revered Buck and be accepted immediately by the fans.

"It's tough as hell to stand up here and try to be funny," Buck once quipped at a banquet, "when the guy sitting next to me is waiting for me to die."

Costas eventually finds his way up to Cashman's cozy broadcast booth. Just as 1971 Cy Young Award winner Vida Blue is about to hurl the opening pitch, the NBC truck goes down. A public-address voice informs the fans there will be a short delay because of "technical difficulties." The announcement is not well received.

"Technical difficulties," Costas muses. "The average fan is thinking, This is a day game, the players appear to be here. What technical difficulties could we be experiencing?"

Ten minutes later, he removes his headset. "Let me know if they start playing," he says nonchalantly and walks off.

The problem is solved before he returns. A hurried search is launched, but before concern escalates to panic, Costas reenters the broadcast booth carrying a huge plate of salad and a dinner roll. "If they're going to have a delay," he says, "they should make it long enough for a decent meal."

A decent game would have been nice, too, but this one turns out to be a yawn--a one-sided affair played at three-quarter tempo. NBC's production is salvaged only by Costas' deft interviews with players who shuffle in and out of the booth all afternoon.

•

Costas was a 21-year-old upperclassman studying communications at Syracuse University when he landed his first professional broadcasting job in 1973. A year later, he was the boy wonder at KMOX in St. Louis, the sports monolith of radio airwaves in the Midwest. Within two years, he was calling regional football and basketball games on CBS. NBC lured him away four years later. In 1986, at 34, he became the youngest person ever named Sportscaster of the Year by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. "He's probably the quickest success story in the history of sports broadcasting," says Buck.

"I would have been more than willing to pay my dues," Costas once remarked, "but nobody ever made me."

That first job back in his Syracuse days was doing play-by-play for the local minor-league hockey team. He applied without ever having called a hockey game. He didn't know hockey from haiku, in fact. He sent the station basketball tapes, explaining, "I don't happen to have any of my hockey tapes available right now."

He had worked only ten or 12 college basketball games when he was hired in St. Louis by KMOX to call American Basketball Association games. To win the job, he submitted a doctored tape of his call of a Syracuse-Rutgers game. Only the best sequences survived his inspired editing. He then rerecorded the new version with the treble down and the bass up so he would sound older.

That choirboy face was never an asset on the way up. On one of Costas' first NBC assignments, a producer, mistaking him for an errand boy, pulled him aside and said, "Do me a favor. Move my car." Some executives at NBC considered Costas' cherubic appearance a credibility problem. "How much older do you think you'd look," someone asked him, "if you wore a beard?"

"About five years older," Costas estimated, "because that's how long it would take me to grow one."

When NBC gave him a shot at baseball in 1982, his bosses had no idea that the sum of his baseball play-by-play experience amounted to four games. "I didn't lie," he shrugs. "I just didn't tell them."

NBC brought him into the studio to host NFL '84, one of television's most difficult assignments owing to the madness of doing live halftime and postgame shows for as many as seven overlapping games being aired in different markets. "It wasn't till we made the big announcement [that Costas was the new host]," recalls Mike Weisman, then--executive producer of NBC Sports, "that Bob sheepishly came in and said, 'Mike, I just want you to know one thing. I've never worked in a studio in my life.-- "

•

For a fellow who relies on candor and glib wit, Costas has shown keen judgment. Well, OK, there was that time in Syracuse when he hosted Bowling for Dollars for a week. Just 21 and obviously lacking in proper reverence, he couldn't resist wisecracking every frame. Bowling loyalists were outraged.

Even the tamest remark, he has learned, can roil the waters. Before the fourth game of the Dodgers-Athletics World Series in 1988, he averred on the air, quite accurately, that the injury-plagued Dodgers were fielding "one of the weakest lineups in World Series history." Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda heard the remark on a clubhouse television and used it on his team like a cattle prod.

The Dodgers won the game, Lasorda claimed Costas should be named MVP, and suddenly, the sportscaster was part of every newspaper's game story. Oakland fans griped and TV critics faulted him for becoming "part of the story."

To this day, Costas is flabbergasted by the whole thing. "What was I doing except my job?" he says, his voice an octave or two higher than normal. "Did I court this whirlwind?"

He is still utterly mystified by the response to another comment he made during game one of the 1989 American League Championship Series between Oakland and the Toronto Blue Jays. Down 7-3 in the ninth, the Jays would be facing Oakland's virtually unbeatable reliever Dennis Eckersley. Given the circumstances, Costas noted wryly, "You'd have to think Elvis has a better chance of coming back."

Three days later, when the series shifted to Toronto for game three, local bars displayed Bob Costas Banned for Life Here signs. He received threatening phone calls at his hotel and eventually resorted to changing his registration to an alias. When his name appeared on the SkyDome scoreboard, 50,000 fans booed. Amused, he stood in the press box and waved. A colleague, concerned for the broadcaster's safety, yanked him back down to his seat. "These people believed not that I was biased against the Blue Jays so much as that I was anti-Canadian," Costas says. "Of course, neither one is true, but how in the world are you going to refute that?"

Still, over the years, most of what has been said or written about Bob Costas has been kind. A good thing, too, because many who know him say he is overly sensitive to criticism. "He's bothered more than the next guy, no question," says NBC producer Ricky Diamond, who has worked with Costas for nine years. "But he cares about his work more than the next guy."

"I think he really agonizes over the message that people get about him," says longtime friend Roy Firestone, a sportscaster on ESPN. "It's one of his obsessions. He'll deny it, but it's a fact."

Costas denies it. He respects well-informed constructive criticism, he says, but objects to mindless cheap shots. "You could go on forever about what's wrong with TV sports: the shallowness, the inanities, the hype, TV's part in the corruption and crassness of modern sports. But sometimes writers take their understandable resentment and misgivings about television and project them indiscriminately onto anybody who's in front of the camera. There are people in TV sports whose work, for the most part, separates them from the general tone of things. Those people deserve the respect implicit in well-reasoned, specific praise and criticism and shouldn't be sneered at or unfairly characterized just because it fits somebody's stereotypical notion about what people who work in television must be like."

A 1989 Sports Illustrated commentary by Franz Lidz railed against network sportscasters who "never say anything" meaningful and, worse, "don't stand for anything." Lidz mentioned Al Michaels and Marv Albert but cited Costas as the prime offender, claiming he is "so used to slinging flutterball wisecracks that he won't throw the hard stuff."

Costas was outraged. "This was a dishonest, irresponsible piece," he said. "Here's a guy presuming to lecture about journalism. In the process, he violates every precept not only of journalism but, more importantly, of basic fair dealing, one human being to another.

"Since when," Costas wants to know, "does objecting to falsehoods and wildly out-of-context quotes equal being too sensitive to criticism?"

Frank Deford, who left Sports Illustrated to start The National and who now writes for Newsweek, thinks Lidz's evaluation of Costas was "one hundred eighty degrees wrong." The article, he says, should never have been published: "I'm amazed that it got through." Even so, Deford believes that Costas has a blind spot. "For some reason," he says, "Bob just doesn't rationally, logically understand that anybody who sits there and makes the money that he does and gets the attention that he does is going to have a certain amount of envy directed at him, and you just have to roll with those punches. It is his Achilles heel. If anything will drive him out, it's that."

•

Costas' success in so many different venues--all at the same time--baffles the brass at NBC. They know they have a likable, talented broadcaster on their hands. But how best to use him?

Sure, he has Later and NFL Live and hosts NBC's pro-basketball coverage. But that hardly seems enough, so NBC has considered showcasing him in other ways. Prime-time specials, perhaps. Maybe an occasional sports piece on Tom Brokaw's newscast. He has filled in for Bryant Gumbel on Today several times. (For a while, rumor had Costas heading for a full-time chair on the show, a position for which he insists he is ill-suited, claiming he would rather have his hair set aflame than have to rise at four in the morning.)

Former NBC producer John Filippelli says, "I don't know anybody else in this business who could host Nightline and then loosen the tie, open the jacket, go to another studio and sit in for David Letterman."

"The business," says O'Neil, "has such an appetite for programing on all fronts--entertainment, sports, news, you name it--that people in my position, seeing someone as capable as Bob is, are naturally going to load him down like a packhorse until his knees buckle. But that hasn't happened yet."

Buckle, no. Quiver, yes. During 1989, with pregnant wife Randy and three-year-old son Keith at home in St. Louis, Costas was toiling in New York or on the road at least two thirds of the time. That summer, Randy delivered a baby girl, Taylor. A few months later, she told her husband he wasn't spending enough time at home. Costas agreed and informed NBC his schedule had to be streamlined. He spends more time at home now, especially since his family temporarily moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, last September so he could be closer to NBC's New York headquarters during the preparation for the Olympics. The Costases plan to return to St. Louis soon after the games end.

•

On a blustery spring day, Costas is anchoring NBC's sports coverage from the network's studios in New York. "Did I get the Dodgers-Phils game backward?" he asks after sending the telecast back to Marv Albert in Reno for more boxing. Thumbing through index cards inscribed with results, he'd had three minutes to familiarize himself with 12 baseball games before reporting them on the air. The score in question is a late result from the previous night. He reported that the Dodgers won at Philadelphia, when in fact the Phils won in L.A. The index card was wrong. He mutters under his breath, grabs a newspaper and angrily turns pages. "Where's the game story?" he fumes. The game ended too late to make the paper. Somebody hands him a copy of another newspaper. Same problem. He throws it down in disgust. "I need a game story on last night's Dodgers-Phillies," he shouts. "We will correct that when we go on again." He takes a deep breath and walks out.

For the rest of the afternoon, Costas weaves in and out of NBC's sports programing, bringing viewers current with other developments. He ad-libs almost all of it, marshaling the right words in precisely the right order, never a hem or a haw, a stutter or a botched pronunciation. As he leaves the studio shortly after six P.M., however, it is not the things he did to perfection that occupy him, it is the mistake on the Dodgers-Phils score.

Fortunately, there is little time to brood. By the next day, when he will spend the afternoon at NBC taping interviews for Later, he must be conversant with the career particulars and current projects of Timothy Busfield, Ted Koppel, Roy Blount Jr. and Jerry Seinfeld. With baseball and old movies on the tube for company, he sequesters himself in a hotel room and plows through research until the wee hours.

Another day, same week, Costas initiates the morning with a 60-minute limousine ride out of Manhattan to the Connecticut Golf Club for a charity tournament. He agreed to play in the event months earlier, but today he is in no mood to play golf. He got only four hours' sleep the night before, he has a cold and the weather is miserable.

Mercifully, the tournament is canceled because of wet grounds, but lunch is still on. He joins a table that includes CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz, New York sportswriter Mike Lupica and a surgeon who has paid $400 for the 18 holes of golf he is not going to play with these celebrities. Costas and Lupica dominate a discussion about the worth of broadcasters to their employers. Hypothetical salaries are thrown around. The figures have seven digits. The surgeon, who has been sitting quietly, suddenly pipes up, "I'm in the wrong field. Surgeons can't make anything like that."

"But you're dealing only with people's vital organs," Costas explains earnestly. "I'm trying to get their earned-run averages correct."