Photography by Mitchell Haaseth/NBC Universal, courtesy of Bob Costas
The renegade American Basketball Association was born in 1967, held on for nine seasons with an ever-changing cast of teams and players, then merged with the NBA in 1976. But though its life was short, the ABA produced some wonderful things: Julius Erving, the three-point line, the slam-dunk contest, and Bob Costas. When the Spirits of St. Louis played their first season in 1974, the 22-year-old dropped out of Syracuse University and moved here to call the team’s games for KMOX-AM.
There were some early growing pains, as detailed in Terry Pluto’s essential oral history, Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association. In the first game of the Spirits’ inaugural season, the team took a seemingly insurmountable lead, only to lose it in the final minutes. During the second game, with the clock winding down and the Spirits out in front again, Costas proclaimed, “It would seem that the Spirits have this one well in hand, but you can bet that the last thing coach Bob MacKinnon wants to see is a repeat of Friday night’s blow job.”
From that illustrious beginning, Costas has ascended to become the preeminent sports broadcaster of his time. Last we checked, his Emmy tally was up to 25. He’s practically synonymous with the Olympics and has helped make Sunday Night Football the top-rated show on TV. And having gone 10 rounds with sports cheaters and world leaders, he’s among the profession’s most respected interviewers—which makes interviewing him slightly intimidating. But despite all of those accomplishments, Costas has never again encountered anything quite as wild as the Spirits of St. Louis. We spoke by phone on a Friday afternoon, and I told him to call me Bill.
Hi, Bob.
You are smart to go by Bill, because I’m barely old enough to remember that a famous actor named William Powell played The Thin Man. Having not met you, I don’t know what your physical dimensions are, but if you are in fact a lean and thin man, then you’d fit the bill, no pun intended, Bill.
As a kid, what appealed to you about sports broadcasting?
I always had an interest in sports. But part of what interested me wasn’t just the games; it was the atmosphere of it and the feel of it. It seemed to me that there was a certain romance. The Yankees didn’t just play in New York. They traveled to other cities, and the broadcast came from other cities. Whoever it was, the Knicks, the Rangers, the Giants in football. Any game that you watched was coming from a place that as a kid chances are you hadn’t visited.
The best announcers capture that atmosphere.
It wasn’t just the game. It was the idea of, well, we’re in Cincinnati. Where did we go to dinner last night in Cincinnati? You got to try some Skyline Chili. Or whatever it might have been. That sense of the romance of the airwaves captured me early on. I became almost as interested in the announcers as the ballplayers.
Before you started your career here, you called pro hockey games in college.
I was a senior at Syracuse, but I had cut back my number of credits in order to do minor-league hockey, for which I was paid the princely sum of $30 a game and $5 a day meal money on the road. It was the actual league, the Eastern Hockey League, that the Paul Newman movie Slap Shot was based on.
How did you land the gig with the Spirits?
I had sent a tape almost on a lark, thinking I had no chance… I sent a tape of a game that I had done between Syracuse and Rutgers a couple of years prior. I rerecorded it with the treble down and the bass up, to make myself sound a little older and more authoritative, and then edited it in such a way where all the rough patches went, and all the parts that sounded smooth and reasonably professional stayed. It was hardly an accurate representation of my present level of skill, but I figured I’d get better quick if I got the job.
And that tape impressed them?
I think the fact that I was more than willing to work cheap didn’t hurt me. Bingo. I had the job.
You were a rookie in the rough-and-tumble ABA.
What I didn’t realize until years and years afterward…it was really my first two jobs back-to-back that were the craziest. The old Eastern Hockey League—the Slap Shot league—and the ABA, which was a crazy league to begin with, and the Spirits were the craziest of all the teams. Even Terry Pluto says in Loose Balls that as wild as the league was, the wildest of it all was the Spirits. So back to back, by the time I was 23 years old, I had experienced two situations that would never be equaled. For just sheer laughs and fun and absurdity, I peaked when I was like 23, 24 years old.
How would you describe the essence of the ABA?
It was so freewheeling. And there was a sense of camaraderie in the ABA, because the league was always hanging by a thread and was always seeking the validation and recognition that it deserved… It’s almost as if we were part of an adventure that nobody else quite understands.
But many of the aspects of the ABA that seemed subversive eventually gained wide acceptance.
It’s long since been vindicated. The NBA took up the three-point shot. The NBA took up the dunk contest. The NBA took in four of the ABA teams. In the first year after the merger, half the starters in the NBA Finals between Portland and the 76ers were players with ABA backgrounds, and 10 of the 24 players in the All-Star game had played in the ABA. So the league has been vindicated in that way, and now it lives on in legend.
The Spirits had future Hall of Famers like Moses Malone and streetballers like Fly Williams. But the biggest character was Marvin “Bad News” Barnes. Do you have a favorite story about him?
The one that people most frequently want to hear is the one from Kentucky, the morning after another loss at Freedom Hall in Louisville to the very strong Kentucky Colonels. Teams didn’t travel by charter then, so we meet at the airport for the commercial flight back to St. Louis. The traveling secretary, who also was the trainer, hands out the itinerary. It reads, “TWA Flight 305. Depart Louisville, 8 a.m. Arrive St. Louis, 7:56.” And Marvin Barnes walks over to me, holding the sheet of paper in his hand, looks down at me from a foot above me, drapes his arm around my shoulder, brandishes this itinerary, and says, “Bro, bro, bro, I do not know about you, but as for me, I am not getting on any time machine.”
That’s classic.
Now, some people took that to mean that Marvin was dopey and confused, but Marvin was actually smart. I mean, he was self-destructive beyond belief, but he wasn’t dumb. He knew full well that he was saying something funny. But he was staying in character to do it.
The Spirits had a lot of talent. Why were they so bad?
Well, they weren’t really that bad at the end of the first year. Even though they played sub-.500 for the year, they won four straight games after losing the opener to the defending ABA champion Nets and Dr. J. They won four straight games and knocked them out of the playoffs. Then they went on to play Kentucky, which won the title that year. They narrowly lost the first two games at Freedom Hall. I mean the first two games each came down to the last minute, but they lost them. Then they won Game Three in St. Louis, and they were winning Game Four when Freddie Lewis twisted his ankle and went out. When Freddie went out, and Freddie was just on fire in the playoffs, when he went out, then they lost Game Four. That was on a Sunday. The next game, Game Five, was the next night in Kentucky. They lost that game because their backs had been broken, down three games to one. But they actually had a chance, the way they were playing, a slim chance, but a chance, to be the first team maybe in the history of major professional sports that was sub-.500 for the season and won the championship. Because they actually were good enough to have maybe beaten Kentucky, and probably would have been 50-50 to beat Indiana, the way they were playing, in the final.
But the Spirits weren’t any better the next year, despite acquiring even more talent.
They did have an impressive roster. After Utah folded, they picked up Moses Malone. At various times, they had Moses Malone, Maurice Lucas, Marvin, Caldwell Jones who played for the 76ers after that, Ron Boone who was one of the great ABA players, Freddie Lewis, Don Chaney who came over from the Celtics. They had a good team. Or at least on paper they had a good team. But the team never really cohered like basketball teams have to. So they never found a rhythm, and there was internal strife, because there was a lot of immaturity on the team.
Was it good for you to learn the ropes in the ABA, so you could make mistakes out of the spotlight?
On the one hand, you were sort of on the periphery because the ABA was this kind of outlaw league. On the other hand, I was smack in the center of the establishment and the mainstream, because I was on KMOX. So I had a foot in both worlds.
KMOX at that time had an amazing collection of broadcasters, including Jack Buck. Did you learn from him?
I think you learn by osmosis. I was just a really wet-behind-the-ears kid. For example, you take Joe Buck, who’s immensely talented and his talent is the main ingredient, but Joe was around broadcasting and around the world of St. Louis sports from the time he was a little kid. I dreamt of being involved in sports, but I didn’t have the direct involvement until I was in my early 20s. So I was just kind of feeling my way, not just professionally but personally. I was observing Jack primarily, but also Dan Kelly and Bob Starr and Bill Wilkerson and non-sports people like Jack Carney and Bob Hardy. The level of professionalism, not just talent but professionalism, and how they carried themselves was very helpful to me.
Do you still live here?
We still have a home in St. Louis, but I’m not here as often as I used to be. So primarily I’m in New York, but I get back to St. Louis as frequently as I can. When people ask me where I’m from, I’m as apt to say St. Louis as New York.
You didn’t go to high school here, but people in this town feel a special connection with you. Why?
I think A. it’s just kind of a Midwestern thing, but B. I have lived at least half my life here. My children grew up here. I never hesitate to acknowledge St. Louis’ part in my life when the subject comes up. So I think people feel a certain connection, and I definitely feel it. It’s one thing to be recognized. I think if you’ve been on TV as much as I have for as long as I have, you’re going to be recognized in many places that you go, but the feeling of connection and appreciation is greater in St. Louis.
Do you have a favorite interview that you’ve done?
No. I can’t pick one, because both in sports and out, there have been so many highlights that even if you said to me, pick a top 20, I’d be struggling as to which ones made the cut and which didn’t. There have just been too many good ones.
Have you done any St. Louis interviews that stand out?
I think obviously the most prominent one was the interview with [Mark] McGwire, because everyone was watching to see what he was going to say. But over the years, I’ve had fascinating baseball conversations on-air, both radio and television, with Whitey Herzog, who’s never bad, he’s always entertaining; [Tony] La Russa, who, if he respects the forum and the person he’s talking to, is always interesting; and several with Stan [Musial], and Stan is always just so lovable and good-natured that those stand out.
I understand why McGwire doesn’t get many votes for the Hall of Fame, but it’s interesting to me that after he came clean about his steroid use in the interview with you, his support actually went down. Is he being punished for telling the truth?
I’ve always liked Mark personally very much. But if there was a problem, not so much with St. Louisans, who are generally forgiving on this because they know that Mark is basically a good guy, but I think among the Hall of Fame voters, the admission was qualified because he still contends that he only needed the steroids to restore him to where he could get back on the field and do what he otherwise would have done naturally.
You don’t buy that?
They’re called performance-enhancing drugs for a reason. They enhance performance. No one, no matter how good on their natural merits, has remotely approached the home-run rates of McGwire, [Sammy] Sosa, and [Barry] Bonds who was not on steroids like McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds, including the three of them themselves for several years in the big leagues prior to that period. So everyone knows what the real deal is.
Is the propaganda true: Do the Cardinals have the best fans in baseball?
There are other places where they care as much, Boston and New York and Philadelphia. But I’ve always felt that St. Louis had the best combination of passion and civility. The fans are knowledgeable, but you don’t have the hard, angry edge that you find in other places. So I think the tone in St. Louis is about as close to perfect as you can find.
It’s sad to me that St. Louis fans are bitter toward Albert Pujols for leaving, despite all he accomplished here.
I don’t know that they’re really that bitter. His popularity certainly has gone down a notch, but I think that most fans understand what he did. But even more than that, they understand what the Cardinals did. This was the best contract the Cardinals didn’t sign.
Why do you say that?
It’s nothing against Pujols, who’s been a great player. But this deal won’t even make sense for the Angels in the long run, and it would have made even less sense for the Cardinals, because they don’t have the designated hitter to fall back on. So they made the right move. They remain contenders. They’re never going to get the production from any one individual that they got in a 10-year stretch from Albert, but that money can be used to shore up the team in other ways. They’ve shown themselves to be very resourceful organization.
What do you think of Mike Matheny?
The main thing he has going for him is presence. Even as a player, he had a presence that other players responded to, that his manager and coaches could see. He commands respect, not by yelling and screaming, but just because he is a person who is admired and who clearly has integrity. People respond favorably to that. In terms of as a game strategist, he’ll get better with each passing year. That’s the least of it. He’ll get to where he wants to be quickly, if he isn’t there already. But you can’t teach presence.
You caused a controversy by making a statement about guns on Sunday Night Football, after the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide. Does politics have a place in sports broadcasting? There are times when inevitably politics or real-world events intersect with sports. It’s happened at the Olympics. It happened with race relations, even predating Jackie Robinson and continuing through athletes like Muhammad Ali and Curt Flood and others. Women’s rights have played out to some extent through sports. There is an economic aspect when it comes to whether stadiums should be subsidized with public funds. There is an academic and athletic aspect to college sports. So some of this is inescapable. But I think that what I said after Belcher was misunderstood by some people. I would not have gone there at all no matter how great the tragedy was, if it didn’t directly involve an NFL player.
What message were you trying to deliver?
I was talking not so much about gun control, although I’m not going to be disingenuous, I do favor common-sense gun control. But that was not my point there. My point was that there is a gun culture in sports, and there is a gun culture in the National Football League, where too many young men carry guns. Inevitably, sometimes those guns are used not as a responsible expression of their legitimate Second Amendment rights, but as some sort of warped expression of manhood or some sort of misguided notion of street cred.
So that culture leads to tragedy?
When you’ve got a huge percentage of players who are young, aggressive, subject to impulses, sometimes surrounded by people who don’t have their best interests at heart, tragedies are going to happen, and homicides are going to happen. Inevitably. Does that mean that most of those who own firearms are going to be involved in it? No. But does it mean that a tragic percentage will inevitably be involved? Yes.
Would you say history bears that out?
You’d be hard-pressed to come up with a single instance in which a professional athlete, by virtue of having a gun, defused a dangerous situation and turned it around for the better. But you could make a long list of situations, some of them fatal, others just stupid, where people wound up being arrested or having their reputations besmirched or getting into needless difficulties because they or their associates were armed in public.
What about the argument that the people are the problem, not the guns?
Could Jovan Belcher have strangled his fiancée? Could he have stabbed her? Yes. But every common sense person knows it’s infinitely more likely, in an impulsive moment, that a gun will wind up being fatal than these other means would be. So I was talking about an attitude toward guns. I was not specifically talking about the Second Amendment or gun control.
Which interview that you’ve done was the most difficult?
It’s always most difficult, not when it’s contentious, but when the person is not forthcoming. I recall an interview with Jack Palance on the old Later show. Jack, who was an imposing figure, I mean his head could go on Mount Rushmore actual size and he had that intimidating presence, he just was not in the mood for an expansive conversation. And that’s what Later was; it was an expansive conversation. So it was 22 minutes of pulling teeth, me trying to get him to open up and him offering disinterested and seemingly monosyllabic answers. In its own way, it was amusing.
What about Jerry Sandusky?
That’s an entirely different thing. That was a very unusual situation, but it was a genuine news story. That’s the way I approached it.
Michael Jordan beating the Jazz, Muhammad Ali lighting the Olympic torch, the famed Sandberg Game—your voice is part of memorable sports moments.
Almost inevitably, if you’ve been on television as long as I have, and as fortunate as I have been to be involved in so many big events, every now and then a big moment is going to land in your lap, and you just hope you don’t mess it up.
What was it like eulogizing Stan Musial?
I was just very, very touched that the Musial family asked me to do it. And they asked me, it turned out, exactly a week before the funeral. So I jotted down some thoughts in the next few days. And then the night before and the morning of, I kind of pulled those thoughts together. I was actually somewhat surprised, because I read it over a few times before I headed to the church, that in a couple of places I got choked up.
Why did it?
Just the combination of how fond I was of Stan and also the era that he represented, but I think also the fact that it was St. Louis and there were personal connections there. Looking out over the church and the people who were there, some of it is a connection to your own life.
You also eulogized your boyhood hero, Mickey Mantle. How did they compare?
Well, similar. But the big difference is this: Mantle’s life was cut short, partly through his own shortcomings. He was a beloved and iconic figure in his own way, too. But it was a much sadder occasion in that respect, because he didn’t live a full life, and his life contained many regrets. Whereas Stan lived a very full life and had fewer regrets than most of us. So Stan’s was the respectful and loving commemoration of a full life well-led, whereas Mickey’s was a little bit different.
When legendary Yankees announcer Bob Sheppard died, they still used a recording of his voice when Derek Jeter came to the plate. I don’t want my future children to have to watch the Olympics without Bob Costas. Can we work something out?
[Laughs.] Nah. You know what, if the Olympics and the Olympics on television continued after Jim McKay stopped doing it, they can certainly do just fine after I stop doing it.
What’s the biggest key to calling a game or doing an interview?
It’s two seemingly contradictory things, but they complement each other. You have to be simultaneously well-prepared and spontaneous. You don’t really know for sure what percentage of the preparation you are going to use, and you don’t know exactly where it will apply. So you have to be prepared, but not locked into that preparation. You got to be nimble enough when you’re calling a game to go in the direction the game takes you, including unforeseen events. Or during an interview, you can’t be locked into, I’m going to ask question No. 3 next because now I’m on question No. 2, because you have to listen. What if the response calls for a follow-up? Or it’s a surprise and it takes you in a direction you couldn’t have anticipated? So you have to be willing to prepare, but also quick enough on your feet to toss all that aside and go in whatever direction the conversation or the event takes you.
When you’re calling a game in the booth, do you ever look at Twitter to see what fans are talking about?
Oh God, no. No, no, no, no. I incorporate Sabermetrics, some of the advanced metrics I’m interested in. But if Vin Scully calling a game is just as good in 2013 as he was in 1963, that’s the way a game should sound. If Jack Buck were around today, I don’t think anybody would ask him to change his style. My style has always been a little bit of a combination of old and new, if only because my frame of reference, personally, was different than that of Ernie Harwell or Jack Buck or Harry Caray. I was a younger guy. Just as Joe Buck’s frame of reference is somewhat different from mine. But the nuts and bolts of how to call a ballgame well, I think remain the same.
So that’s a no on Twitter?
I want to be informed about all the relevant information, storylines, relevant statistics—not arcane statistics but relevant statistics—that form part of the story of that game or that season. But I don’t want to be distracted from the game. My feeling is that people should settle in to enjoy the game. I never look at Twitter. And I’m certainly not going to look at Twitter during a game. I don’t have a Twitter account. I’ve never read anyone else’s Twitter. I do not care. I am not interested. How I call a game would not be affected by it one iota.
Can you remind me of the Ludacris lyric that includes your name?
“I be rollin’ torpedoes, get blunted with Rastas, and for a hefty fee, I’m on your record, like Bob Costas…” It’s not the only time that I’ve been name-checked in a hip-hop song, but it’s my favorite one.
How does Bob Costas come to know that Ludacris has mentioned Bob Costas?
Because when he first did it, my then probably 14-year-old son, who is now 26, called it immediately to my attention. It’s not the only time that I’ve been name-checked in a hip-hop song, but it’s my favorite one.
That’s a good place to be in life: Enough rappers have dropped your name that you can choose a favorite instance.
There you go.
