Over the course of his five-decade broadcast career, Bob Costas has received a lot of awards. But there are two that matter to him most: The first is his 2018 induction into the broadcasting wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The second is the award he’ll be presented with on Saturday evening, the Stan Musial Lifetime Achievement Award for Sportsmanship.
The Musial Award is special “because it's St. Louis, because it's Stan, because it has a baseball connection. All those things resonate with me,” Costas said.
Named in honor of the longtime Cardinals player and Hall of Fame member, the Musial Award recognizes and encourages kindness, selflessness, integrity and civility in sports.
Before Costas was on the biggest stages of sports — including the Super Bowl, World Series, NBA Finals and the Olympics — he got his professional break in St. Louis. As a 22-year-old recent graduate of Syracuse University, at the urging of a friend, Costas applied for a job as the play-by-play announcer for the ABA’s Spirits of St. Louis on KMOX.
“My thought was they're not going to hire a 22-year-old kid,” Costas said. “I found something that I did on the campus station when I was 19 or 20, and I listened to it, and it was better than I thought, but I had someone edit out the choppy parts and then string together the calls that seemed smooth, and if there were any references to the score that was out of sequence, we edited that out so it seemed like one continuous 10 minutes or so. And then I had him rerecord it with the bass slightly up and the treble slightly down, so I would sound older and a bit more authoritative.”
Costas scored an interview and in his visit to St. Louis in 1974 met sports broadcasting luminaries including Jack Buck. At the very least, Costas thought, the interview would help him develop connections.
“Lo and behold, they hired me,” he said. “Perhaps the fact that I was willing to work for their initial offer of $11,000 a year, to which my thought was, if I had $11,000 and I had to pay you the 11 grand for the job, I would. So naturally I accepted it.”
The Spirits of St. Louis were short-lived after the team didn’t survive the merger with the NBA, but Costas’ career at KMOX thrived. He transitioned to calling University of Missouri basketball games.
Costas would also host sports programs and appeared on “legendary morning man” Jack Carney’s show. “It was all kind of a laboratory for learning how to be a broadcaster,” Costas said. “Jack Carney was instrumental because he introduced me to a broader audience, beyond the people who would have listened to a struggling pro basketball team that only lasted for two years.
He continued: “Jack Carney was a real sensation in St Louis. It's hard to describe for those who weren't around the quality of his show and the uniqueness of his delivery and the way he brought so many different elements to it. He was really a master of the form, and he was so popular that anything he thought was interesting, the audience figured it was interesting too. And so when he gave me his blessing, in effect, I think that made me a St. Louisan more so than calling the basketball games.”
Costas made the jump to the national stage with NBC Sports in 1980. That put him on a path that would lead to being part of the broadcast teams for Super Bowls, World Series, NBA Finals and the Olympics.
“I guess I was pretty versatile during the course of my career, not just the different sports I did, but the different roles I played,” Costas said, “Sometimes play-by-play man, sometimes host, sometimes commentator or essayist, sometimes interviewer. I guess I checked a lot of different boxes.”
Perhaps it was the mixing of those boxes that landed Costas in hot water with NBC. Prior to Super Bowl LII in 2018, he’d made remarks at a symposium at the University of Maryland in which he spoke of the dangers of playing football.
“The reality is that this game destroys people’s brains. Not everyone’s, but a substantial number,” he said at the time. NBC removed Costas from the Super Bowl broadcast team, and soon thereafter he split with the network.
“I knew the NFL wasn't [happy with me], and some of the people at NBC weren't,” he said. Despite the blowback, Costas’ approach to sports broadcasting allowed him to stay true to himself.
“I had to acknowledge the elephants in the room, so it wasn't just CTE and football,” Costas said. “It was steroids in baseball that were corrupting the record books, it was the International Olympic Committee’s troubling affinity for authoritarian regimes. It was the obvious sham that is the case in too many places in college athletics where there's almost no relationship — it’s not everywhere — but in many places between academics and athletics. It's right in front of you. It's the elephant in the room, and I felt like I had to acknowledge some of those things.”
After doing MLB postseason play-by-play this fall, Costas confirmed to the Athletic that he’s retiring from that role.
But why now?
“I felt for the last couple of years that by my own standards, I wasn't quite as good as I used to be,” Costas said of the decision he’d made more than a year ago. “There were games, individual games, or stretches within games, or moments within games, where I was pretty much as good as I've ever been, but I didn't think that I could consistently do it at the level that I had come to expect from myself.
“You have a certain lifetime batting average,” he said. “Some people are content as long as they can stay in the league to hit beneath their lifetime batting average. I would have been content if I could hit close to it, but I felt that there was enough of a falloff that I wasn't satisfied with it.”
St. Louis is still a special place for Costas. He’s spending the days before the Musial Awards visiting friends and family. Even after his career had left St. Louis in 1980, he stayed and continued to call St. Louis home until the early 2010s.
“I still feel connected to St. Louis,” he said. “I still consider it to be my hometown. I think if I made a list of my closest friends, more than half of them would be St. Louisans. Many of my best personal and professional memories are here. I think I have a great understanding of why St. Louis is such a great baseball city. I just feel a connection that will never go away.”
Costas, 72, isn’t planning to leave sports broadcasting entirely. Acknowledging the passage of time, he said he wants a slimmer portfolio but also said that he foresees an opportunity to rejoin NBC. Viewers got a glimpse of that at the conclusion of the Olympics in Paris when Costas and Al Michaels made a guest appearance on NBC.
“I don't know exactly what shape it will take,” Costas said. “I think that we all recognize, I do, and the people at NBC do, that after 40 mutually beneficial years that it ended on a discordant note, and it shouldn't have. I understand why they were uncomfortable with me hosting the Super Bowl, and I didn't really care one way or the other. I had done six or seven Super Bowls.”
“Sometimes you can get sideways with someone, but that doesn't mean they're not a good guy, and I don't have any hard feelings toward any of them,” he said. “With the NBA coming back to NBC a year from now and with that American Olympics looming in 2028, I think it's actually almost tailor-made for the kind of emeritus role that I'm looking forward to. I'm not going to call the games. I'm not going to be the primary host, but there are little things that I could do that would resonate with the audience, that would remind them of what the NBA on NBC was in the '90s, and what the dozen Olympics that I hosted for NBC over a long period of time was like.”
To hear Bob Costas talk more about his career, including what it was like to cover Game 1 of the 1988 World Series when an injured Kirk Gibson hit a walk-off home run, listen to St. Louis on the Air on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or click the play button below.
Related Event
What: Musial Awards
When: 7 p.m. Nov. 24
Where: Stifel Theater, 1400 Market St., St. Louis, MO 63103
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Jada Jones is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
