Bob Costas has spent decades turning down money to read four words on television. This week the NBA finally caught up to the point he was making back when most of its current sponsors didn’t exist yet.
On October 13, the NBA and WNBA rolled out a new “responsible gaming” campaign with the National Council on Problem Gambling. Core message, straight from the league’s own press release: “No matter how much a fan thinks they know about sports, their money is at risk.” NBA exec Scott Kaufman-Ross called it central to “helping our fans make informed decisions.”
Great. The same league selling you the app is now also selling you the warning label. Thirty years too late, but NOW it cares.
Costas gets to say I told you so forever, and he’s earned it the worst possible way.
He was 18 when his father died of a heart attack at JFK Airport in May 1970. John Costas, in his son’s own description to Graham Bensinger, was “an inveterate gambler, big time gambler.” He was the kind of guy who had the mortgage riding on football games. At the funeral, a man named Steve Collins pulled Bob aside and handed him an envelope with $6,000 in it.
Collins had been holding the money for a reason. A bookie will never pay a dead man, so he’d gone and collected his father’s winnings himself.
“Your father was up when he died,” he told an 18-year-old at his dad’s funeral.
That’s the whole inheritance.
Six grand in cash, handed over a casket, because the man happened to be ahead when his heart gave out.
Costas took that into the booth with him for the rest of his career. At MLB Network and Turner Sports, he refused to personally read the sportsbook promos. Producers had to find someone else to do the ad read. Covers.com reported that detail years before any of this was a PR talking point.
“I couldn’t in good conscience encourage people to gamble,” he told NBC’s Kristen Welker. Legalized, mobile sports betting, he warned, is “going to ruin some lives. That’s inevitable.”
Legal Sports Report put the whole arc in one tweet this summer:
Nobody at a league office wanted to hear that in 2010. They wanted the rights fees.
Now look at who’s cashing the other check.
The leagues running this PSA are still partnered up with the same sportsbooks whose business model depends on people betting past the point of fun. FanDuel and DraftKings are already in court over whether their VIP programs fuel addiction. Neither lawsuit started because a sportsbook got nervous about somebody’s bankroll.
“Awareness is an important first step in preventing gambling-related harm,” said NCPG’s Derek Longmeier in the same release.
Sure — assuming step two ever shows up, instead of just more ad inventory sold against it.
A PSA squeezed between two sportsbook commercials is the cheapest possible version of caring a league office can buy. Costas never needed a council partnership or a press release to figure out where this was headed. He watched what a bookie’s envelope did to his own family. On his own, he decided he wasn’t going to be the one reading the pitch.
