The Press Box - Simone Biles, NFL Training Camps, and Bob Costas on His New HBO Show

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker answer some listener questions about the media's reaction to Simone Biles, the new dateline approach for NFL beat reporters, and a lot more (4:05). Then Bryan is joined by Bob Costas to discuss his new HBO Show 'Back on the Record,' his famous interviews with Vince McMahon, and his favorite parts of hosting the Olympics (36:38). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Bob Costas Production Assistant: Isaiah Blakely Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, I'm Mallory Rubin. And I'm Van Leithin. Check out the Ringerverse podcast from The Ringer for all things, superhero movies, nerd culture, and fandom entertainment. We have instant reviews and fun takes on all the latest news and more. Available now on Spotify. David, what's on your mind today? I was listening, you know, I'd hate to pull back the curtain for those that don't want to have the curtain pulled back. Don't want to see Oz in his underwear or whatever.

But I was finally listening to your interview with Bill Walton. and it didn't get a chance to talk to you about it on the air, so I was saving it from when we got here. Am I, was I wrong when I was listening to it and occasionally checking the time on my iPhone? Did you ask one question that then led to a 45-minute monologue? Like, was that pretty much how that interview started off? That is absolutely right.

And the first question was we were doing a revisit of David Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game, And my first question was, Bill, how'd you first meet David Halberstam? And then I had all these questions laid out here on my Google Doc. He was going to take readers through and all the stuff. You know, what kinds of questions did he ask? Where did he interview you? You know, what was your relationship like with him? Did you become friends?

Is it fair, Bill, to call it a friendship, et cetera, et cetera. He answered every one of them. And then he answered 30 more questions over the next 40 minutes and gave this just kind of amazing full life tribute to David Halberstan. Yeah. It was unbelievable. Let me tell you, the biggest anxiety I had during that, people were, people were like, were you just, do you want to like, you know, cut him off or someone?

I was like, no, no, because it was interesting. Like all that matters is if it was, if it wasn't interesting, then we would have done something, right, edited it or something like that. But it was so interesting. And I was like, he's saying exactly what I hoped he would say in the sense of hope, the stuff he would talk about it, I'm learning so much from this. My only anxiety was, what is the second question? Oh, gosh. Yes.

I mean, listen, there's sometimes where I'm actually helping out with a big interview project right now. And when the subjects answer subsequent questions, because we all have, we have everything we want to get out, you know, in different bullet points. When they answer extra questions, we're like, high-fiving. We're like, oh, that makes it so much more natural. That does a whole, you know, it's really great. But I know when you're actually just doing like a podcast interview or a podcast. print interview or I guess podcast interview is like the main time because print interviews,

it doesn't matter what you do. But you, but you're part of the broadcast, right? And you have, and even like, you know, if you're being, I mean, if you're being expansive, you might have 20 questions written down or something like that. And if suddenly he's like swallowed 18 of them, then like you don't even have like a follow up prepared and then you get in your own head and you're like, okay, wait, what is he said? What is he? Like, now I'm, now I'm taking notes on what what the answer is, trying to figure out what the next question is. It gets real, it could be really, it could be really uncomfortable. Yeah, and that, that, and it just seems so like,

my question is going to seem so like small and boring after like an amazing 40-minute answer. Exactly, exactly. So what did you guys have for lunch? Just a quick one. Yeah, I'm sorry, just to circle back to one thing about what you just said. I mean, I knew it would sound terrible, and I knew it would sound just kind of really strange coming out of that.

But I love talking to Bill Walt. And he was, that was an unbelievable, an unbelievably interesting interview. We got a lot of notes about it. That was different. And I think the next one will have a few more, a few more given takes and maybe for the worse. Coming up on today's press box, David,

we answer listener mail on questions about Simone Biles, NFL training camp and the reporters covering it, and the genre known as the definitive oral history. Plus, broadcaster Bob Costa stops by to talk about his new HBO show, his famous interview with Vince McMahon, and turning down a job at 60 minutes, all that more on the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network.

Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. Erica Servantes is on assignment today. So producer Isaiah Blakely is with us. David, before we bring on Bob Costas, let's do a little listener mail for all our friends out there in Podworld. Brad Benham asked us to talk about the Simone Biles takes that are coming in from the Olympics. If people did not see this, Simone Biles is the greatest,

gymnastics star ever. She withdrew from the Olympics team finals in Tokyo on Tuesday. She had just done the vault. It was a pretty uncharacteristic performance for Simone Biles. According to the New York Times, quote, Biles told her coach and a team doctor that she was not in the right, quote, headspace to continue because she was afraid of injuring herself and also because she didn't want to jeopardize the team's chances at winning a medal.

Continuing here with the New York Times, Biles, the most decorated gymnast in the The world walked off the mat and left the competition saying she was not mentally prepared to continue. Biles then withdrew from the individual all-around competition scheduled for Thursday. She's still making Pete David in the Olympics before they're over. I got to say, as soon as this happened, I was like, oh, no, because you could see the bad tweets coming a mile away, and you could predict exactly who they would come from if in fact you had heard of the person because there were a lot of these

that I had just not heard of the bad tweeter. No, this was this was a bad, this is a bad tweeter buffet, right? I mean, every, every bad tweeter out there just saw this as an opportunity and pounced or dug in, I guess, to not make metaphors. Right, and it's a hard one, right? Because the tweets are bad,

and you say, okay, we should just all ignore that, right? We should ignore the tweets. We should have a conversation about Simone Biles, write what we want about Simone Biles, and just not worry about it. But you understand this is an issue of mental health. So when people see that, there's quite understandably this urge to be like, I'm just going to go for that. But then that has this weird effect of bumping it into Twitterland and actually making that the terms of the debate or just the terms of the conversation. I should say. I'm sure what the debate actually is here.

I don't know if you read. Did you see Charlie Wurzel's newsletter today? He had a good thing about this. Twitter promoted a take from conservative columnist Matt Walsh saying, hey, you know, Michael Jordan wouldn't have walked away from game seven of the NBA finals. And what Wurzel writes is essentially

Twitter has decided that troll makes bad tweet is major national news, which it is not. While not 100% analogous, this type of trending aggregation is somewhat similar to what places like Fox News do when they pick out tiny local stories and broadcast them to big national audiences. It distorts reality, flattens context, and invites a whole bunch of people to jump in and get good and mad. That's what happened this week with Simone Biles. Yeah. I mean, it really does distort the conversation. And Matt Walsh, who is only, I mean, kind of his only.

significance is being a troll making bad, bad takes on Twitter, right? I mean, he has a newsletter and he's a syndicated columnist or whatever, but he's not, well, whatever, but he was on his timeline immediately thereafter saying thanks all you, thanks to all the haters for driving attention towards my, towards me, which has, you know, there was definitely a ring of like, I'm not mad, you mad to it, but like, it's true. They were giving him a lot of oxygen, even though like everybody was disagreeing with him. And I think, well, you know, his take, we can do. You want to parse out his bad take?

We can do that. Really? I mean, but I mean, I think that the interesting thing about it was that there was like a factual aspect to it, right? His tweet was like comparing Simone Biles to Michael, as if Michael Jordan had left, you know, a playoff game in the playoffs in the finals game seven because of mental health. And of course, everybody immediately replied like Michael Jordan actually retired because of mental

health. But I think that there's. Yeah, he left basketball. Yeah. He left the whole sport. And then his, Walsh's defense and the people, the incredible parade of trash that was trying to publicly defend him was just like, well, there's a, you know, it's a categorical, you know, error.

You can't compare retiring in the offseason to retiring in the middle of the Olympics. I mean, it's, you know, whatever. You know, their argument was that they're missing the point. Clearly, the better argument is that Matt Walsh was completely missing the point. And if Matt Walsh had ever watched a basketball, game or knew anything about professional sports. He just would have picked someone different than Michael Jordan, right? He would have picked LeBron James.

He would have picked somebody who didn't retire because of mental health. You know, it would have made a lot more sense. But I think that what that gets at, there's something actually pretty interesting there because I think there's a lot of people that would be sympathetic to Matt Walsh's trash argument on a just kind of instinctive basis, right? Like, oh, the athletes of my youth would never do something like that. But in fact, the greatest basketball player of all time did do something like that. And it has less to do with whether or not it happened at a certain point in the season.

And more to do with the fact that our vocabulary for discussing these things is changing, right? Michael Jordan could have left a game seven in the middle because of mental health issues. And it would not have been recorded in history in 1990, whatever, as him leaving because of mental health issues. right we would have dramatized it in a different way they would have lied to us whatever happened we don't have we did not have the vocabulary to discuss these things back then right and what Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles and Kevin Love there's a million athletes who are out there you know on the front lines talking about these realities right now but what they're doing is is actually just like helping us understand right we didn't know what an ACL was 20 years ago right now

we understand when someone blows out their knee we can like imagine the like what the break, what a knee looks like under a mic, I mean, under an x-ray, right? Like, we know more now than we knew then.

And we don't know enough to really talk about these mental health issues with precision. But the fact that we're able to talk about them in the way that we are is a small victory. Even though there's idiots who want to take exception to it just to draw, you know, Twitter traffic. So in the process of having a bad take, Matt Walsh accidentally led us to an interesting, example that informs just how differently, as you say, our vocabulary isn't talking about

these things in 2021 that it would have been in the 90s. Yeah. When Michael Jordan was winning basketball games and retiring briefly from the sport of basketball. Yeah, no, I, that's the most positive take I've heard. I'm not giving him credit for that. No, no. But I mean, you're finding the silver lining there in a happy way, I think. Yeah.

And I was thinking about that when what, okay, listen, a lot of people have rightly made the point. I don't know if it's necessary, but if, you know, there's a, there is a factual point that if any sport that you could, that, you know, that you might be slightly more compelled to drop out of a competition because you're at 99.8% instead of 100, Olympic level gymnastics has to be at the top of the list, right? Because if you're like a tiny degree off, you could end up paralyzed, right? You could literally break your neck. Yeah. And, and that's, that's obvious, right? I mean, I mean, if you're not, I mean, not everyone, I guess, took that into consideration, but that should be incredibly obvious. Now, I think that when I was watching her walk away, this is exactly what I was

thinking, even when the mental health stuff was, was, was, I was thinking about it at the time, because it's been in the ether, but it's also like, she has to walk away, whether or not we actually talk about why in an honest or, you know, kind of positive way is a separate thing, right? But there was no, but like the idea that an athlete of her caliber should not be trusted to understand whether or not she can safely execute her, her repertoire of, you know, moves is, is crazy, right? I mean, she, like, she could, like, that's her call. We all accept that it's her call. Well, I guess not when Kerry Strug, when everybody was, you know, whoever is comparing her to stupidly now, when Carrie Strug was like, you know, Bella Carolli probably threatened her parents life, but, you know, to make her go out there and do that vault, right? I mean, but like that's, and no one would expect, we can all like glorify that moment in history,

but it was a miracle that that didn't end in catastrophe. And nobody would, and nobody would glorify the way it actually happened. It's just like it's stupid post facto, you know, rationalization. But like, you know, we should trust Simone Biles. We are fortunate. This is not a, this is not a symptom of Generation X or anything else. We are fortunate to be in a world in which an athlete, the level of Simone Biles has the volition to say, I'm not 100%

and I know what that means better than you do, right? We should all be grateful to be in that world regardless of how it shakes out in terms of metal count. Got an interesting tweet from Dan Diamond,

our pal over with the Washington Post. He says, for years, athletes who copped to mental struggles were tagged by media as quitters or head cases. Now there's a push

to cheer them as heroes. What does that pivot say about how media forms narratives and should mental struggles be normalized versus valorized or villainized? It's interesting, right?

Because you talk about acquiring a new vocabulary to talk about this stuff. It feels like there's a further, there are several further steps in this. Yeah. Toward normalizing it, right? We're not, we're just at the edge of, as a collective sports media, media, full stop getting our arms around being able to talk about this. I mean, I hope I don't sound like, like an old coot. I'm not regressing to say that the actual, like, evolution, like to normalize this would be probably to move past the valorization of it,

right? I mean, it's the heroism comes in being open about it. You're not, it's, the, the, the, the heroism is not in walking away for some, is not the act of walking away. It's the act of walking away with one's head held high, despite the certain reaction one is going to get. And frankly, a lot of the, the, you know, essays and op-eds about, how Simone Biles is a hero are written in reaction to people saying that she's, you know, a villain, right? That's a lot of it because you know those Matt Walsh's are out there, right?

So the people are writing with one eye toward that. Right. And so it's all kind of part of the same spectrum. But, I mean, in the same way that like, well, you could talk about Carrie Strugg. In the same way that, like, if someone of Simone Biles caliber hurt themselves, and then in a previous era, someone would have shot him up with a painkiller and said, go back out there. We're now in an era where like, no, the athlete actually has humanity. Like, this is a human being and we will not force them to be treated like a lab animal.

And we should all be happy that that is the place. I mean, that is, that is a wonderful thing that we've gotten to a place where we can treat our stars as human beings with personal accountability and volition, right? But like, if that's, if that's the world that we, I mean, Kerry Strugg should not have been forced to go out there, should not have been out there regardless, you know? And, and it's just, I don't know. I mean, it's just unfortunate that one has to like face the facts

that these arguments are going to happen. There's a really good column in the New York Times by Kurt Streeter about this because you talked about the athlete's power of no. It's exactly what you're just saying there. You know, where it might manifest itself in the way that Simone Biles just manifested it at the Olympics.

It may, there may be a political manifestation. We saw with the police shooting a while back, right? NBA and WNBA player said, you know what? We're not playing tonight because we don't think it's appropriate to go out and play basketball right now. That's just not what we want to do. Maybe we'll come back in a few days, but we're not going to do it right now. It may be an injury that you're talking about. Look, I can go out there and do something, but I choose not to go out and wreck my health for the rest of my life to do that.

I get to say no. I have a certain power to say no. I'm the athlete here. Yeah. I can choose. and that's just a really interesting sort of way to think about all these things. Those are all kind of different,

different ideas, but the idea that goes to what you're talking about, the athlete is empowered to say no. And we're actually talking about this in large part because of the, you know, Matt Walsh is out there on the internet too. Clay Travis had a similarly dumb take. No more mentions of his name.

That's it. Well, I'm just saying, like we're talking about, I mean, part of the media angle of this. I mean, all of the media angle is the sort of back and forth. We started with the Twitter highlighting that tweet, everything else. I think that, you know, and a lot of times, a lot of times when you're looking at an issue like this, or looking at any political issue, I mean, it's always healthy to try on the other side, right? Just to sort of like see how it feels to like pull those pants on for like two seconds and see if there's anything there. Clearly, like, there is a, I mean, I'm not even thinking for a second that any of these guys are, you know, good actors. But like, it is impossible to look at Simone Biles' situation. and not imagine a version of this that you would respect her for,

that you would be pro, right? If this was your best friend, if this was your child, you know, like if this happened, you'd be like, yes, you'd do whatever you need to do.

If this was you, right, you were not, like, I'm not ready to go. But even if, but let's just say it was like your child and you completely didn't understand

why they were walking away, right? If you're like, this doesn't make any sense, I still love you and respect you and thank you for what you did to the country and I, you know, whatever.

Right, this is like, is, that it is very, very easy to imagine a world in which any of these dodoes would not be coming down on the side of, you know, this is America's, this is the greatest sin ever committed on the, you know, the United States of America. And when that's the case, maybe you should just like inspect your motives a little bit, right? Because if this were, I mean, you know, it's, it's really weird when this is the issue that is a partisan one, right?

That's what I mean. That's what's so, and that's what was so obvious is you could see that coming 100 miles away. Yeah. It's the same people. Yeah. Every time and we get just dragged into this whirlpool for everything. Everything with sports, and they know with sports, especially something like the Olympics, it's going to be something everybody's paying attention to that will, you know,

be much more interesting than infrastructure. And so they just grab onto it and that's it. Donald Trump did that when he was president all the time. It's, uh, it, it, uh, it will never end. Uh, David, this is a question from, listener John Paul Roman. He wants to know about U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance. How much longer does Hillbilly elegy need to be included in every sentence that mentions

J.D. Vance? Does he have to win the Ohio Senate seat before we stop name-dropping the book? This is tough because on the one hand, as terrible as that movie was and as sort of as the book has sort of ebbed in reputation since its initial, you know, the initial swooning at its release, it is still the thing he's known best for, right? I mean, it still is, it's the great, well, not just known best for, it is his greatest triumph. And maybe you'd be inclined to say,

you know, let's talk about some stuff he's done since, if you're not pro J.D. Vance. But at the same time, in the interest of, like, information, like, informing the readership, I mean, if I saw, if I was, like, half asleep and saw J.D. Vance did something kooky

and did not immediately make the Hillbilly L.G. reference. I mean, I might not remember. who he is. I mean, he's J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance is one of those names. You're like, I know, I think I know who that is. Or that's a name I should know. And then it takes a second before you're like, oh, yeah, it's the, you know, it's the doy moonface dude who's like, you know, cosplaying as a Trump supporter. It's, he's a, maybe we should identify him as that as that. I was going to say venture

capitalist, but that's, that might be even better. Well, that knows. That actually makes, that makes it make more sense. The venture cat, the doughy moonface venture capitalist. is just cosplaying as a Trump supporter, clearly this isn't his point of view. I mean, there's never been, of all of the craven Republican office runs

in the past five years or even longer, this has to be one of the most transparently craven. I mean, it's just so, it's just so dumb. It's just so dumb. But, you know,

you know, I guess part of his origin story now is going to be that he, like, took on Hollywood and beat him up, right? They tried to make a good movie, but I put my foot down. This is from Dave Shocking,

what are your thoughts on NFL reporters compelled to tell you precisely where they are recording their audio, be it a car, a TGI Fridays, et cetera, et cetera. Have you noticed this from the training camp reports? Yeah, that's great. I think we're indicting some of our ringer friends here. And you know, you and I do it right when we're not at a home. We're sort of largely because we're looking at each other in a in the Zoom right now. And it's a lot of times like, oh, Brian, where are you talking to me from? So it's kind of a natural thing to come up on a podcast.

It's really funny. There is a certain amount of, hey, I'm here about it. I'm on the road. I'm at the camp. I'm on the scene, which maybe is a little heightened after pandemic year when most people weren't on the scene. I do find in sports writing that we've all been trying to create the new date line. So the old dateline was Columbus, Long Dash, Albuquerque, Long Dash.

Oh, yeah. That indicated that you as a writer had traveled to the story. We don't really have those anymore. There are no, I don't believe we have date lines on the ringer last time I checked. So we do two things. We do the picture of the stadium and says, my office for the day. Or we start the podcast by saying, yeah, I'm in a parking lot outside a hot dog stand here in Wisconsin. And so everybody's just, it's the way a journalist is trying to tell you that he or she has gone to find

the story. Yes. Like I said, the desk used to just handle this at newspapers. Somehow we're not doing that anymore. That's a really astute point. Yeah, now that we're on audio, we don't have, you know, Craig Gaines is not going to jump on every podcast and be like, hey, guys, just because he's too proud to tell you, Brian Curtis is on the sidelines at

Cowboy Stadium right now. This is from Kyle Goss, David. Does Big 12 conference realignment pose an existential risk to the press box podcast? If you haven't seen this, the University of Texas, my alma mater is leaving the Big 12 conference and going to the SEC. Baylor, David's alma mater is going straight into the toilet. No, I'm just kidding. We don't know what's going to happen to Baylor yet.

Well, they're going to win the Big 12 every year. But go ahead. It's always been, as I used to say in wrestling, an uneasy alliance. The Big 12 has it not? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, particularly, I mean, yes, Baylor had a kind of very specific. specific, you know, I mean, in pro wrestling terms, Baylor signed a contract knowing full well that they were going to be the jobber of this promotion.

And they might have pushed, they might have angered some people by, you know, getting in the gym and tanning bed and getting the crowd behind them. But, yeah, I mean, it's always been an uneasy alliance. I mean, especially when A&M was there. I mean, these were your most natural rivals, which is kind of how you make a conference work, right? But it's also the, you know, the scale is just so skewed in so many different ways.

And, you know, it's especially, you know, when one sees the chance to leave and play in this, like, super conference, it seems pretty obvious to me. I mean, it seems like the way that this is all going, right? Our friendship's going to be fine, though, right? Yeah. I don't care about this much at all. I'm more, I would be more concerned about, you know, you coming with a take. that the SEC as like Thanos or whatever is terrible for sports. But like,

but I don't, it does not matter that our teams are not in the same conference anymore at all. We got a note, David from Aaron McDade and another one from JJ Dean, alerting us to an important development in oral histories. Uh-oh. Oral history is an important subject on this podcast. Insider has published what they call a definitive oral history.

Ooh. Of how Donald Trump took over the GOP. We collected never before reported details from Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, et cetera, et cetera. So what is the difference between the oral history and the definitive oral history? That's a great question. The difference is a headline or a tweet that tries to get you to read the latter. Yeah, it feels like the way you would write the magazine cover in the old days, right? Like the interior oral history is just sort of more, more, you know, low-key.

but the whoever's doing the cover headlines is just like the definitive oral history of how Trump took over the GOP Also you have a chewed over subject Like Trump and the GOP Yeah well you remember what I said I think we talked about this before That there's a little bit of like corner claiming

You know or whatever with these things Where it's just like I'm gonna do the official oral history Of like you know legendary MTV show the hills or whatever And the implicitly it's like I'm gonna do this So that no one else and no one else can ever do it again If you ever Google the hills, this is going to come up, right? And I guess on a subject where no one, there's not going to be any respect, you know, no one's going to like respect the fact that you've claimed the how Trump took

over the GOP corner, you put you put definitive on there to make your claim a little bit stronger, you know, to plant your flag a little bit higher. And maybe, maybe you'll be able to retain the SEO leaderboard, be top of the SEO leaderboard for a little bit longer. Yeah, or just like pop the. audience in the short term. Yeah. Like, oh, the definitive one.

Oh, wow. Okay. I've read all these Trump books. I've read all this other Trump stuff now. Now, finally, the definitive oral history is here. I also got a note from a listener named Bill. I think we've surpassed peak oral history. He writes, it's because Vulture did an oral history of Clifford, no, not the movie about

the big red dog, the 1994 movie where Martin Short plays a 10-year-old boy. Do you remember this? Yes. I saw this piece, yeah. And I think you and I almost said this when we talked about oral histories last time, but maybe not quite, is that the oral history boom is mixed up in the nostalgia boom of the 80s and 90s. So, like, we're rediscovering every movie from that period.

And basically at this point, writing about Star Wars or, you know, Indiana Jones and that stuff, that is like writing about Trump taking over the GOP. So we're now into the obscure things. and so one sort of way to deliver that, deliver your nostalgia bomb, is to do the oral history of this thing from the 90s or 80s that you had forgotten about. Not a piece about it,

but an actual oral history of the making of the movie Clifford. By the way, I sampled this oral history. This is not something I was going to go out of my way to read. It did quote David Letterman, Martin Short, and all the stars of the movie. So points for getting the cast of Clifford back together one more time for the oral history.

Unbelievable. Yeah. I had another thought. I don't know that this applies to Clifford at all, which I have never seen. And by the way, did not actually remember until I saw this. But you know how when you're reading the Wikipedia page of every movie that's a bomb? It always says it was a critical and commercial bomb,

but it has since become a cult classic. Yeah. We really need to tighten the definition of cult classic. Because it's kind of like everything has become a cult classic. Classic in journalism. Yeah, because everything's available, like, there is no movie that has not been watched more times since the advent of streaming than it had been watched before, right?

Exactly. I mean, even, like, Star Wars or Jaws are, like, gone with the wind, certainly those have been watched more times by more people since streaming began. So everything is more available, and thus probably 50% of things, at least, are more popular or more well-known than they were before then. Or less forgotten than they were.

Less forgotten, yes, yeah. But it feels like we've now kind of flattened the world so that there's no, there's no bad movies anymore or maybe there's no uninteresting movies anymore. Everything is interesting. Everything is a cult classic. Everything is material for an oral history. I just, I just find this very funny.

It's not, it's not bad. It's just very, very funny. Yeah, it's interesting. Two things. One, the nostalgia point you made was smart. And I think that we, I don't even. think we said this the last time we talked about it. But that is what a lot of these, a lot of these, you know, in an nostalgic culture,

what you want to do is just remember something, it's just recall something, is like, maybe briefly relive something. What makes these oral histories really work on that level is that it's a feature story without a hook, right, without an angle, without a tape, without any sort, there's no pitch necessary. If you're like, I want to write about Clifford and your editor's like, why? Why on earth would we publish a Clifford story? What makes this one, like, what is the hook?

What's the, what's the angle? And you're like, well, the angles is that it's an oral history. And I have David Letterman already agreeing to do it. Okay, there you go, right? And there's not, and as a reader, if you want to read about Clifford, then there's that thing for you. You know, you don't need anyone to be like, Clifford was actually great. That's the hook. Or Clifford was, you know, one of the craziest productions of all time.

You don't need a hook. You just the existence of an oral history is its own hook. And by the way, when you're talking about the flattening of it, There's a book that I just got. My brother-in-law, two of my brothers-in-law, or my, yeah, have a podcast called No Politics at the Dinner Table, which is fantastic. But they just interviewed an academic author named Michael Cloon, who just wrote a book about how we don't judge art to be good or bad anymore and how we should, right?

I mean, like, everything is just sort of acceptable and we kind of judge around the margins. Yeah, totally. That's the way we were talking to Brian Raffrey about the other day, about like everything is the work of the screenwriter uteur now rather than being like a good or a bad thing necessarily and the good or bad thing becomes very secondary. No, I like this theory. You were totally

right about oral histories being a non-pitch and I think that's what bothers me sometimes. I'm like, no, no, no, wait, we've skipped ahead to the point where you tell me why I should be interested in this obscure thing. Whereas, you know, you'd have this nut graph or two if you were doing a piece about it. Like, was this an incredibly interesting failure?

Was it actually this movie that is not just terrible, but just bug nuts, awful, mac and me terrible that you need to tell us how it came about or need to relive it in just glorious detail. It's just kind of a non-pitch a lot of the time. And that, yeah, I think that sort of gets at me. We have some only in journalism words, David. Okay, let's do it. We need to thank listener Steve Goffman, who works at the Washington Post audio.

He went back and performed the service of listening to all of our previous pods and putting together the full list. of all the only in journalism words. I tweeted out from our thing. Shockingly, there have been some repeats. We've had beleaguered on the list three times. So, no, all right, we got beleaguered. That is an only in journalism word here.

That's hilarious. Here's some more for you. Panacea. Oh, yeah. Panacea. These are also SAT words, David, remember from junior year? Mm-hmm. Lambasted.

That was lambasted. Lambasted. If you don't know how it's pronounced it, that actually makes the case. There you go. Thank you very much. Highly anticipated as a phrase. Oh, yeah. No one ever says that, but you say the highly anticipated new movie from Quentin Tarantino.

Thrice. He was thrice, the NBA MVP. You would never say that. Pillarid. Reeling, R-E-L-I-N-G. The bowls are reeling from. from their six straight loss. That's a sports writing classic.

Harbinger. Another good SAT word. The one that really made my stomach, made me feel uncomfortable since shivers was panacea. One, because I'm pretty sure I've used it. But two, because it feels like, I mean, listen, there are a lot of these words that are part of the journalism vocabulary, and that's sort of the joke that we continue to make.

but their persistence is both because we're used to reading them and because they pop up on like thesaurus.com when you're looking for a word to fit in. There are a handful of words that we're covering where the answer is there are very few synonyms, right? So you go from the one that just comes out of your head naturally or the one you used in the previous sentence and then you have to, the next thing in line is panacea, right?

I mean, the only other option is a word that is sort of laughable and you know it at the time, right? Yes. But that's part of this reality, too, I guess. You feel a little like George Will, just typing out the word panacea. Yeah. A few more for you, Quixotic, staunch, a staunch Democrat, quell. I'm going to use staunch today.

I feel like I can make that work in real life. I think you can too. Quell, temerity. That's a good one. Rollicking, kind of an old-fashioned one there. Taps, as in Taps for a job. He was tapped as the new Detroit Tigers manager. clear-eyed

kind of a funny one a plumb erstwhile oh my gosh and masterful slash magisterial yeah yeah those are all good

not sure I've ever had the moment to use either one of those in real speech all right David time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag

that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always always gratefully received a tweet from the account citizens for ethics david quote senator tommy tuberville

republican from alabama failed to properly disclose stock and stock option trades together worst at least $894,000 and as much as $3.56 million dollars so no more or Twitter joke to write Tommy is having issues with an SEC offense yet again i guess it's SEC offense but there is the joke thanks to john sloan lead him in 87 bill and mitchell Tyler. After many years, David, and more jokes about infrastructure week, we have an apparent agreement in the Senate on a bipartisan infrastructure framework or Biff for short. Biff. It was an upward Twitter joke to write. This is a Biff effing deal. Thanks to Jetti White for that one, our friend. And we have an important update, David, about

Gilgamesh again. Not the last update about Gilgamesh. This is a new one. What is it happening? Quoting from the Guardian here, a rare and ancient tablet showing part of the epic of Gilgamesh, which had been acquired by the Christian arts and crafts retailer Hobby Lobby for display in its museum of biblical artifacts.

These aren't they the people that were like illegally trafficking all that shit from Iraq? Aha! Has been seized by the U.S. government. There we go. The Department of Justice says the tablet was sold to Hobby Lobby with quote a false provenance letter. There's an overword Twitter joke to write Hobby Lobby got themselves into a real Mesopotamia.

Thanks to Nels McLaughlin and DJ dashing. If you threw out an epically, epically, see Gilgamesh, bad pun, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right, Bob Costas is here. Back on the record starts Friday. Bob, is it fair to call this show a reboot? Well, since the name of the show is back on the record, it's pretty clear when I'm trying to reinvent the wheel. it'll have many of the same elements.

It won't be exactly the same. And the biggest difference is we're only four times a year instead of weekly or monthly. It was designed to be quarterly. COVID pushed us back a couple of times this year. So we'll get the four in between July and October, one a month. And then next year it'll settle into its quarterly groove, at least we hope. Then you'll have a big interview, and then you'll do a roundtable or a commentary after that?

Two big interviews, we hope. Charles Barkley will open up and Allie Raysman will follow, particularly timely with Allie because she's been so outspoken about her difficulties with USA gymnastics. That's putting it mildly. And with the Simone Biles news this week, we'll want her perspective on that. So we have Barclay and Razman. Then we'll have a panel in the same fashion as Bill Maher. And then I'll have a closing essay. Won't be new rules. Maybe I'll get a smile now in them. But it won't be a new rules. We won't have an audience like Bill does, but it's the same basic idea. Like I said, you know, what we're hoping for is that the quality is what people will come for, not for any bells and whistles or any new format or anything. It's kind of what I've always done. I've done pretty well. How long does it take you to usually write one of those essays? Let's see. I wrote mine Sunday. I fiddled with it. It took maybe three hours to get it exactly the way I wanted it, maybe three hours. And you practice it a couple of times before doing it on the show?

No, we'll rehearse on Thursday, more for blocking and all those other things, and how do you get from here to there and that sort of thing, and what's the lighting, all the things that are part of television. So I'll run through it once during the rehearsal, and then I might, you know, read it back to myself in the green room before I go out there to do it, but, no, I don't practice it too much. The look into the camera essay, it's a very elemental part of television, I think, but it really works and it works in the Twitter era as well. What do you think the power of that particular form is? Well, if Twitter is the counterpoint to it, the power is some sort of depth, some sort of respect for language, some sort of nuance, some sort of insight that might be based in some knowledge, as opposed to something someone just had occurred to them in the moment while they're sitting there on the couch, that would be.

be a significant difference, I would think. And you're having two sports guests on the first show. You're going to have entertainment people on, too? Yeah, you know, I always did. The later show that I did after David Letterman in the late 80s, early 90s on NBC, was probably 90 plus percent non-sports guests, various walks of life. We had occasional sports guests. Maybe the better comparison is the original on the record show.

I'm going off the top of my head, but Chris Rock did it, Jerry Seinfeld, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Faye, J-Lo, Tom Hanks, George Clooney. I know Bruce Willis was a guest. If they like sports and have something to say about sports, then we can branch out from there. And I especially like comedians. John Stewart was another one who was on the show. Bill Burr will be on one of these first four shows. And if you said to Bill, you have to do an hour and it's only about sports, he'd have more than enough to fill that hour.

because many of his rants are about sports. So I especially like comedians in that setting. The first show won't have them, but certainly as we move along, we will. Poking around YouTube, I found a David Byrne interview, the guy from the Talking Heads that was on the record. I'd forgotten that, yeah.

Yeah, that was a pretty cool one. So you're going to do, you said the original idea was due quarterly. How do you get people's attention in the media world we live in, you know, when they're not looking for you on a weekly basis or on a, you know, a certain time. How do you get their attention?

I would think that there's a built-in HBO audience. One of the few preconditions I had before agreeing to return was that I would like each of my shows to premiere following a new Bill Maher. So we get Bill Maher's show as a lead-in each time our show airs for the first time. So I would think that some of it is just the neighborhood. I've been in this neighborhood before. I'm returning to this neighborhood. It's a little bit of a niche, but it's a good niche.

HBO is known for quality, and that includes HBO sports. So I'm happy to be part of that, and I'm not really obsessed with how large the raw audience is. HBO measures success in different ways. If they're subscriber base, consider this among the things they like about HBO. even if they don't like it as much as curb your enthusiasm or reruns of the Sopranos or Bill Maher, if they like it and it fits into that jigsaw puzzle that is HBO, then that's success. Now, Marr and John Oliver with their HBO shows, they package some of their material to put out there on Twitter and on social media, which is seemingly part of television these days. Have you thought about that as you've conceived the new show?

I imagine that some segments will be on YouTube for sure. you will not find me on Twitter. And I would prefer that the only thing they do on Twitter is say, hey, gang, you know, here's the show, here's the guests. And if you want to see some of what happened, you can find it on YouTube. I'd rather it be just informational rather than declaring anything. I prefer to declare with a little more texture that Twitter allows. Even if we take the video of your commentary in full and put it on Twitter,

I guess that's okay. I guess that's okay. Whatever happens on Twitter, I'm 99% unaware of unless it crosses over into something that's closer to mainstream and therefore gets my attention. So, you know, look, that's a train that's very far down the track and I'm not going to be able to turn it around. I'm just not getting on board. Yeah. No, I just say we have cost us on Twitter, if not actually cost us on Twitter. You know, see there.

You would be. Yeah, well, I guess, I guess somebody on behalf. of back on the record with Bob Costas, we'll post something or other on Twitter. I was poking through the archive, and I once again watched your 2001 interview with Vince McMahon, the proprietor of World Wrestling Entertainment, during the first failed version of the XFL,

not to be confused with the second failed version of the XFL. What was your goal going into that interview? Well, my goal was to question him about the XFL. He had moved outside what was then the WWF, even though he brought much of the WWF sensibility to it. He moved outside, not just to a different sport, but this wasn't on a cable network. This was in prime time on NBC.

And it was getting the lowest ratings that any prime time programming at that point had ever gotten in the history of network television. And we're not talking about a half-hour show. A game takes a few hours to play out. So this was a significant television story. not just a sports story. Now, the second go-round of the XFL, I think, failed because of circumstances.

You have to give Vince credit. The first time, it was just god-awful. And I don't know, Brian, how I get painted in some quarters. Like this, the XFL was this noble experiment, this quixotic dream that was only undone by an array of unfortunately. circumstances. No, it was crap. And that's why it was undone. It got a very good rating out of curiosity at the start. And then people realized it wasn't compelling football. And it was it was tainted by that kind of dopey, you know, kind of head banging WWF sensibility of the time. I said when I was asked about it before they ever played a game, I think it was Conan O'Brien who asked me what I think of it. And I said, you know, Conan for years, I've been saying, why doesn't somebody combine high school football with the atmosphere of a tawdry strip club. And finally, someone has taken my idea and run with it. I don't see how you get to be the villain when you were right about something from the very start.

But when the second iteration of the XFL came along, they had the right idea. And it's very clear that in the ensuing two decades, he had more and more cable outlets, including every network having its own cable sports operation, NBCSN, which I guess now will be Peacock and CBS Sports Network, etc. So there were more and more platforms to put things. And there's also very clearly as the unsuccessful because it was underfinanced Alliance of American Football, I think is what they called it. But that got decent enough ratings. They put a handful of games, as you know, on network TV, but many of them were on. CBS Sports Network, and it got decent enough ratings.

Whether you and I share this passion or not, there's obviously such an obsession with football that people will watch spring football involving teams and players that they're not that familiar with in larger numbers than they might watch an NBA playoff game or a regular season major league baseball game.

So if you do it right, there's an audience for it. And the second go-round of the XFL, they picked franchise cities that were receptive to it. For example, St. Louis, which had just been jilted for the second time by the NFL. And they were drawing good crowds. And they were drawing decent numbers for a cable sports entity. And then the pandemic hit and wipe them out. So this is my long way of saying that Vince, whether he was really calling all the shots or not, but under the umbrella of Vince and the WWE, this second thing,

was night and day different from the first thing. And whether Vince decides to go for three tries or not, somebody else, if they're properly financed and have the proper approach, can, I think, make a successful run out of that. And it might be of great interest in the NFL because with the changes happening now at the college level, with name, image, and likeness,

and a lot of people think that's going to lead to larger compensation for college athletes, And who knows what that will do to the landscape. The NBA will have to expand its minor league footprint. And the NFL could use a minor league because a lot of guys are not going to be able to hack it in college for whatever reason it might be, academic or otherwise. It has a niche if it's done right. So as you said, the first half of that interview in 2001 about XFL1 was about the ratings, Vince, is answering your questions. And then the second half of the interview, he starts acting like the Vince McMahon character he plays on television.

In that moment, are you thinking, man, this is good TV. People are going to get a kick out of this? What's going through your head? Yeah, I am thinking it's good TV. And it was live. And it's HBO. So it's live and uninterrupted by commercials. I think we had it formatted for 15 minutes, but we went close to half an hour.

And Ross Greenberg, the producer, was in my ear saying, keep going, keep going. so I knew it was good TV, but I was also trying to stay on point. Yes, it was spectacular, but it also had a journalistic justification. I think at some point, Vince kind of shifted over into the Mr. McMahon character that he plays in the wrestling world, but I was not the first person nor the last for him to do it to. Armin Ketian highly respected reporter for CBS and also at another time for HBO. I recall him slapping the notes out of Armand's hands. So he's known to have a short fuse.

It's fine. A lot of people thought in the moment that I should be afraid that he was going to, you know, smack me or something. Maybe I'm just dense, but I never thought that was the case. I knew he was trying to use body language and pointing his finger and his raised voice to try and intimidate me. But I never thought that I was in any kind of physical peril. and I wasn't thrown off. So, you know, I was okay with the way it turned out. And the next day, Vince called me, Bob Vince, hey, how you doing?

He goes, let's make it two out of three falls. So we scheduled a rematch for the next year, and it was very interesting, but it was much less heated. And we never got around to a third one. So I don't know where the match stands. If it's 1-1 or 201, 1 way or the other, I'm not sure. but people sure do remember it. That's for certain. Yeah, and I was going back in watching it,

what I got a kick out of was it was a double bill on that program of Vince McMahon and Bobby Knight. Yep. You know. Yep. And when I sat down with Bob Knight, again, no commercial is just a short bumper, maybe 20 seconds or something so I could get from one place on the set

to the next where Coach Knight was waiting. And I said, coach, this may be the one time in your life when your presence actually lowers the temperature in the room. I mean, I was thinking it's like if you followed this first show of the new program, Charles Barkley with Bill Lambier, you know, is almost the same guy. So I'm glad Bobby Knight could restore some order. You know, people have an appetite for this stuff because I've been asked,

are you going to have Vince McMahon on? If there is something where it crosses over into something that's newsworthy in sports, such as a reboot of the XFL. I would have him on again. Sure I would. You've talked for a long time about wanting another interview with Roger Goodell. Is that something you're pursuing for the new show? Yeah, didn't get him for the first show.

Maybe we wait until the season begins. Roger and I have always gotten along extremely well personally. I like him very much personally. He doesn't seem to want to engage when I was at NBC for a number of years, including on Super Bowl Sundays when you have a six-hour pregame show, we asked for Roger to be on the broadcast, and they always declined. And then I offered any Sunday night during the ensuing season, always decline. And, you know, maybe it's not worth it to Roger to sit down and answer direct questions.

I would never be antagonistic or never ambush somebody, but I guess that there's a reasonable expectation that I would ask more pointed questions than most people on network television and maybe he could get an easier ride with their other network partners. And now I'm out of that mix anyway. But if Roger wanted to come on, he would get a fair hearing and even on some issues, an appreciative hearing from me. So fingers crossed. I hope it happens. When we talk about long form interviews, you've done those on HBO, you've done those on HBO, you've done those on NBC, on later, and on other places there.

In recent years, a lot of those kinds of interviews have moved from TV to podcasts. What's the case for still doing them on television? Because television still matters because it's a different neighborhood. It's the neighborhood that I'm most familiar with and most comfortable with. People have said to me over the years countless times, podcasting is made for you. And in a certain sense, it is. I mean, I get it, the open-ended nature of it, the depth of it, the interviewing aspect, the ability to go in different directions, maybe you interview someone who's interesting

for half an hour, and then the next 15, 20 minutes, you're just sharing whatever your thoughts are on that particular day. All those things are things I think I could do well. My hesitancy is this. I think the next census, Brian, will show that one and every three or four Americans has a podcast. So as crowded as the television universe is, the proverbial 500 channel universe, it's much less crowded than the podcasting world.

I have no idea how anyone keeps up with all these podcasts. Even if someone would curate for me, someone whose judgment I trusted, this is the 1% of all the zillions of podcasts that are out there. This is the 1% that will appeal to you, either. because the serious content appeals or you'll laugh your ass off or it's about music that you're interested in, the raw number of that one percent would be enough to keep me occupied for the rest of the decade. When do people have time for this stuff? I think that might be a low ball estimate on how many people have podcasts,

because most people at the ringer have two, you know, or three themselves. Why stop? Why stop? You know, I do not. I realize that some people put all this stuff in the category of get off my lawn. And hey, if you want to do it, you want to listen to it. God bless it. And it's good that the format is there. And I know that the very best of these podcasts are some of the best content that's out there because the format allows for it.

And certain people of some consequence and insight gravitate toward it. there's there's there's there's no question about that um it's just it's just not something that that kind of is in my wheelhouse or that i see as being in my wheelhouse but have at it if it's your company like now you know i've actually brian this is an honest fact i have been on more podcasts in my life than i've listened to wow bills mine now yeah so and then a handful of others but you've never you've done that more than actually sit down and listen to a podcast I think so. That's wild.

You know, I don't mean any disrespect in this, but a couple of years ago, maybe three. I go to a Yankee game, not the broadcasting game, I'm going to sit in the stands. And so I'm picking up my tickets at Will Call with some friends of mine. And the Yankees, I hadn't asked for it, but the Yankees had sent someone down who was going to escort us to our seats. Nice young man. I'd say he's on 29 or 30. And he hands me his card. he says, I'd like to have you on my podcast.

And I'm thinking, unless you have a very extended family, who is listening to your podcast? But I tend to do these things when I'm asked because I don't want to disappoint anybody. I'm not going to listen to it whenever it airs, but I'm doing it for you because you seem like a nice guy. So this is the new, would you read my movie script as will you be on my podcast? Yeah, that's right. It says the waiter. as he hands the big time producer, not just his fillet, but his movie script.

You were a host of the Summer Olympics on NBC from 1988 to 2016, usually the primetime host, I think, all but once out of those years. Yeah, the first one, Bryant was, Brian Gumblewood. What was the best part of that job? The best part was the travel log aspect of it, the personal and professional experiences that took me to Korea, to Barcelona, to Sydney, to the birthplace of the Olympics, Athens. I'm just thinking now of the summer games, to Beijing, say what we will, and there's plenty

to say about the Chinese government and their practices, but this is an historic place that most Americans had not set foot in. That was a remarkable thing to be part of, then London, then Rio, and that's just the summer games. And then all the relationships with the people you work with. Those relationships exist if you're covering baseball, basketball, football. But the Olympics is different. It's kind of like you've gone away to camp or something. That six weeks or whatever it is is an experience of real camaraderie and shared purpose. I think the bonds that are forged in those six weeks, and then beyond that, if like me, you've done multiple Olympics, as many of the producers and researchers and other people involved have done,

that, that forges lasting friendships. I've been texting with several of my old friends and colleagues who are in Tokyo now. So that kind of shared experience. And the preparation for covering an Olympics the way you should cover it, if you're the primetime host, is not confined to just, you know, who's the best 100 meter runner from Brazil. It involves the history of the host city and nation and some of the sociological aspects that inevitably overlap. So it was an ongoing education for me. I think it filled me out on a personal basis in a way that I hadn't anticipated,

but once I'd done a few, I realized that was what was happening. What was the least appealing part of that job? What's appealing for me was the opening ceremony. Now, I'll stipulate that there were moments in the opening ceremony that I'll always treasure. In fact, when people ask me to pick my three or four favorite moments in my whole career, one of them is always Muhammad Ali lighting the torch in Atlanta in 1996. I still get goosebumps thinking about it. And there are many magnificent and memorable moments that take place in every opening ceremony.

But the way NBC approached it, Olympics after Olympics, was that you needed at least one note on every country. And at the Summer Olympics, we're talking about more than 200 countries. I had various co-hosts, Dick Enberg, others. But Katie Couric and I settled on the notion that we're playing tidbit ping pong. You take Latvia, I'll take Lithuania. Now, wait a minute, I had Lithuania last time. Why don't we switch it around?

And after a while, I'm saying to the researchers, do we have any other note about Bolivia other than fictionally, that's where Bouch Cassidy and the Sundance kid met their demise? Can we come up with something here? And, of course, then there's the question of tone. There are some people who look at this and they're rolling their eyes. You know, they think this is like a cross between a UN Security Council meeting and cert this. So lay. But then there are other people who think it should be treated with great solemnity. And I always felt like I appreciated those moments that were poignant and meaningful, but also could see some levity in it. But there's no approach that is exactly right for the entire audience.

So if you skip or seem to have given short shrift to Hungary as we're going through the ages, and somebody from Hungary, wherever they live in the United States, sees that. Their assumption is, aha! Aha! In Athens, in Athens, something I said about Turkey, not critical, but just something was insufficiently celebratory. And of course, the assumption was because of the historical antagonisms between the two countries. and Costas himself is Greek, he's just waiting.

He's laying in wait and just deliver a haymaker to the Turks. And all I'm trying to do is get from the T's to the U's. I'm trying to get from Turkey to Uzbekistan. That's all I'm trying to do. Plus, the preparation for the opening ceremony because of those 200 countries and because of what you have to know about the artistic portion and what it's supposed to represent, et cetera, that actually takes up a disproportionate amount of time.

That one night might take up 40 to 50% of your total preparation as opposed to the next 17 or 18 nights. So while I recognize the majesty of it and need no disrespect to anybody, I don't know if anyone noticed, but toward the end, the last two or three Olympics that I hosted, I didn't do the opening ceremony. Yeah, I like the idea of you sitting there plotting the history,

historic revenge of the Greeks, just waiting for your moment. But you know how this works, right? I did the Yankees Red Sox last weekend at Fenway. I'm certain that they're both Yankee and Red Sox fans who think that I had it in for their team. And if only they knew, I mean, Joe Buck talks about this all the time. If only they knew what 99% of broadcasters actually root for. A good, close game, because blowouts are harder to call. And if you do in a postseason series, you want it to go seven.

You want it to go to the limit because then it's the most dramatic. And beyond that, people root for the cities where they think there are the best hotel accommodations or where they have friends. But there are very, very few network broadcasters who are sitting there with a voodoo doll sticking pins into the San Francisco Giants or the Seattle Mariners. In fact, I have never received a letter to this effect and neither have any of my colleagues. Dear Mr. Buck,

Nance, Musburger, Michaels, Costas, whatever, I am a fan of neither the New York Yankees

nor the Atlanta Braves. I am, in fact, a fan of the Texas Rangers. But just as a baseball fan, I have to say, I found your broadcast unconscionably biased against the Yankees,

against the Braves. No one has ever received one letter or email or anything to that effect. However, the very same broadcast, word for word, listened to by fans of the Braves and fans of the Yankees who'll get the same letter. It's just that the name of the team they're griping about changes. Dear Mr. Kossis, why do you hate the Braves so much? Dear Mr. Kostas, maybe they don't say Mr. Might be dear asshole. Why why do you hate the Yankees so much? It's kind of, it's an occupational hazard if it's even a hazard. I think most of us view it now as a joke.

I'll end here, Bob. We'll stipulate that over the years you've had a billion great jobs. In 30 years at NBC, what was the most interesting job offer you turned down? Just everything that I wanted to do and was well suited to do. They asked me about some few things that I wasn't interested in. But the most interesting came in 1993 when David Letterman left NBC every didn't get the Tonight Show and Jay Leno did. And when he went to CBS, part of his deal was that he controlled the hour after his.

And David offered me that hour because he liked what I did on later when I followed his program on NBC. And as part of the offer, CBS said, we'd like you to be a correspondent about sports and pop culture on 60 minutes. And then we'll carve out whatever you want in sports. You'll be kind of busy if you accept the 60 minutes part and the post-Letterman part. part, but if you want to have a role on this property or other that we have in sports, we'll carve out some kind of place for you in that. Because of my great regard for Letterman and my great regard for 60 Minutes as a franchise, it was very tempting. But there were two reasons why I said no. At that point, NBC is about to reacquire baseball. The NBA on NBC was a

remarkable property in the heyday of Michael Jordan and the constellation of stars that surrounded him, the dream team and that whole run of indelible NBA figures. And we had the Olympics for the foreseeable future. I wasn't as interested in football and in fact stepped away from it in 93, but we still had those properties and I would have had a role interviewing or whatever it might have been on the Super Bowl or other such things. it was hard to turn away from that sports aspect. But the other aspect is this.

My kids then were seven and four. You can say to a little kid, hey, want to come with me and meet Michael Jordan, want to come to the Olympics, want to come to the World Series, and I did that all the time. It's hard to say to a little kid, I'm interviewing the Secretary of State.

Want to come? That doesn't move the needle for them. So the combination of the loyalty to NBC and the properties they had and the way it fit with my relationship with my family and my kids, I had to with regret turn down the CBS office. Hey, kid, you want to come with me while I chase an insurance adjuster down the street and say, excuse me, sir. Excuse me. These papers here, I want to show you this. I got a few questions to ask you. That would be funny.

back on the record with Bob Costa. It starts Friday, July 30th on HBO and all the HBO streaming platforms. Bob, thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks very much, Brian. Good to talk with you, as always. All right. It's time for David Shoemaker. Guess is the strained pun headline.

All right. Monday's headline about baseball player, your mean Mercedes appearing to retire was Mercedes-Ns. Today's pun comes to us from David Carpenter. It's actually a book title, a book by none other than Chip Games. Speaking of Waco and the Big 12, you'll remember, David, that Chip Gaines's previous book was called Capital Gaines.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. His new book also has a pun title. I'll give you the subhead. The Good Stuff Don't Come Easy. What was Chip Gaines' Strain Pun Book title? I've seen this book. I've held this book. But you might not necessarily remember the title of this book.

The good stuff don't come easy. Well, then it's got to be, it's like losses and gains or, um, it's, it's got to be a gains pun because it's a, it's, it's the, the subtitle lets you know. It don't come easy, David. Sometimes you have to endure something to get there. Tough, um, hurdles. It might hurt a bit, David. Pains and gains.

No, no pain, no gains. No pain, no gains. It's absolutely correct. he is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Isaiah Blakely. All three of us are back next week with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David.

See you later, Ryan.