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That's sunrisechallenge ca. Few interests bring people together the way sports can. Last year, the top 10 most watched telecasts were all live sporting events, with the super bowl bringing in 121 million viewers. Now, about Costas.
A voice that has been central to so many iconic sports moments is marking the end of a legendary run. After retiring from play by play announcing, Costas spent four decades with NBC, covering nearly every major sport and hosting a record 12 Olympics for the network. I sat down with Costas to talk about the unifying power of sports and to reflect on his extraordinary career. Bob Costas, welcome back to Meet the Press and welcome back to NBC.
It feels like I never left. Well, it's wonderful to have you here and to be sitting with you. The NBA season is winding down. We're in the middle of baseball season.
The NFL is right around the corner. So it seemed like the perfect time to sit and have a conversation with you. You, of course, retired from a play by play announcing last year. What has this chapter of your life been like?
You know, I really think that for a number of years, I was rightly in an emeritus stage. It was only by a fluke that I came back and called a few postseason series on tbs. And I wasn't quite as good at it, to be honest, as I had been for 40 years. And when you care about your craft and you care about that particular sport, baseball, as much as I do, I just didn't want to hit beneath my lifetime batting average.
I could have continued, but it was my decision not to. But I think that all the other things, the interviews, the commentaries, the essays, all the other things that I did previously, I can still do, but at an emeritus position, not the front center guy anymore. You wanted to move into this next chapter on a high note. In other words, yes, I did.
I did. Everything at NBC for nearly 40 years was pretty fulfilling and we did a lot of good work together. My thanks to all the producers and all the people that I worked with, both on the air and off. But collectively, we did A lot of good work.
So that ended or included the sort of things that I hope for. And I didn't feel like this last chapter in baseball quite aligned with the standard of my career. And nobody wants the last note of a symphony to be discordant. Or if you're a basketball player, you never leave the gym on a miss, you leave on a make, so you feel good.
In fact, I was thinking about stepping away from the Olympics. I wound up doing 12 of them and on my 11th I was thinking, maybe this is enough. But then I got pink eye in Sochi, which was quite a cause celeb and memes everywhere. And you had to be good natured about it.
But you can't leave on the pinky Olympics, so I had to come back and do one more in real. So you did 12 Olympics because of that Pink Guy episode, which I can only imagine, like must have been one of the more challenging of your entire career. I think I was the 11th. I woke up the morning of the first telecast, look in the mirror and my left eye was like a slit.
I'm thinking, what is this? I didn't feel bad and the doctors told me, well, it's just some sort of little infection. Here's the antibiotics. It'll be done with in three days.
Which is why I said, okay, I can host for three days and it'll be gone. And then we realized when we jumped to the other eye that it was viral. And it doesn't go away that quickly. It was full blown viral conjunctivitis.
And some people said, because people just say anything now, there's no barrier of credibility, accountability, honesty, fairness. There's no barrier to commenting anywhere on the Internet. So it's like, oh, he couldn't bear to give up his seat. No, I was the only one who had prepared to do that particular job.
Everyone else had prepared to be at various venues. And so eventually they had to bring in Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira from the Today show. And the researchers wrote the copy for them. Of course, they're good professional broadcasters and they were able to take care of it.
But the reason why I stayed until I couldn't see anymore was because I felt it was my obligation to NBC and to all the people who had worked for all that time, two years or more, gathering information, preparing features. I'm the one carrying the ball for them. That's why I did it. Well, it was one moment in just an extraordinary career.
I'm going to name a few of the incredible moments of your career more than 40 years, hosting almost a dozen Olympics, or a dozen Olympics, as you say, countless World Series, NBA championships, Super Bowls. You are also the only person in the television history to win an Emmy in sports, news and entertainment. What does it feel like when you hear that canon, your body of work? Well, most I think about how fulfilling it was to do something I dreamed of doing as a kid, the sports part, and then to find out, Dick Eversole had to convince me, ran NBC Sports for a long time, started Saturday Night Live along with Lorne Michaels.
He had to convince me that I could do a non sports show. And later with Bob Costas, which followed David Letterman and later Conan o' Brien on NBC is one of the most fulfilling chapters of my life, really. And it has a new Life now on YouTube and I keep hearing from people, oh, I saw you last night with so and so. And when I first heard it, I think it was Dennis Hopper.
The person mentioned, was this a seance? Dennis Hopper's been gone now it's on YouTube. So it's gratifying to hear that. And I guess if there is anything that might have distinguished me to some small extent is that I checked a lot of boxes, I did a lot of different things and I hope I did them well.
Yeah. Well, let's talk about how your career started and the breadth of your work. I mean, you have shared that in your senior year of high school, you're actually cut from both the baseball and the basketball teams. And the backstory has actually reinforced something that was already inside of you, which was this desire to become a sports broadcaster.
Was that in your gut always? Oh, yeah. I mean, it shouldn't be framed as, oh, he wanted to be a ball player. And then we found out he couldn't.
Then they cut it and then he decided to be a broadcaster. I was smart enough when I was 10 years old to realize if I was ever going to get a Yankee Stadium without buying a ticket, it was going to be to be in the booth, not to be wearing pinstripes out there on the field. You know, you're in high school. I wasn't half bad.
I was good enough to be the last guy cut, but I knew I was going to be the star of the team. And it was just amusing that the baseball coach actually said to me when he cut me, he said something to the effect of, you're not bad with the glove and you can run a little bit, but I don't think you can hit your weight and I don't think you weigh 130, which might have been true when I was 16 years old. And then he said, have you ever thought about podcasting? I said, that's pretty much all I think about.
And he was a wry guy. And he said, good, try that. So he was onto something. He was a good scout, both of baseball talent lacking and maybe potential broadcast talent.
Not too bad. You took his advice? I did, yeah. Well, I know that in addition to that, you write about the fact and you talk about the fact, 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? Well, my father was an inveterate gambler, and I looked at him as a sort of Runyon esque 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 crack 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. Now, when you lose someone close to you, when you're so young and your own sense of yourself is not fully formed, you'll always wonder, I wonder to this day how he would have reacted to my good fortune. Could I have made him part of my life and the way I made my children and my friends part of that life?
I'd like to think so, but I can't know for sure. Well, I know that you have written about him and as you say, there were some complicated parts, but obviously a lot that inspired you as well. You did get your first job at NBC when you were in your 20s, 1980. So you look like you were 15 years old.
Talk about the fact that you had butterflies, but you say you weren't exactly overwhelmed. Can you take me back to that very first moment that Bob Costas was on air? What did it feel like? The first time I was on air was radio in Syracuse, where I went to college, and then radio in St.
Louis, and I wound up on CBS TV when I was just 24 doing regional games. But my first full fledged job in network television was in 1980 when I came to NBC and when I did my first broadcast, I was not yet 28 years old and I looked about half that. And the late, great Don Ohmyer, who ran NBC Sports and who had hired me, called me into his office and said, you know, you have a lot of potential. We really like you.
How old are you? And I said, I'll be 28 in March. He said, Dammit, you look like you're 14. And he actually said the following.
How much older do you think you would look if you grew a beard? And I said, oh, five years at least. And he perked up. He said, five years earlier?
I said, yeah, because that's the one it would take to grow it. So that idea didn't pan out. I guess to your question, I had butterflies, but I'd done well enough on the radio and also in my handful of opportunities with CBS tv, I'd done well enough to not feel overwhelmed. Was I as good as Dick Enberg or Al Michaels or anyone at that level then?
No. But I was good enough for Donald Meyer and other people to believe that I could become someone at that level. How do you go from being a 28 year old with butterflies to one of the greatest sports broadcasters in history? You know, as with a lot of things, it's circumstantial to some extent.
Had Bryant Gumbel not left sports to go to the Today show, then probably I would have remained as just a play by play guy. I say just there are many great play by play announcers who have become iconic for doing just that. But NBC asked me to step into Bryant's role and I explained to them I have almost no studio experience. In fact, the first few years that I did it, I just used not cards.
I'd never looked at a telephone before, so I had lived a lot of it. And then doing pretty well on the football led to me hosting the basketball when we got the NBA, and that's the Michael Jordan era in the 90s, and then also hosting the Olympics. But had Bryant remained, those jobs rightly would have been his and he would have been great at it. It's incredible.
I want to just remind you of some of the amazing moments in your career that you broadcast. Derek Jeter's final at bat in Yankee Stadium, Tiger WOODS Winning the U.S. open in 2008, Michael Jordan's final NBA championship, just to name a few. Was there one moment in all of your career that stands out?
Well, that 2008 U.S. open that really belongs to Dan Hicks, who called it so masterfully. And I always thought that Dan should have won the Sports Emmy for Play by Play that year because not only did he have Tiger woods, but he had Michael Phelps and his eight gold medals in the Olympics in Beijing. And whoever won it, I'm sure was great, but Dan should have won it that year.
I was just a host a lot of times. I was just kind of. I was lucky enough to be there. You were literally just there sometimes.
I was front and center. No doubt Michael Jordan's last shot for the Bulls. He did come back in a couple years with the Wizards, but essentially that's the way the curtain came down on his career. And I've always felt that a really good broadcast, a sports broadcast, if it's significant enough, should be the first draft of history, that you should hit upon the themes that are likely to appear in a well written story and Sports Illustrated a few days later.
And I think I managed to do that in that moment. There was no way you could have anticipated how it would end. Utah was winning the game, and had they won that night, Game 7 would have been on their home floor and they might have won that game. And so Jordan's career could have ended in defeat.
But I was aware enough of the storylines that were possible so that when it panned out as it did, I think I was able to put the caption beneath it that was appropriate. Did you know in that moment how significant, how historic it would be? I had some sense of it. Some sense of it, yes.
And how does it feel to be a part of a moment that big in history? It's exhilarating. It's completely exhilarating. And, you know, more recently, I was engaged, I was professional, but I didn't have the same feeling of exhilaration.
You know, I guess that happens with the passage of time. But the first time I was involved in a Super bowl, the first time a World Series, or through the years, I'm in my 40s then when Michael Jordan did what he did. You're in the prime of your life and the prime of your career, and you just hope that you'll be equal to the moment, the moment we find ourselves in now with sports. Because the industry is changing in a lot of ways, and I want to get your thoughts about that.
You've got giants like Amazon, Apple and Netflix who are getting into live sports coverage. How do you think that's changing the way people watch sports, absorb and enjoy these pastimes? Well, sports is coming at people if they want to access it from so Many different directions it used to be. This is how ancient I am.
When I was part of the NBC game of the week in the 80s, that really was the game of the week on television. In most markets, very few games were on tv. And if you lived in a non big league market, if you lived in Montana, the one game you saw was that game on Saturday afternoon on NBC. And so it registered with people in a different way.
Now, if you want to, you can access every game. There are highlights everywhere, including on the Internet. So information and enjoyment in one way or another are coming at people from so many different directions that even network television looks still at the center of it, but it doesn't own it. It doesn't have the complete primacy that it once had.
So someone like me, I guess I was lucky to land where I did. It was the modern era, yes, but it still had many vestiges of the classic era that had preceded it. And the games that I was involved in, including the Olympics, I think just landed differently than some things made today. Do you think the fact that everything, every sport, every game is accessible, does that take away some of the excitement?
I think 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 to bet on the game.
You have a different relationship to how that game plays out than if you're just rooting for your team. And then also there's the Internet where there are no misdemeanors, only felony. So you lose a game and the coach should be fired or the guy went over 4 should be traded. There's kind of a harder edge to it than it used to be.
And a lot of sports coverage that's not event coverage now is a bunch of people yelling at each other for an hour over a half dozen different sports stories. And it's all soundbites and arguments and clickbait stuff. And a lot of the journalism which used to be part of sports has been diminished. HBO Sports, which was the gold standard in that regard, is gone now, including real sports with Bryant Gumbel.
ESPN does fewer outside the lines in 30 for 30s than they used to. The relationship has always been an interesting one between sports and the outlets that carry them because you're simultaneously covering them, but you're also partners with them. You pay a rights fee. And so it's difficult sometimes to take a clear eyed critical view within that context.
I tried to do it judiciously as as much As I could. But the relationship between networks and sports leagues is the only one I can think of where the buyer has to continually flatter the seller. Now, most of the time I'm good with that because I saw my role as a textured role. Yes, you're a dramatist.
Yes, you're a reporter and maybe occasionally a journalist. But it's your job to emphasize the drama and the excitement and the shared experience. But there are also issues in sports which, generally speaking, television is less likely to delve into than print journalism is. You bring up sports betting.
I do want to ask you about that because it's generating billions of dollars in revenue. But we are also seeing, in some cases people's savings depleted. Yes, some people going into debt. Do you think sports betting should be more regulated now that it has been legalized?
I'm not expert enough to know exactly what the legislation would look like, but perhaps there should be more regulation. We're moving toward nearly all 50 states legalizing gambling at this point, and it's inevitable. If, in fact, as a group and over time, gamblers didn't lose more than they win, then no back alley crap game, no casino in Atlantic City or Vegas, no racetrack, and now bet MGM DraftKings, whatever it is, would ever exist in the big picture. The house always wins.
And some people, especially now because it's so easy, my dad had to find a bookie who was, in most cases, probably connected to the mob and surreptitiously had to place his bets. Now you've got young guys with a phone in their hand. It's right there. And some of those people are going to become addicted to it and it's going to ruin some lives.
That's inevitable 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?
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. I 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 I.
For some of them, it's obviously just a little recreation. It's fine. But there's an insidious aspect to it that I didn't want to be part of. Well, you talk about the fact that baseball is, in many ways your first love.
And we are seeing technological changes with baseball. The pitch clock. Do you think that these changes are good? Are they bringing in younger viewers?
Yeah, I think they were necessary. I was pushing for it for years before it finally came to fruition. I put it this way. For a long time, baseball is supposed to have a pleasing, leisurely pace.
It's not supposed to have a plodding, lethargic pace, which it had for too long in recent memory. A 3:2 game is not supposed to take three and a half hours. Now, that 3:2 game, same outcomes within it takes maybe 45 minutes less than that. And that pace, the players adjusted to it quickly, and I think fans appreciate it.
It's easier to stick with a game when you know it's not going to last forever when it has an appropriate pace to it. What I don't like, though, is I don't like the runner on second base automatically in the 10th inning. That's not baseball. They should play at least one inning straight.
And if you want to put someone on second base, the ghost runner, whatever you want to call it, starting in the 11th inning, go ahead. And I realize why they want to do it. Even though people talk forever about marathon games, why was it again, they win 19 innings, wins 21 innings in modern baseball, the managers don't want that to happen because it blows out their pitching staff. No one pitches a complete game anymore.
So if a game goes 19 innings, you're using your entire pitching staff. So that's the reason why they want to get them over more quickly. But I think they could play at least one minute straight. Okay, well, let me ask you about your other level.
We've been talking about the Olympics. The United States is set to host Summer Olympics in 2028. What makes for, in your opinion, a successful Olympics? When it comes to the broadcasters, what are you going to be watching for?
Well, compelling stories, and every Olympics has them. If it's a domestic Olympics, and I was lucky enough to do one in Atlanta in 96 and a Winter Olympics in 2002 in Salt Lake, if there are American storylines that are legitimate, I never like to just invent them or overhype them. But if there are legitimate American storylines, then that drives ratings and drives interest as well. There are always stories at the Olympics, and I think Roon Arledge set the template, and Dick Ebersol picked up on it.
And now his successors at NBC have followed this game plan, and it's the right one at the Olympics. The viewer is not as familiar with it in the intervening years. You know, at the super bowl, it's just the NFL Writ large. The World Series is baseball writ large.
But not many people in the United States are following most Olympic sports except during those two weeks. And you have to familiarize them with who the competitors are, including the non American competitors, what's their backstory, what makes them interesting, what's their journey been like. And then you can decide whether you like them or not, whether you're going to root for them or against them. That's a really good point.
And in some ways, you're filling in the blanks for the country on who they should be rooting for and why. You get to the super bowl, they've already decided whether they're rooting for against Peyton Manning or Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes or whatever. Yeah. Well, I had the wonderful opportunity to sit down and speak with most decorated Olympia Michael Phelps, and he spoke very candidly about his battle with mental health.
And one of the things that he said was he thinks that the Olympic Committee should do more to support its athletes, to give them mental health support. Do you agree with that statement? And do you think it extends to all sports? Yes.
And there are sports psychologists, for the most part, they're concerned with maximizing performance. But if you broaden that out, you can also talk about the mental health challenges that a certain percentage of us face. There should be no shame in that. I give Michael Phelps a lot of credit for being front and center about that and what he had to overcome and still perhaps to some extent has to be aware of.
Yeah, I think this is a legitimate issue. Michael talked with me about it, I think in 2016, before his last Olympics, or was it 2012? I'm losing track at this point. It all runs together at some point.
Michael Phelps talked to me about it, and I give him credit for being as candid as he has been. And within that context and based on your conversation with Michael Phelps, what would your message be to the Olympic Committee and frankly to other sports outlets? What should they know about what athletes need to remain healthy? Well, you have multiple levels.
You have the individual federations, and then you have the National Olympic Committees, and then you have the ioc, which encompasses the whole thing. So what happens within swimming or what happens within gymnastics is distinct from what happens within track and field. But in theory, any of those people could have issues. I mean, think about Simone Biles as recently as now.
I'm trying to rewind the clock here. I GUESS it was 2021 because they had to put it off because of COVID in Japan, and she had some issues with what they call the twisties being up in the air, and she had to bow out. And some people praised her for that, for her candor and being upfront about it, and others criticized her for, hey, an athlete's supposed to be tough. It's supposed to persevere through it.
So that alone, the differing reactions to that alone shows you that this is still an ongoing issue. Yeah. I want to talk to you a little bit about where we are broadly as a country. I'll give you another statistic about yourself.
This is your 13th appearance on Meet the Press. It is, yes. We looked, we checked. Lucky 13.
And it comes at a time when our country is very divided. I don't have to tell you that sports is unifying. People rally around their team, the games that they love. What can sports teach us and teach this country about unifying?
Well, the best of sports, especially team sports, is the idea that people from diverse backgrounds come together in the service of a common cause. That cause being to do as well as you possibly can as a team. And you look at the arena and you look at the stadium and you see people with differing political viewpoints and from different demographics, but they're all there rooting for their team. And in that moment, unifying.
Just look at the ratings. And especially true with football, we now have a fractionalized media universe. Shows that now qualify as hits get a tiny fraction of the rating that Seinfeld got or friends or ER got in the 90s because there's so many different options. But big sports events pull together a very large audience, and that audience comes from across the demographic spectrum.
So that in and of itself is unifying. On the other hand, some of the tone now that's around sports, as we talked about before, is angry and accusatory, and it becomes tribal sometimes in a way that isn't really all that healthy in my mind. But maybe the world has just passed me by. Well, politics is a part of sports.
Sports is a part of politics. Does it concern you that we are seeing, in some instances, politics infused in sports? I think that politics inevitably has intersected with sports. Anyone who says that politics has no place in sports has to be abysmally unaware of the history here.
A history that goes all the way back to Jack Johnson and Jesse Owens and Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson and Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe and Kurt Flood and Tommy Smith and John Carlos. Now, of the names I've mentioned, with the exception of Billie Jean, most of them are African American. But that's part of the story, because until fairly recently, in our nation's history, sports and some aspects of entertainment have been the only avenues that were broadly, and even then, there was a fight. Jackie Robinson didn't come until 1947 that were broadly accessible to people of color or where someone like Billie Jean King could make a larger statement about women's rights, not just within sports.
And to turn your back on that is to wear a blindfold. So when people say stick to sports, I think what they actually mean most often is stick to sports. Unless you're saying something that I want to hear and I agree with. But if you're saying something I disagree, but that comes from a different perspective, well, then you just shut up and say, there's a grand ball, a shortstop.
I never bent to that. Well, and in fact, in a few specific moments in your own career, you decided to come off the sidelines and to weigh into some divisive issues from gun control. You've spoken out about other issues that have gotten attention. How did you decide which moments you were going to come off of the sidelines and weigh in on issues that could be divisive?
Well, the gun thing was, and still is, widely misunderstood. It was about a gun culture in the country and in sports. And all you have to do is Google athletes with guns to see the long list of criminality, folly and tragedy attached to that. And saying that that's an issue is not the same thing as saying, let's throw out the Second Amendment.
So that was widely misunderstood. The Washington, then Redskins team name was an issue that NBC asked me to talk about because Washington was playing Dallas on Sunday Night Football only days after President Obama had talked about it. There were some protests from the Oneida Nation. Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, said, we'll have to take a look at it.
So they asked me to comment on it. And that's not going around on YouTub. It's two minutes. And I think I did a very nuanced job of saying, look, no one's accusing the Washington team, its players, or its fans of being racist or that is their intention.
But let's make a distinction here. Every dictionary defines Redskins as pejorative, derogatory, an insult, a slur. There are no such definitions attached to brave Chiefs, warriors, names that might be associated with Native Americans, but only objectionable if the symbols or rituals are objectionable. That's a distinction.
In this world, people often don't want to make distinctions. Everything's binary. If you don't like Trump, that means you must be embracing everything the Democrats are doing and if you don't like some of what the Democrats are doing, that must mean that you're a MAGA person. And there are millions and millions of Americans who are in between those two extremes and who recognize distinctions and nuance.
And I hope I'm one of them. Do you have any regrets about anything, about in any way dipping your toe into the topics that you just discussed? The one I have regret about is the gun thing, because I took for granted that what I was saying, and I was actually quoting Jason Whitlock, ironically now a hero to the right wing, but a writer then in Kansas City who had played football himself. And it was coming off of a tragic incident involving Javon Belchick, who played for the Kansas City Chiefs and murdered his fiance and then killed himself on the same day in a murder suicide.
I quoted from what he had written and I thought it was self evident that people would see that what I was saying and what he was saying was we have entered an area where the gun is too often the first resort, not as a matter of self defense. I thought that was self evident. I was wrong. And in retrospect, I wish that I had made the same point I wanted to make, but that I had made it in a better way.
I'm generally pretty precise, and that time I wasn't as precise as I should have been. But that doesn't mean that those who knowingly misrepresented what I said, not just in the aftermath, but to this day, that doesn't get them off the hook. You know, when people have a straw man, they don't want to give up the straw man. You clarify it.
Oh, okay, now I get it. It speaks to how divided our country is. Do you think sports can still be a unifying force? I mean, to your point, every one of the top 10 highest rated TV events in 2024 were sports.
Well, sure, it could be a unifying force. Everybody watches the Super Bowl. You watch the World Series, the NBA Finals, whatever it might be. The next day people are talking about it.
And there's generally for politics to enter into it. It should be about, hey, should they have taken this guy out and put that guy in? Would you have done this in this situation? What do you think about this guy being traded?
That's what it should be about. But there are times when it crosses over. You know, if. If your city is being asked to devote public funds to subsidizing the building of a new stadium or arena which is owned by billionaires, when there are other needs within your community that is a subject of debate.
From a political standpoint, it happens to be about sports. But I don't see how you ignore that. Now, you can ignore that during the game. Very, very, very seldom during a game itself have I ever alluded to any of those things when I hosted the Olympics.
And if there was interstitial programming, there's plenty of it during the Olympics. And I was asked to interview the president of the ioc. Then some of those questions. Anyone who thinks the Olympics isn't loaded with political overtones isn't paying any attention historically and at present.
So that's when I would make those points or ask those questions. But not when Michael Phelps was jumping in the pool or Usain Bolt was about to bolt out of the blocks. That, you know, when people say, I'm just trying to watch the game. Hey, Jack, the game, it's halftime.
Or this is a moment in between. This is not when the event is going on. I hope I'm not going too fast for you here. Well, one of the things that makes sports so unique right now is social media as it has changed the shape of just about everything that we do.
And you see athletes communicating with their fans directly. How does that change the shape of sports broadcasting? Or does it? You know, I think those of us who've mostly worked in network television have been fortunate and remain fortunate because we get a certain kind of access because the game is on national tv.
But it has changed the way athletes react to the guy on the beat. It's harder for the guy or woman on the beat to get closer to those they cover because that social media aspect, their Instagram or whatever it is, their X account is the way they speak unfiltered to their audience. And they're all making a lot of money and they have all kinds of hangers on in many cases and advisors who are telling them, why take the risk of being interviewed by this man or this woman when you could stub your toe. Now, that doesn't mean that everybody follows that path, but I think more people than previously follow that path.
And social media, as we talked about before, can be an awful place. You know, it's a place where truth and fairness are optional and where everything has to be at high decibels, everything has to be clickbait. No misdemeanors, only felonies. Just the other day I happened across this.
Someone was interviewing me about Michael Jordan's last game with the Bulls, which we've talked about. And I said, you know, I once crossed paths with Michael, and I kidding Him. I said, you, you messed up my place in the time capsule by coming back and playing with the Wizards. That should have been your last thing.
Clearly a joke, the way the headline of this thing was on some site. Bob Costas, still livid with Michael Jordan, lambast him for coming back to the Wizards. What? It's a harmless little joke, you know, and the person who did that knows that one of two things are true.
Either the person is a complete idiot, or he or she knows that, but they do it for clicks. And I think one of the things that is most important now for young people, and I think this could begin at the latter stages of grade school and should continue through college, is media literacy. Not teaching anyone or instructing anyone what to think, but how to determine what is credible as you go about deciding yourself what your opinion is or what your point of view is. Here's a conservative outlet that is credible.
Here's a bunch that are not. Here's something over here that's credible and a bunch over here that are not. Speaking of young people, if you could speak to a teenager who tries out for that sports team that they so desperately want to join and they stumble, they make a mistake, what advice do you give that person about how not to lose confidence in what their life goals might be? I can only imagine not having grown up with it.
Myself and my own children are in their 30s, and I think they predate the real torrent of this stuff that has occurred more recently, the effects of social media. You know, you hear about the depression and the low self esteem that sometimes comes from being mocked on social media at a time adolescence, when people are particularly vulnerable, when their sense of themselves hasn't been fully developed. And now if we're talking about sports where you could drop the pass that loses the game or miss the shot that loses the game. And if you're being mocked or taken harshly to task by people who either don't have the common decency or the intelligence to realize you're talking about kids here.
You're not talking about a guy making $30 million a year who you might hold to greater account. You're talking about kids here. So I guess that's just one more way. As fun and as beneficial as participating in sports can be, it's obvious there's one more area where potentially people can be cruel to you.
And part of media literacy is learning what not to pay any attention to, either about yourself or about the world. And just finally, as you think about the future, do you ever miss it? Do you ever think about getting back into the game? I don't miss what I used to do.
I think I can still be effective and still enjoy it in an emeritus role. So whatever I do should be in an emeritus role. But I have had more than enough times at bat to throw out a cliched type metaphor. I've had more than enough times at bat and many years ago, I passed the baton.
I passed the baton to Mike Tirico on the Olympics, and he's done a wonderful job for NBC. And I've always felt that there's so many different ways to be good. Mike is good in a way that's different than I hope I was good in my own way. And I'm generally, generally satisfied and gratified with what my career has been.
Anything I missed, there's always something more. I think we covered enough. Thank you. Good luck editing.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Beatboxing actually has hidden health benefits. It can help strengthen and protect your voice from injury.
See healthy living differently with Manulife. Visit Manulife Ca Health. Hey everyone. I'm Dylan Dryer, co host of the third hour of Today and mom to three wild boys.
I've learned a lot my years as a parent, mostly that I don't have all figured out yet. And I'm not the only one. This is my new podcast, the Parent Chat. Each week I sit down with someone new for honest conversation and real world advice about parenting.
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