Bob Costas
Bob Costas is an American sportscaster, on the air for the NBC network since the early 1980s.
Bob Costas was born in Queens, New York, and grew up in Commack, New York, graduating from Commack South High School. Following high school, he attended the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, though he left school before graduating to begin his professional career.
His sportscasting career started while attending Syracuse University, as an announcer for the Syracuse Blazers minor hockey team. His career as a professional began as play-by-play announcer for the Spirits of St. Louis of the American Basketball Association, followed by a stint with KMOX radio in St. Louis. Costas later did play-by-play for Chicago Bulls broadcasts on WGN-TV during the 1979-1980 season. He was briefly employed by the CBS network prior to joining NBC Sports in 1980.
He is a devoted baseball fan (he's been suggested as a potential commissioner) and wrote the best-selling Fair Ball: A Fan's Case for Baseball in 2000. For his 40th birthday, Oakland Athletics manager Tony La Russa allowed Costas to manage the club during a spring training game. The first time Costas visited baseball legend Stan Musial's St. Louis eatery, he left a $3.31 tip in homage to Musial's lifetime batting average (.331). Costas delivered the eulogy at Mickey Mantle's funeral. In eulogizing Mantle, Costas described the baseball legend as "a fragile hero to whom we had an emotional attachment so strong and lasting that it defied logic." Costas has even carried a 1958 Mickey Mantle baseball card in his wallet.
Costas has been fairly outspoken about his disdain for Major League Baseball instituting a wild card. Costas believes that it diminishes the significance of winning a divisional championship. He prefers a system in which winning the wild card puts a team at some sort of disadvantage, as opposed to on an equal level with teams by which they were outplayed over a 162 game season. Or, as explained in his book Fair Ball, have only the three division winners in each league go to the postseason, with the team with the best record receiving a bye into the League Championship Series. Once, on the air on HBO's Inside the NFL, he mentioned that the NFL regular season counted for something, but baseball's was beginning to lose significance.
Costas was married from 1983 to 2000 to Carole Randall Krumenacher, who went by "Randy." They had two children, son Keith, born in 1986, and daughter Taylor, born in 1989. Costas once jokingly promised that if Kirby Puckett was batting over .350 by the time his child was born he would name his kid Kirby. True to his word, since Kirby was hitting better than .350, Bob gave his son, Keith Costas, whose first name comes from Bob's first wife's brother, the middle name Kirby. On March 14, 2004, Costas married Jill Sutton, who also works in the broadcast media industry.
Bob Costas has won multiple National Sportcaster of the Year awards (from the National Sportcaster and Sportswriter Association) and nearly 20 Emmy Awards for outstanding sports announcing. In 1999, Costas was a recipient of the Curt Gowdy Award, which is awarded to members of the electronic and print media for outstanding contributions to baseball. He is also an honorary board member of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation.
He was selected as the Dick Schaap Award for Outstanding Journalism recipient in 2004.