Media icon Costas reflects on career start in Johnstown

Costas
JOHNSTOWN — Bob Costas is an American media icon who has done just about everything there is to accomplish in an illustrious 50-plus year career that actually had its roots in Johnstown.
Costas, now 71, is a 29-time Emmy Award winner — and the only person in television history to have won Emmys in the fields of sports, news and entertainment.
Costas enjoyed a fabulous 40-year run with NBC-TV from 1980 to 2019, in which he was on the broadcast teams for numerous Super Bowls, World Series, and Olympic Games, along with other top sports events such as National Basketball Association championship finals, U.S. Open golf tournaments, and thoroughbred horse racing competitions.
Costas has also hosted numerous sports and news television shows, and is currently employed by TNT Sports, where he does play-by-play and studio work for Major League Baseball on television station TBS, as well as commentary for CNN.
Costas, who said that his favorite sport is baseball, is also employed by the Major League Baseball Network.
In 2018, he was inducted into the National Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame and also received the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award for broadcast excellence.
This past weekend, Costas returned to Johnstown — the place where he said that his career began 50 years ago as a Syracuse University student calling Syracuse Blazers games for 30 dollars a game in the Eastern Hockey League.
Costas — who was on hand Saturday afternoon for an interview session with the media in the Stars and Stripes Room at Johnstown’s First Summit Arena at the Cambria County War Memorial — said that the town of Johnstown hasn’t changed much in 50 years, and in many ways, neither has the arena.
“Walking around town, things here look much the same,” Costas said. “And the arena is largely the same. The seats are newer and wider, and the bowl is bigger than it was 50 years ago.
“But some of the people are the same, and some of the ushers are the same. The press box still looks the same — it hasn’t been updated,” he quipped.
It was in that press box that Costas got his start, making his broadcast debut in the 1973-74 season when the Blazers played in Johnstown against the city’s EHL team that was then known as the Jets. That gig opened the door for him to become the voice of the old American Basketball Association’s St. Louis Spirits on KMOX radio in St. Louis from 1974 to 1976.
Then it was on to positions as a sportscaster at CBS-TV, Chicago’s WGN-TV, and NBC for Costas.
“The hockey job is where I got my start,” said Costas, who admitted that he wasn’t much of a hockey fan when he had that position, and spent many nights successfully winging things through his broadcasts. “When I got to St. Louis, they had only one week to hire an announcer before the season started, and I got my break.”
The First Summit Arena is now the home of the North American Hockey League’s Johnstown Tomahawks, a junior team which welcomed Costas for his return to the city this past weekend.
Costas dropped the opening puck for the Tomahawks’ game with Danbury (Conn.) Friday night, and was also on hand for Saturday night’s game with Danbury. Costas reached out to the Tomahawks for the visit, with the desire to show his adult son, Keith — who is also employed by the MLB Network — one of the places where the elder Costas got his start.
“It’s a great experience to meet him, especially for young professionals like myself,” said Alayna Moore, the Director of Communications with the Tomahawks. “He called us just as a regular fan would call us. His success in his profession is inspiring.”
Costas had no trouble recalling the three biggest thrills of his broadcasting career — all taking place when he was at NBC.
“Kirk Gibson’s legendary home run off (Oakland Athletics pitcher) Dennis Eckersley in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series that the Los Angeles Dodgers won in five games, was one,” said Costas, who interviewed the Dodgers’ Gibson on the Dodger Stadium field following the game after the slugger had hit a game-winning homer with a badly-injured leg that forced him to limp around the bases, albeit pumping his fists in glee.
“Michael Jordan’s last shot as an NBA player,” Costas said, recalling Jordan’s game-winning jump shot for the Chicago Bulls in Game 6 of the 1998 National Basketball Association championship series against the host Utah Jazz that locked up the championship series for the Bulls in six games.
“And Muhammad Ali lighting the torch to begin the 1996 Summer Olympic Games,” Costas said of the late, legendary boxer, who was battling Parkinson’s Disease at the time of the momentous event in Atlanta.
As the host of many sports and news television shows, Costas served as a correspondent with former NBC news anchor Brian Williams on the show Rock Center in November 2011, when former Penn State University assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was arrested in the notorious child sex abuse scandal.
In an attempt to publicly deny the charges — for which he was convicted in 2012 and sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison — Sandusky consented to calling the show and conducting an interview with Costas that aired nationally.
But instead, Sandusky’s hesitant answers to some of the questions that were posed by Costas served to further implicate Sandusky in the court of public opinion.
“He didn’t do himself any favors (by consenting to that interview),” Costas said of Sandusky.
The young boys who were assaulted by Sandusky were the primary victims in the horrific, tragic situation. But plenty of others — including iconic Penn State football coach Joe Paterno — also suffered collateral damage from the fallout.
Paterno was fired by Penn State just days after Sandusky’s arrest, and his legacy in many realms of public opinion was forever tarnished. Paterno died the following January from lung cancer at the age of 85.
Costas regards Paterno’s situation as a tragedy as well.
“Joe Paterno was a good man, a philanthropist, who did so much for the university and so much for the student-athletes that he coached,” Costas said Saturday. “The vast majority of his players graduated, and most had a legitimate academic-athletic experience under his direction.
“He did a number of good things — he tirelessly raised funds for the university, gave money out of his own pocket to the library, and he raised the profile of the university to where its endowment has grown,” Costas had also said in a 2012 interview that aired on the New York Times Daily Motion website.
“Nothing is as tragic as what happened to those young boys, but there were subplots to this,” Costas said. “This was also tragic for Paterno and tragic for the university as well.”
Now in the twilight of his career, Costas is thankful to have largely escaped the massive influx of technology in sports broadcasting.
“There is always change with the passing of time, and now, I’m not just on the back nine of my career, I’m on the 17th hole,” Costas said. “I haven’t had to embrace many of the (technological) things that have been foreign to me.
“There are good things about the changes, but in a click-bait society, I think an everlasting commitment to quality can be greatly diminished,” Costas added.
Costas – who also appeared in Johnstown for the city’s Kraft Hockeyville USA preseason game between the National Hockey League’s Pittsburgh Penguins and Tampa Bay Lightning in 2015 – thinks Saturday’s visit may be his last.
“This is the 50th anniversary of my career here, and I don’t know that I’ll be around for my 75th,” he quipped. “I think this is going to wrap it up for me.”
The Costas file
Name: Bob Costas
Age: 71
Personal: Costas and his ex-wife Carole are the parents of two adult children, son Keith and daughter Taylor. Twice married, Costas and his present wife Jill now spend most of their time in New York City.
Career highlights: In a 50-year media career that has included tenures at NBC and CBS-TV, as well as the Major League Baseball Network, Costas has been involved in coverage of numerous World Series, Super Bowl, National Basketball Association championship series games, and Olympic Games, as well as hosting sports and news talk shows. He is currently employed with TNT Sports and the Major League Baseball Network.
Honors: Costas is a 29-time Emmy Award winner who is the only person to win the award in news, sports and entertainment. In 2018, Costas was inducted into the National Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, and he also received the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcast excellence by the National Baseball Hall of Fame.