Bob Costas: Finding Strength Through Family Struggles | Forward Progress

0:00As soccer takes center stage this summer, Comcast helps bring the experience home to America. As the exclusive Spanish-language home of the tournament in the U.S., Telemundo is set to present its most expansive coverage ever. 700 hours of programming, live on-site presence at all 104 matches, and with multi-view and real-time 4K, Xfinity will deliver the most innovative and immersive sports viewing experience for fans watching on Telemundo, Peacock, Fox, and FS1. Learn more at ComcastCorporation.com. Hey, it's Graham. Our past in-depth guests have shared so many inspirational stories about overcoming adversity and tackling the darkest and most challenging times in their lives.

0:41We're sharing one of those moments in today's Thursday podcast in the hope that it provides a blueprint for any difficulties you might be facing. This week, Bob Costas. Your dad was pretty hard on you. He thought you should study criminal justice, and he also never thought you were ambitious enough. Why is that? He thought that wanting to be a broadcaster was sort of a quixotic notion, and that maybe if I studied criminal justice, that that would be something that was a more practical career path. So he encouraged me to take that up at Syracuse University. But part of the reason, a large part of the reason Syracuse appealed to me was that I knew that Marty Glickman and Marv Albert had gone there.

1:32He didn't live long enough to see me even matriculate at Syracuse. When he died, it's like May of my senior year in high school. So he never saw or heard anything I did, and I've often wondered, what would it be like? I could take him to Yankee Stadium. I could take him to Lambeau Field or Wrigley Field or if you'd lived that long, take him to the Olympics. And you don't have to have a bet. You don't need to be trying to strike it rich. We're good. I got you. Or would it be, you know, that he'd be pumping me for information? Or would he, and this is almost comical to think about, would he curse at me through the television?

2:12Would it be, you know, hey, my own kid is bringing me bad news. And how would he kind of indirectly involve you in his gambling? Well, my father was an inveterate gambler, big-time gambler, the mortgage literally riding on the outcome of his bets. And he didn't gamble at the racetrack or casinos. He bet on ballgames. I liked watching the games with him. I liked following it. I liked, actually, the exhilaration of it. We're winning or we're losing. And so if my mom and sister fled, a lot of times I would stick with him. And why would they flee? Because he had a volatile temper. And if the games were not going his way, and if the Christmas money or whatever it was was going down the drain, it wasn't pleasant.

3:06And volatile temper means what? Volatile temper means throwing things, cursing, yelling. just, you know, not good. Not good. But I'll say this. My dad was an interesting guy. My dad was like out of a movie, or at least so I thought. He was funny. He was charismatic. He was very smart. At his best, if he was flush with cash, he was very, very generous. So, you know, I wanted to be close to him, and that was a way in which we could be close. So you're 18, a high school senior, and the police come and knock on the door. What do they say? It was a Friday afternoon, May 15, 1970, and I opened the door.

3:59My mother was right behind me, and the cop looked past me and said, Mrs. Costas, and she said, yes, and he said, please sit down, and she said, my husband's dead, isn't he? And he said, yes, ma 'am, he is. And he had had a heart attack walking through JFK Airport. From what we can surmise, he was dead before he hit the floor. Sunday at the wake, a gambling buddy of his walks in. The guy's name was Steve Collins, and he handed me an envelope, a thick envelope, and he said, your father was up when he died. Give this to your mother. Now, a bookie will never pay a dead man. So when Steve learned that my dad had died, he went to the bookie and said, John sent me to collect.

4:51He got the money. There was$6 ,000 in$100 bills. That was my father's entire estate. How did you handle his death as well as your mom and sister? Well, he was a difficult man. To this day, if you don't resolve, in some sense, a primary relationship in your life, you think about it. He put my mom through the ringer. She obviously loved him. So it wasn't any one emotion, but certainly among those emotions is I'll never know. I'll never know how he would have reacted to me as an adult and to the life I could have made him part of. I'll never know. So it's 1966, and your mom's driving and gets in a car accident that nearly takes her life.

5:49What happened? Rainy day or night. She was the only passenger. Car skids off the road. smack head on into a tree. The doctor later told my dad that he had never seen someone, we're not talking about illness, but with traumatic injuries to that extent who survived. Every bone in her body practically was broken. Cranial injuries, everything. But somehow she survived it. The pain and discomfort that she not only put up with and lived through, but laughed through very often, had a happy, fulfilled life, despite what she had been through was an amazing thing. What do you think you learned from her?

6:39She had a great sense of humor. She was self-deprecating. She took a great deal of pleasure from the fact that she could turn on the TV and see her son. And I wasn't fully aware of this. One time, I was in some kind of storage room in her house, And she had stacks and stacks of VHS tapes. Bobby on Hollywood Squares. Bobby on Johnny Carson. Bobby on World Series. But she had like 300 of them that she cataloged herself. And she got you a tape recorder at 16. Oh, yeah. A Christmas present when I was 15 or 16. And sometimes I would sit in front of the television set. and, you know, turn the sound down and try and broadcast the Yankee game or the Met game.

7:33And my initial thought then was, this is much harder to do than I ever imagined. One quick favor before you leave, please consider giving the podcast a rating and review. Those go a long way in helping us reach new listeners. Thanks for your support.