It’s the sport that I still follow most closely. When we resumed in the ‘90s, I got to call World Series games with Joe Morgan and Bob Uecker. I was lucky enough to be part of the great NBC coverage of the game of the week in the 1980s. Baseball was always something that I was interested in doing. If I was hitting a Wiffle ball or throwing a tennis ball off the stoop, I could hear Mel Allen, Red Barber, or Vin Scully in my head. If I was shooting baskets in the schoolyard, I was hearing Marty Glickman, or then Marv Albert. No matter what the sport was, I could never separate the voices of those sports from the games themselves. When I was learning sports and learning baseball, baseball was the unquestioned national pastime. Of course, the Olympics fall into their own category as kind of a different thing.īut to your point about baseball - I’m 70 years old. Other than baseball, that was my favorite thing that I ever did for NBC Sports. There was a whole constellation of stars around the league. Then that blended right into Kobe (Bryant) and (Shaquille O’Neal). Our first year, in 1990-1991, was the first of the (Michael) Jordan championships. I wasn’t so happy about giving up the NBA when NBC lost it in 2002. Could I get engaged sometimes if the circumstances were right? Yes, but I did it on professionalism. But I didn’t feel toward the end, and actually for quite a while, as if I was the perfect person to say, “Hey, everybody, I’m just as excited as you are about tonight’s game!” I was doing it on professionalism. You’re watching Aaron Rodgers duel Tom Brady? I’m good with that. I can still get engaged watching the game. Not that I felt hostility toward it, but for a long time I felt ambivalent about football and some of the issues that surrounded it. I wouldn’t have done it for anybody else under any other circumstances. Not only to give up the NFL, I initiated giving up the NFL twice during the course of my career and only returned to it when NBC got “Sunday Night Football” because of my relationship with (former NBC Sports head) Dick Ebersol. Why has baseball been a lifelong love affair where it seems you were OK to give up the NFL or the NBA? You can listen to the entire conversation by clicking on the link at the end of this Q&A, which has been edited for length. Costas was a guest on my sports media podcast this week and we had a terrific conversation on a variety of topics, including where he sees himself as a baseball broadcaster at age 70, whether network broadcasters can be critical of NFL owners, his thoughts on Vince McMahon, and the time Jack Nicholson declined his interview during the NBA Finals.
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