 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the National Archives. My name is Colleen Chogan, and I'm the Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the McGowan Theatre this evening, and all of our guests that are also streaming online. So tonight is a special evening. It's a celebration of sports, and if you're a sports fan like me, then our guests need no introduction. Bob Costas and Michael Wilbon have a nearly a century of sports reporting under their belts. Football, basketball, baseball, the Olympics, and even the Kentucky Derby. I don't think there's probably a sport that they haven't covered, and they're gonna give us the inside scoop tonight. Now, I know what you might be asking. Why is the National Archives talking about sports? It's simple. From playgrounds to the major leagues, sports and sportsmanship are part of America's DNA. They are important components of our society and our culture, and at their best, sports have the ability to unite people, teach values, and inspire hope and pride. For generations, sports have brought us together and helped us define our identities. This happens certainly at the local level. You can't think of my hometown of Pittsburgh without thinking about the Steelers, about the Penguins, and the Pirates. And it certainly happens on a national level as well. Along with millions of Americans, I look forward to cheering for Team USA next summer during the Paris Olympics. Sports also teach us important life lessons. I played a lot of sports throughout my life, and it really affected my personal journey. My volleyball coach in high school, her name is Sharon Watson, was amazingly the most successful female coach in American high school sports history. It was a real honor to play for her. She had a 96.83% winning percentage during her long tenure. Yes, 96.83. And I'll tell you, I mean, I learned a lot from her. She made me very tough and resilient, and she made me fearless in very important ways. It's hard to intimidate me, and I credit Coach Watson for that. To tell these types of stories here at the National Archives, we've recognized the power of sports with a special exhibit, All American, The Power of Sports. The exhibit showcases how sports have been used officially and unofficially to shape our nation and influence diplomacy across the world. The All American exhibit and tonight's discussion are intended to help explore the power of sports, both to embody national ideas and challenges, and for us to live up to them. It's an honor to have two of the nation's most respected sports journalists join us for this discussion. Now let me turn the program over to my friend Governor Jim Blanchard, the Chairman of the National Archives Foundation, which generously supports our exhibitions, our public programs like this one, and educational initiatives to help the National Archives share America's records to people in the United States and around the world. Please join me in welcoming Governor Blanchard. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Shogun, our newly sworn in archivist, Dr. Colleen Shogun. Enormous credentials I might add, political scientist, teacher, Library of Congress person, White House Historical Association, happens to be the first woman archivist of the United States. So we have a great lineup for you tonight, two icons of the sports world, people we've listened to and heard. We know the voice when we hear it. It's going to be an exciting program they're going to give us tonight. I happen to be, as Dr. Shogun said, the Chair and President of the National Archives Foundation. We are the non-profit partner of the archives. We help raise resources and give advice on programs, exhibitions, and activities here that are so important to our country and the people who visit the archives or people who visit the website as well. Of course, the impact of our work is on display tonight with Sports in America, but also an exhibition here as well. And so we're really proud of our work and our partnership with the archives. I should also say that we have a wonderful board and most of them have great sports backgrounds. I'd like the board of directors of our foundation, the members, to please stand. Stand up. Don't be bashful. Hey, Vice Chair Rodney Slater, Secretary Slater, was a top running back at Eastern Michigan University. Yes, we should have got him at Michigan State. That's what we should have done. Yes, hey, Larry O'Brien's here. There's a gallery named after his family and his dad, but Larry O'Brien is the longest serving member of our board and his dad was the commissioner of the NBA. Larry, a special kudu to you. You know, speaking of sports, we all had our favorite teams, the hometown teams or our favorite players. Almost everyone has that in their life, in their career. And oftentimes if you're a Buckeye, I might add or my parents were. You follow it passionately to the grave for sure. My favorites were because from Michigan were the Detroit Tigers and the Michigan State Spartans. My hero was the late Hall of Famer, Al K. Line. He was a right fielder for the Tigers. I, yes, I I dreamed I dreamed of replacing him some day in right field. Fortunately for me, the coaches all said, you make a good manager, but we really think you should run for student council president. It worked out, but that gives you, as Dr. Shogan said, how important coaches are and athletics are in life. They tell you a lot about a good coach. It tells you a lot about a good coach because they look at the whole person and not just what they can get out of the player at the time. I got to know Al K. Line years later, I might add, and he became a good friend, the late Al K. Line. I also got to know almost all the Tigers all over the years, including the World Series champions when I was governor. And one of the privileges I took advantage of as governor was to go down to Lakeland for spring training. And the Tigers gave me my own uniform, Al K. Line pitch, batting practice. And one day I, Sparky said to me, you ought to come tomorrow and ride with the team to Witterhaven and you'll get to meet Ted Williams. I said, God, that's exciting. I recalled I was in Boston for my 14th birthday and our friends took me to the Fenway Park as a surprise for my birthday. And at that game in 1956, Ted Williams ended up at the end of the game. I won't give you all the details. Throwing his bat way up in the air, the crowd booed him and he went over and spit at the crowd. It became an historic moment in sports. And so you can imagine then how excited it was to see Williams in the flesh now as a retired ball player. By the way, I decided not to mention that incident to him. So we got on the team bus. We drove over to Witterhaven. We got out of the bus. We're walking toward Williams. He's standing on the mound, pitching mound. He's pitching batting practice and then simultaneously hitting fly balls to the outfielders. So as we approached the mound, I'm with Sparky. He says, hey, Sparky, good to see you. Who's that with you? He said, I want you to meet my dear friend, our Michigan governor, Jim Blanchard. He said, oh, that's great. So we shake hands. This guy is huge. He says, he is an R, right? And Sparky says, no, Ted, he's a D, but he's a good D. So he grabs me and gives me a new G. This is Ted Williams. I have the photo. And then he says to me what he's holding on to me like he's going to just flip me over. He says, Sparky, did you tell him about how Roosevelt sold us out at Yalta? I'm going, oh my God, Ted Williams wants to give me a history lesson. So that's my one story. There are many. Our special guest tonight have thousands of stories. It's so exciting to have them. And let me just say because of their bio, I'm not going to read their entire bio, but Bob Costas, as you know the voice from the Olympics and Major League Baseball, he's an American sportscaster who's been known for his long tenure with NBC from 1980 to 2019. He's received 28 Emmy Awards. Of course, he's had the prime time host of the 12th Olympic Games. Wow. From 1988 to 2016, he's currently employed by Warner Brothers Discovery Sports, where he does play-by-play and studio work for MLB and TBS and commentary on CNN. He's also employed by MLB Network, where he does play-by-play. Michael Willman, who many of us here in the watch in D.C. area remember and miss reading his columns in the post, is one of the nation's most respected sports journalists. And as an interest-wide presence as a decorated sports writer who has broadened his career now to include television, radio, and new media, a co-host of ESPN's Pardon the Interruption, and an analyst on NBA Countdown, ESPN, and ABC's long-standing NBA pre-game show, Willman left the Washington Post in December 2010 after 31 years of excellence in order to assume and expand the role in the world of sports. We are so fortunate to have them. So on behalf of the National Archives Foundation, we thank all of you for being with us. And now please welcome Bob Costas and Michael Willman. Hey, so here we are. Hi, everybody. Hello there. There will be time, substantial time, bit later on for questions and answers from the audience. You'll ask the questions, we'll provide the answers. But what we hope it is not, and I don't think in this gathering it will be, is are the gnats making any progress? What about the commanders? You know, we don't want to be pretentious, but we think that this may be a loftier discussion than that. I went through not as much as I would like to. I'll come back for more. But I was at the National Archives earlier today, especially or specifically, the portion that's devoted to sports and its impact on society. And I think that you and I both, Michael, in our own way, while reveling in the drama and the excitement and the shared experience of sports and the games themselves, have never lost sight of the fact that not always, but often, there's something else at play there and we ought to focus on that too. And we have focused on that largely for all those years that Governor referred to. I sort of get a little nervous when we talk about the number of those years now, Bob. Oh yeah. I went from a reverent newcomer to venerable statesman to something that seemed like the blink of an eye. But I've been here, living in Washington, I've been in the National Archives several times now, and once luckily enough on July 4th, when there's a special program and a very festive atmosphere, still I wanted to sneak to the sports exhibit naturally enough. And I should tell, as a jumping off point, when Bob talks about that intersection of chronicling and being a fan, we walked in tonight, just an hour ago, and we found out some unfortunate news about someone that we both came to know. We both started watching as children and then we both came to know as a professional and now we hear about the passing of the great Brooks Robinson, the Hall of Famer. Brooks Robinson just passed away in the last couple of hours. The Baltimore Oriole icon, for those of you who may not be as familiar, may not keep up with baseball as much as we do. And my first assignment here as an intern for the Washington Post was, drive to Baltimore kid and cover the Orioles when there were no nationals and no senators. And Brooks Robinson was, before Cal Ripken, the face and the personification of the Baltimore baseball franchise, it probably went from Ruth to Robinson to Ripken. And so to find out that tonight, and we immediately sort of go into a hyper drive because that's what we do. And we started thinking of ways to tell the story of Brooks Robinson. Yeah, and you know, Brooks Robinson was not in any way politically consequential. Not everyone needs to be. If we weren't drawn to sports for the shared experience, for the drama, for the beauty of great athletic performances, then what would it matter that those who were politically consequential had anything to say? That's what gave them the platform. That's what drew our eyes to them. But at the same time, no matter what someone's political leaning is, no matter what their background is, if they grew up in our generation as a baseball fan, wouldn't even have to be an Oriole fan. You feel something when you hear that Brooks Robinson has died. During COVID in the space of less than a year, 10 Hall of Famers died, including Governor Blanchard's favorite Al Kailine and Bob Gibson and Joe Morgan and Tom Siever. And you feel something and one of the things and it's a human emotion. You feel your own mortality. Wait a minute. I grew up watching this guy. I grew up rooting for this guy. And if there wasn't that heart and soul, that human connection, then we wouldn't care about the other stuff. But inevitably, the other stuff intersects. And at the right time and in proportion, we ought to be able to highlight both of those things and hopefully provide some insight into those things. And when I hear, and you and I have both heard it, stick to sports. What that almost always means is unless you're saying something I want to hear and I already agree with, because if you've watched Fox News over the years, which I have done just to check on life on other planets, you will see that entertainers, shut up and dribble, shut up and sing, entertainers and athletes who are in accord with the general tone at Fox News are welcome. And they have every right to have their say, but let's not be hypocritical about it. No, that's an important point. The sort of another intersection of just cultural discussion that Bob is referring to and sort of what resonates with us. We celebrated on the show that Tony Kornhizer and I do every day. Tony was not in today, but our substitute host, Frank Isola from New York. We celebrated an anniversary 58 years ago strange because I'm young enough, old enough to remember what happened, but satchel page, a satchel page anniversary. He pitched, right? He came back and pitched. He came back and pitched at 59 years old for the Kansas City Aids, 59 years old. And I, you know, this is a great time of year for me. This is my favorite time of year in some ways because I think about not the beginning of school, but the beginning of post-season baseball. Which my life was defined by the first, I don't know, at least 30 years of it. And now in many of those years, I got to hear Bob Costas. And if you care about baseball and love baseball, hearing Bob's voice has been a treat for all of those years. And we're about to start into that period now, like next week. Where are you going first? I'm doing the NLDS series that involves the Dodgers for TBS. Maybe the Cubs? Yeah, against either. It could be the Cubs against either Milwaukee and whatever wildcard entrant they face whoever wins that series plays the Dodgers. So that's what I'll do. Some of us have a rooting interest in that. But I start to get into these discussions. I worry that the history and significance of what Bob was talking about is lost. And so, satchel page coming up, we have producers that understand that Tony and I are not gonna celebrate anniversaries from three years ago. We want the ones from 58 years ago. So that we can highlight the contributions of people who are really larger in that iconic way than any sort of political position in the culture. Satchel page was certainly one of those who was in the Hall of Fame by 1971. And you just think about a satchel page will be now what? 120 years old? My math, 119. Yeah, but he always said, his exact quote was, how old would you be if you didn't know how old you was? Cause he had multiple birth certificates, right? Yes, he did. Probably produced them on demand. So to celebrate, that's what got me in the mood for our discussion tonight and questions you may have later was celebrating that anniversary of satchel page pitching at 59 years old. And I get into it with people who start to, we get into these discussions about a wonderful ball player, talk about cultural touchdown in Shohei Otani and all that he has done and is doing and will do and start to say there's never been anybody like this before and I'm like, hold on. Hold on. And certainly there's never been anybody like satchel page before who once told the great Willie Mays after Mays had hit him once in an exhibition. He said, the next time you come up, the next time I see you, I'm gonna throw three fast balls past you. And I think satchel page was like 54 and he actually did that. To the player, I don't know how Bob feels about this and I feel as the greatest ball player ever in Willie Mays. So it's the ability to celebrate them what they meant to the culture and really remembering them and not getting so carried away with the things on our watch that we lose track of how this all came to mean what it means to us. Yeah, I recall doing an all-star game once for NBC in the 90s and we always tried to do dramatic openings for the World Series and the NBA finals that would draw the audience in. And there were a cavalcade of stars on both the American and National League teams and part of my narration was those, and we looked at Ken Griffey Jr. and then a shot of Roger Maris, those who may be forever linked to men they never knew. That's part of the history of sports but especially of baseball because its history is so long, so rich, and it's possible the steroid are a mess this up because it was such a distortion. But nobody ever says, I wonder how George Michael would do against Shaquille O'Neill. But going way further back, you could imagine a pitching matchup between Walter Johnson and Randy Johnson. You can compare Willie Mays to Shohei Otani, although Willie never pitched but Shohei Otani evokes the name of Babe Ruth. Last year, and you can't, there's so much stuff out there now, social media nonsense that you can't really measure what reasonable people are thinking all the time because those who treat Twitter as if it's a pew poll are going down the wrong path. But I was doing Cleveland versus the Yankees and so in the first game I said, the Yankees haven't won the World Series since 2009, that seems like an eternity to their fans. But the Guardians, formerly the Indians, won their last World Series 74 years ago tonight or today in 1948, if my math is correct, whatever the number was. And Satchel Page was on that team. Satchel Page was on that team, that's right. In 1948, the Cleveland Indians were the first American League team to integrate. So Larry Doby, who was the first American League black player, is kind of the Buzz Aldrin of baseball integration. Buzz was the second man to set foot on the moon. Larry Doby had to have faced a whole lot of what Jackie Robinson faced and it's almost as if, I mean, Jackie's one of the greatest Americans, let alone greatest figures in baseball history and everything that's been said in the praise of him isn't enough. But Larry Doby had to have faced some of that and when the time is right, it's up to you and me to tell someone who's 25 years old about that. And if someone who's 25 years old is so into their own bubble or on their phone that they say, that's not my frame of reference, therefore I don't care about it and it's irrelevant, that person is on their way to being a full-fledged idiot. Yes. Well, the phrase that angers me the most anybody in our profession is, well, that happened before I was born. Right. Which will bring a rant from me instantly, I don't care where we are. I wish I was there to back you up. I don't care who's listening, I can take it from my 15-year-old though, not courteously, but I can't take it from people in our profession, happened before I was born. So did the Holocaust, so did slavery. Yes. So you're saying they are less relevant because you weren't born? It needs to happen on your watch, really? And so God help the producers who have to work with me, who don't want to acknowledge history and don't want to deal with my dear wife is sitting in the front here. At one point she said to me early in our marriage, something about Yankee Stadium and Wrigley Field and why they're special. I said, you know what, in Fenway, I said, you know what, there's only one way to do this. We're gonna go to each one of them in a weekend, which we did. After which you knew you had married the right woman. I didn't. But one of the things I felt greatest about was saying, as we sat at Wrigley Field was, Babe Ruth played right here. That's right. He played here. And does it matter? Yeah, it does matter. It should matter. First of all, it should just really matter that you're curious enough to care about things that happen before you, no matter what they are, whether they're sports or not. But sports certainly are probably the best chronicles, I guess, World Wars, but I'm not so sure. And so this is, again, this time of year really aids in that discussion. Because, and Bob, I don't know if you agree with this, but baseball is the best chronicle of our past times. And maybe boxing is next, but I'd say baseball is. Boxing, even though baseball has seated its position as the most popular sport for reasons that mystify me, but nonetheless, to football, it's not in complete eclipse like boxing is. The average sports fan used to be able to name the champions of all then eight divisions and who the top contenders were. Now, it's such a niche sport. It's off on showtime, it used to be on HBO, whatever it might be. It used to be that every American, even if they didn't follow boxing, could name the heavyweight champion of the world. Now, I don't think 25% could name the heavyweight champion of the world. So baseball still has a position of significant prominence and it has the longest history and it's the easiest sport to chronicle because of comparisons and statistics, everything kept track of. And to your point, I think that boxing, baseball, and in an earlier era, horse racing were what attracted the best writers. Some of the best sports literature, disproportionately, is about baseball. Just read John Updike's piece about Ted Williams' last game at Fenway Park. Hub fan's big kid adieu. Or read anything that Roger Angel wrote about baseball in The New Yorker. Or read what excellent writers like Michael who was always terrific on deadline, what they wrote on deadline, where it's not just enough to say, this is what happened in the game. This, if it's an important game, if it's an epic game, if it's the Cubs finally breaking through for the first time since 1908, it's not enough to say that they beat the Cleveland Indians in an extra inning game in game seven. There's something more at work here. I don't know why this pops in my head and maybe it's not the most relevant thing. Don Larson in 1956 pitched a perfect game in the World Series. Don Larson was a carouser, a drinker, a goofball. In fact, his nickname was Gooney Bird. He didn't even know he was gonna start that day because he'd been knocked out earlier in the series, early in a game at Evans Field. And the old custom was, when you came to the ballpark, if the baseball was in your cleat, in your shoe, at your locker, that meant you were the starting pitcher. So there he was. And he had to sober up quickly. And because he didn't expect to pitch. And he pitched a perfect game. And Joe Trimble, who was then a writer for the New York Daily News, was agonizing because everything was on deadline then. The newspapers mattered. You needed the account of the game. You didn't have it on your phone. You didn't have Sports Center. You didn't have the baseball network. You didn't have streaming highlights. This was gonna be big. And especially it was New York. It was a New York paper. And there he was, staring in an old school typewriter at a blank sheet of paper. He didn't have the lead. And Dick Young, famous, irascible, but great in his time, sports columnist and baseball writer of the Daily News, leaned over his shoulder and said, the imperfect man pitched a perfect game and walked away. And that was his lead. Because it's not just a baseball story, it's a human story. I got into this because I wanted to be a baseball writer. That's why I became a sports writer. I wanted to be a baseball writer, specifically played baseball, growing up that was my first love easily. And when I got to the Washington Post, and as Bob talks about baseball writers, I sort of teasingly, mockingly to some degree, talk about the poets. Because they are such beautiful writers, they might as well have been in another life poets. And I got to grew up under Shirley Povich and Tom Boswell, two of the great baseball writers ever. And standing around in the Washington Post newsroom, I remember it started out with something coming to mind. In 1986, Roger Clemens was thrown out of a game for arguing balls and strikes, right? In the post-season. In the post-season, yeah. So everybody wrote the next day, every paper in the country, somebody wrote speaking of history, that this was the first time ever in baseball history that anybody, much less somebody as famous as Roger Clemens, as accomplished as Roger Clemens had been thrown out of a game, he was participating in for arguing balls and strikes. And Shirley Povich, we're in the newsroom at Shirley, he's retired at that point, probably about 87, 88 years old. Shirley looked at all this and said, no, no, no, Walter Johnson got thrown out of a game in 1924 in the World Series. And then as Tony Coronizer and I are just dumbfounded, believe me, even we were silent. Shirley then dropped the killer line on us and he was explaining what he knew about that game and the circumstances and said later, train told me. So Walter Johnson was the big train. Big train, train told me, which is still to me the all-time stopper when the man with Tony and I wanna say something is unparalleled, train told me, and I remember saying to Shirley Povich before he passed away, that floored me. I was not the same ever again. And Shirley, in his own way then, in his early 90s, said, listen, it's not that big a deal. In 30 or 40 years, you're gonna tell some kid, Jordan told me. And it didn't make sense at the time and it's starting to make sense. He was such a lovely man, Shirley. And for example, when Cal Ripken was approaching Lou Gehrig's record, so this is 1995, all of us could talk about Lou Gehrig. We'd seen Pride of the Yankees. We had record books, but Shirley was the go-to guy because he knew Lou Gehrig. He had covered Lou Gehrig. He was at the game, you know, feel like the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Shirley Povich was at that game. July 4th, 1939. Yeah, yeah, one of the most famous speeches in the history of sports and really somewhere in the American pantheon when it comes to that. Everything sparks a story. When you went through the exhibit today, I was told there was something that really touched you about Muhammad Ali in a specific picture. And I wonder if you tell that story about encountering that today. Well, yeah, there's a famous picture of Muhammad Ali being at a summit of black athletes in the 1960s. Jim Brown, young Kareem, who still then was Louis Alcindor, Bill Russell, and others who were part and a significant part of the civil rights movement. You know, Martin Luther King told many of these guys, told Jackie Robinson, but not just Jackie. Without you guys and what you did, the civil rights movement would not have gained some of the momentum that it eventually gained. And so I guess Michael is setting me up for this. That picture reminded me of an essay that I did in 2016 when Muhammad Ali died. He died on a Friday night and I was doing a baseball game in St. Louis. And NBC said I was kind of their guy for stuff like that. We need you to get back here as quick as possible and do an appreciation of Ali, which we will run tomorrow as soon as we can get it on the air. So I took a 6 a.m. flight out of St. Louis and I rode it on the plane and went in there and recorded it and it played an hour or two after that. And here it is. Muhammad Ali was a beautiful figure in a brutal sport. A dazzling combination of magnetism, skill, and sheer athletic grace. That alone made him distinctive. Stop, stop, stop. Made him meaningful. In a turbulent and transformative time. Ali was a compelling, okay, let's go back and not clip the beginning. So it doesn't. I mean, I don't think my work is that precious. Muhammad Ali was a beautiful figure in a brutal sport. A dazzling combination of magnetism, skill, and sheer athletic grace. That alone made him distinctive. Other qualities made him meaningful. In a turbulent and transformative time, Ali was a compelling and polarizing symbol. A symbol of black pride and liberation, of anti-war resistance, of youthful challenge to the status quo. He was defiantly independent and yet endlessly entertaining. To be sure, there were missteps and contradictions. His youthful embrace of the nation of Islam was misguided. His demeaning of opponents, especially the admirable Joe Frazier was often cruel. And as we all do, he had personal failings and regrets. He was a man, not a saint. But as we saw the man in full, our appreciation only grew. When on moral grounds, he refused induction into the army. When surely, like Joe Lewis before him, he could have fought some USO exhibitions and never faced combat. He instead faced the very real possibility of prison. As it was, he was stripped of his title. And for all he knew, he would never step through the ropes again. In the end, he lost three prime years and millions of dollars. There was integrity in that. Even those who had reviled him came to acknowledge it. Once back in the ring, of all his memorable bouts, the three with Frazier most defined him. The two put each other through a kind of hell and lifted each other to a kind of heroism. And again, Ali's detractors were forced to reconsider. He could no longer be dismissed as mere dash and flash. Frazier tested his will, his fortitude, his guts, and Ali had plenty. The fights with Frazier and others took a tragic toll, though, and he spent half his adult life in a kind of netherworld of ever diminishing mobility and, most poignantly, speech. The once loquacious champ silenced. But by then, he'd become an international symbol of brotherhood, an ambassador of goodwill. And it all came together that night in Atlanta in 1996, when a trembling Ali stepped from the shadows and into the spotlight once more to light the Olympic cauldron. The deeply appreciative reaction made it a fitting and perfect moment of reconciliation. Was Ali really the greatest? Was he a better boxer than Sugar Ray Robinson? Was he better at his sport than Jordan, Ruth, Pele, or Gretzky at theirs? Does it matter? Ali's career and life had an impact far beyond his athletic accomplishments. His place in his time, and now for all time, is unique. He stands alone, the one, the only, the greatest. It's amazing. It's just great. Now, two things. Two things. Two things. Just $6.99, almost half a pound of meat and cheese. The number two, just for you. Candy, I guess. I guess we should just send the call out. We're adding a new member to the now team tonight, although he is no stranger to NBC. I came in. Certainly no stranger to American television. I love it. Bob Costas is here. And I left to go see Hamilton. That's, I left to go see Hamilton, all right? And the producers are great. You'll put the appropriate pictures to what I've just delivered. I looked into the camera, I delivered it, and then I left. And the one thing that bothered me was, over the line, those who had reviled him, they showed Cosell. And that was not right, and if I had been there, I would have said, no, no, no, don't do that. Because Howard Cosell, who could be controversial, he gets all the props in the world for his support of Muhammad Ali and of the Civil Rights Movement and of Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 68 Olympics. If you can Google it's on YouTube, what Cosell said, not just about Smith and Carlos in support of them, but about the IOC and their, what would you call it, their hypocrisy and high-mindedness and all the platitudes that they then don't live up to, Howard Cosell could be a pain in the ass. But what really mattered was what he was in his time. And so much blowback that he got, a lot of it was anti-Semitic. Oh, a New York Jew standing up for that blankety-blank. So I was not happy that Howard was in there. And then as a writer, you'll appreciate this. And I always, even though I wanted to be a broadcaster, the literate broadcasters, the Jack Whitaker's, the Vince Scully's, the Jim McKays, writers now, Michael, Tom Verducci, the people through the years that hit grace notes, turns of phrase, had a frame of reference that beyond just the field or the arena, those are the people that I admired most. And however imperfectly when I had a chance, I tried to do what they might have done if they had the microphone. And so right at the beginning, I listed how entertaining and dynamic he was. And I said, those qualities alone made him distinctive. Other qualities made him meaningful. But as a writer, I should have said made him memorable because it couples better with meaningful, right? That's seven years ago and it still bothers the hell out of me. Okay, those people who are younger, are gonna automatically associate us with television. And even for me now, it's been one show for 20 years. Well, 22 years coming up soon. When did you, in your own head, not work, but art, when did you decide that, okay, I'm gonna make this transition and this new life, this door I'm walking through, I may not walk back? You mean as a sportscaster or a different kind of sportscaster? As a sportscaster. You know, I guess I was bright enough at age 10 to realize that if I was ever gonna get into Yankee Stadium without a ticket, it certainly wouldn't be to stand where Mickey Mantle is standing. It was gonna be to try and sit where Mel Allen and Red Barber were sitting. So that was kind of, you know, when I was playing in the schoolyard and shooting baskets or playing wiffle ball, I would hear Marv Albert or Marty Glickman or whomever in my head. They were the soundtrack of the games and I wanted to be one of them. And you didn't have all the technology that you have now, nothing like it. So when I got to Syracuse, which along with Northwestern was your premier journalism school, when I got to Syracuse, the first time I ever did anything or heard myself was when I did a sportscast as a freshman on the campus radio station. You have a little cassette recorder and I heard it back and I was horrified. No pacing, no rhythm, vestiges of a New York accent, tinny, thin voice. And my thought was I'm 18 years old, I'm doomed. But some professors encouraged me and I took some speech classes and I got some reps in and things turned out okay. Thankfully. I never even aspired. I never even thought it was going to happen until I was 40, mid-40s. What? Never. But you were already doing it. A little bit, but only when PTI started, I was 42, so Tony's 10 years older. And I remember we didn't want to quit our day jobs at the Washington Post, so I didn't. Well that gave you credibility too. Well. At the outset. Probably everywhere except for my wife sitting here who was wondering why is he doing two jobs and never home? So yeah. But at least you knew where he was because he was on TV. Nine years, I did both of them because I didn't trust television, which I still don't. And so I literally did not and I didn't know that that transition was ever going to happen. So it's interesting listening to you. You had a much clearer feeling about how this was going to go and how it was going to turn out. I had none. As a matter of fact, I remember saying to Tony at one point look, we signed these three-year deals and to start PTI. We were in the Washington Post Newsroom down the street and I said, Tony, the worst case scenario is they fire us after about six months. And we got free money to hang out and play golf and that would be the worst case scenario. Tony says, that's your worst case scenario. I said, yeah. He said, that's my best case scenario. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Jesus tried to live up to or down to for the most part ever since. But it is, so it's interesting how people get at, but at the root of it was the same sentiment, the same desire, the same passion. I'll even go as far as to, forgive me, call it a calling. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if, and I think it has to start with an appreciation of those who preceded you. You don't have to copy them because then you'll only be a pale imitation of the master and the original. But you can be influenced by them and inspired by them. So if there had not been a Vin Scully or a Red Barber, if there had not been a Jim McKay, and now as I've read that you said, if there had not been a Bryant Gumbel, there's nobody that looks like you at that time. Thankfully now there's a zillion examples. So it's been a fruitful revolution. But you needed somebody. Even if you loved Vin Scully, you needed Bryant Gumbel. Yeah, I thought about it. Obviously, you know, Bryant retiring and announcing that recently, you know, brought a lot of emotion out of me. He's from the South side of Chicago, as am I. His formative years were there. There was one other person. I was growing up, it's interesting because I meet people now in 2023 who will mention pioneering. And it sort of frightens me. Because I grew up, and first there was Bryant, as Bob just said, there was another gentleman who was on Channel 9 in Chicago and WGN, the famous superstation, Wendell Phillips, and he was also writing a column in the Chicago Sun-Times. An African-American gentleman who I read and watched when I was 10 years old, fortunately. And so at 10, I had him, and there's a book about him now which I just started reading and I haven't finished yet. And then by the time I was 15, I had 18, I had Bryant. And so yeah, there were people that you looked at. So I never grew up, Bob, with the feeling that wow, there's no one who looks like me who does this because they existed. Right. And because they were so great at it. And then the other people I identified with had nothing to do with race. I grew up reading Brent Musburger, reading. Brent Musburger was a sports writer long before he got to CBS. And I read him covering the Chicago Bears as the B writer. And so when you mention people that come before and Brent knows the stories and went to Northwestern and so literally there's sort of a following in footsteps and there were an army of people. And I don't know if this happens more in what became our calling than it does in other professions, maybe not. Well, it's more visible. It is more visible. You don't have to seek them out as much. It's kind of just seeps in. Before we go to questions and answers which we're gonna do in a moment, everything's parts of story, as I started to say. So when Michael mentioned Shirley Povich who was not only a giant, but such a nice and gracious and generous man with all of his experience, he wrote one of the great leads ever. Now think about this guy who literally knew Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, but it doesn't have to be generational. It can be if you have a humanity about you, you see injustice and you do what you can. And but you do it deftly. Sometimes you don't do it stridently, you do it deftly. The Washington Redskins to their everlasting disgrace were the last NFL team to integrate. And Edward, who was it? Who was the- George Preston Marshall. Right, George Preston Marshall who infamously said we will have a black player when the Harlem Globetrotters have a white player. All right, so the Cleveland Browns come in and Jim Brown has a field day and Shirley's lead was Jim Brown integrated Washington's end zone four times yesterday. So now there's other thing is just doesn't really fit, but when I was why I have a chance to tell it, I was at some banquet that was honoring Shirley. Shirley's son is Maury Povich, who took a somewhat different path, right? And so I said, you know, when I look at Shirley Povich, I say to myself, here's a man who actually knew Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Joe Lewis, Jackie Robinson. And when I look at Maury Povich, I say, here's a man who actually knows Joey Butifuco. And they both took it well. And Maury to his credit on his putter has, that was given to him, is DNA daddy on the bottom. I say a post-script on the Shirley Povich story. We could do a whole thing just talking about Shirley. So I was going to my first fight of my life was Sugar Ray Durant. I was terrified. The one in Montreal? No, the one in New Orleans, the rematch in New Orleans, when Ray Charles signed the National Anthem. Yes, and I was 22 years old. I'm going to this and Shirley Povich has given me a ride there and I was, he said, you know, kid, you look nervous. I'm like, Shirley, I'm terrified. And I said, this is your first fight. I said, yes, my first fight. And I said, Mr. Povich, what was your first fight? And I'm ready for Joe Louis Schmelling. I'm ready for that. I mean, I know enough about Shirley and I've been around him enough in the summers, the summer intern, and now I'm okay, I'm ready for Joe Louis. And he says, Dempsey Tunney, the long count fight. No, like 1928 or something? 1927, I think, and so there were moments, you know, like that that just kept coming and you would, I sat next to Shirley as a matter of fact, the night that Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig's record. And a young woman came up to the press box and leaned in and she was holding a tattered pennant. And she said, Mr. Povich, my father who's ailing in a hospital in New York asked me if I could find you to sign this because your name would make it complete. And Cal Ripken sent this young woman to the press box. Oh, how great is that? So that Shirley could sign it because the other two signatures already on it were Lou Gehrig and Cal Ripken. And Shirley's the only one who covered both. Shirley's the only one who covered both and the father knew that. And he sent this young woman to get the signature. And it's just, you know, it's just sort of sobering when you have that sort of access around you and yes, we would tease Maury about this all the time, his different path that winds up with DNA daddy on his putter. You know, look, the athletes and those we cover are the primary actors, but the way it is covered has a tremendous impact on the way it is remembered. Most of you here of a certain age where you can recall Kirk Gibson's dramatic homerun in the 1988 World Series for the Dodgers when he came limping out, didn't even dress, wasn't standing on the field for the national anthem, wasn't expected to play and that was his only at bat in the entire World Series. It was as theatrical as anything I've ever seen in baseball. In fact, my sole contribution, Vince Gully was calling it magnificently. Jack Buck had a great call on radio too, I don't believe what I just saw. The game was over, I said to one of the producers, this reminds me of Robert Redford's at bat as Roy Hobbs in The Natural. And before game two, they intercut Redford with Gibson and Randy Newman's soundtrack and it was eerie how they mirrored each other. Gibson didn't have a bullet wound, but he was hobbling around and Wilford Brimley as the manager of the New York Knights and La Sorda, they each jumped up an exaltation and they each got about this far off the ground. So that match too, and Kirk Gibson has told people he's at the center of it, he did it. He said half of what I remember about it is looking at Dennis Eckersley and in the moment. But the other half of what I remember is what Vince Gully said and how Harry Coyle, the director, cut it. Barry Levinson's a great director, directed The Natural, he had as many takes as he needed. Harry Coyle in real time, boom, boom, boom, everything was motion picture perfect. If that hadn't been described by Vince and presented by NBC the way it was, would it be a great moment still? Of course, but would it be remembered the same way? Would Lake Placid have been great? Of course, but without Al Michael saying do you believe in miracles, it doesn't resonate decades later. So that's where if you can do it halfway decently, that's where you play into it. You can enhance it, or you can detract from it, or maybe you just kind of are there and don't get in the way, so. I think we have questions. Yes, we hope so. Oh, I see microphones. Yeah. So please, and I may have a question or two for Bob actually. Yes. So Michael, but this is great. Yes. Hello. Hello. So you mentioned people like Brian Gumbel and those who paved the way for you, but as Michael and I know his cousin Carol Simpson was a pioneer journalist who I know inspired you. And I was Carol's producer for many years. Amelia Bundles, who was at ABC for a while. Yeah, for a while. She was a pioneer. And NBC. For a while. She anchored the weekend on ABC. That's right, Carol. Yes, she did. Yes, she did. So if I remember correctly, Carol was kind of distressed when you decided that you were gonna do sports. Are you going to go around writing about people who chase balls? Yes. Yes. So, and Carol, that's what Carol would have said. But so I'm wondering what your 60-something self would tell your 22-year-old self about why you made the right decision because sports is diplomacy and foreign affairs and all kinds of other things. So I'm just curious what you would tell Carol and yourself now. Thank you, Amelia. I was with Carol last month at Martha's Vineyard in her house, still sparring with each other. Instead of, you know, so I was 16 years old and a junior in high school in Chicago, and I asked Carol if I could interview her. Okay, so let's do some math. 16 years, oh God. It's almost 50 years ago. And Carol was on, she was on locally in Chicago at that point. She had not become Carol Simpson in BC News or ABC News. And radio. And radio. And we had this discussion. And I'm not gonna, I don't see around corners very well. That's not my thing. I don't ever pretend that I do. That's not what I do well. I've done it well once. And I knew that sports was way too important and one of the most important things in the world when I was 16 and 26 and 46 and 64. I knew that then. And I always told Carol that. That something I might have been covering at a time, John Thompson walking out of the old Capitol Center to protest Proposition 48. And we can get historical about this. And Bob referred to Dr. King and others talking about telling professional athletes that what they were doing set the agenda and sometimes the pace for the civil rights movement. That Jackie Robinson had his travails eight years before Rosa Parks. And you can go through and find this. The first real race riots in American history, modern American history were because of Jack Johnson winning a fight July 4th, 1910. The place that different events in sports and the people that do these things occupy, you, Muhammad Ali. I mean, so the most famous person on earth, I mean, how many times has this been a sports person recently? It certainly went from Muhammad Ali to Michael Jordan. And it just, whether we want to deal with this or not, it illustrates how important sports is and therefore chronicling it, how important that is accurately to start. And so I, believe me, it's much easier to throw this in Carol's face now than it was when I was 20, whatever. And I will still call her up now and say, it's your favorite relative who covers people chasing balls. So some things have not changed. You know, if we don't do a good job though in the day to day, in the appreciation of the excitement, the shared experience, and sometimes the actual beauty of sports, you know, there's a difference between a thoughtful appreciation and mindless hype. You might be sitting next to the guy who does mindless hype. That doesn't mean that you can't do a thoughtful appreciation. If those moments, whether it's Ali or whoever it might be, those moments are linked together by other moments not as consequential, but still important to people. I don't know how many people of great intellect and other walks of life have told me what big sports fans they are. They, you know, George Will doesn't sit around apologizing for being obsessed with baseball. You know, he's one of the smartest guys I know. He enjoys baseball and has written about it for the game itself. He's acknowledged some of the political aspects along the way, but 95% of it is about the game itself. If you don't have an audience that appreciates what you write or say about sports in general, then you don't have their ear when you say, hey, wait a minute, something else is going on here. This is very important. And Ali, oh, just for the record, I should state you brought up Carol. Talk about how fortunate was I to be inspired by somebody in my own family, my first cousin. I mean, you know, the first important paper I ever wrote, I still have it because she took red ink and bled all over it, which I reminded her of last month as well. So yeah, I mean, the number of inspirational storytellers, you don't know where they're gonna come from. You don't know. Yes, we have some. Yeah, there we go. He's got the mic. Good evening. Earlier this month, Warner Brothers Discovery canceled winning time, the drama series about the 80s Lakers and your former partner, Coach Riley. Within the first two episodes, there was instant angry backlash from the show subjects Jerry West, Karim and your former colleague and our favorite new owner of the Washington Commanders, Magic Johnson. Do you, the two of you personally enjoy the drama citation of sport history that you know so well? And do you think this most recent backlash is gonna damper creative minds when it tells sport history in the future? I'm gonna be reasonable about most of this. I hate it. So did I. These people are not fictional to me. I understand what other people might be entertained. They're real. At dinner with Magic Johnson Saturday. He's a real person, not a character. I know Jerry West. There are parts of Jerry West's life that he would be the first to tell you and has told us. And he's written about it. He's written about it. He writes it about it just unvarnished and unvarnished. Right. Jerry West, one of the great storytellers ever. These people are not fictional. So Karim is not fictional. Jerry West, not fictional. Magic Johnson, not fictional. And so no, I hate it. I don't like dramatization. I understand there's a, I'm not saying there's no place for it. I did not watch one episode, one moment will not consume it, period. I watched the first three or four and was enraged by it. Now, I know that the portrayals, in some case, showed acting chops. And they, you know, John C. Riley and whatnot. And Brody as Riley. And Adam McKay, who is the producer, is a big deal guy. And I'll tell a story here out of school. And somehow it'll wind up. Because that's the way it works. Nothing stays within its own kind of original context anymore. I actually wanted to do a commentary about it. HBO is a performers and journalists' paradise. Synonymous with quality. But the landscape is shifting. So HBO sports almost doesn't exist anymore. And it's all because of the new financial realities. You know, when Brian Gumbel and Real Sports wrap it up at the end of this year, that was the 60 minutes of sports. That showed you how you could cover sports in a thoughtful and still entertaining and engrossing way. This was extremely good work. And I was proud to have been there for a long stretch from, I think, 01 to 09. And then I had to choose between that and the new baseball network. And I chose to go to the baseball network. But that's, it's a proud chapter. And I, but I wanted to do a commentary on HBO at that time about how this is an outrage. Jerry West is a tormented man to this day. There's a dark side, but it's all directed at himself. The idea that Jerry West was this abusive character dropping F-bombs at everybody, that's completely false. It's not an exaggeration. It's completely false. Kareem is a deeply intelligent person who was in many ways out of place in the sports world, but for the fact that he has this surpassing ability, one of the greatest of all time. He was uncomfortable sometimes in his own skin, his size. He's, think of it, think about it. He was a guy, he was a giant, right? But his whole game was finesse. He didn't want to overpower anybody. He felt out of place in Milwaukee. You know, he'd grown up, it wasn't his dad like could have gone to Juilliard or something, right? But wasn't able to go because of the obvious circumstances of the time. So Kareem might have been short with people at times. He might, as when he was younger, he might not have been, you know, before he became Roger Murdoch on airplane. He might not have been, listen kid, I'm out there busting my buns every night. Tell your old man to drag Walt little in here up and down the court for 48 minutes. But, you know, prior to that, he was having trouble getting comfortable with both himself. He's a deeply thoughtful man who's written about the Buffalo Soldiers and the Harlem Renaissance. You know, this is a legitimate intellectual. I've had pieces that Kareem has written in the past five years are amazing. The sub-stack stuff, yes. So you could understand how in the midst of the racial turmoil of his time and being a fish out of water in many ways, he was uncomfortable. He was not, the idea that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar ever would have said to a little kid, get the fuck out of here, impossible, impossible. So I was, so having that feeling, I stopped watching it. I'm told that it was better in the second season. So I wanted to do this commentary and the only time ever at HBO, they let me do and say whatever I wanted to do and say. They said this game of the series is kind of important. So, you know, just this one time, please hold your fire. So I did, you know, because sometimes you gotta pick your battles. Which current athlete, sorry, over here. Which current athlete are you guys most excited to see what they do after they retire? It's a good question. Wow, after. Should have thought about that before we sat down, shouldn't we? No, after. You know, one popped in my head immediately and I admit a bias toward this person and being involved and sort of helping to, because he asked co-host at his charity event four years in a row now and that's Steph Curry. Oh, it's a good choice. You know, and if I think about it, later tonight I'm gonna turn and say, wait a minute, I forgot about so-and-so. Steph Curry, he might be at the top of the list for me. Bob, is it? Oh. Ha, ha, ha, ha. You know, there are some, you knew what Peyton Manning was gonna do. He was gonna be funny as hell. Any place he wanted to be. You know, and a lot of these guys now have accumulated enough wealth that they can be at least part of groups that own teams. So, you know, that could possibly be interesting. Magic, Matt, I don't think enough is known and appreciated about Magic's post-basketball playing career and the business interests and the opportunities he's given other people and his involvement in multiple sports, not just basketball, baseball and football and soccer. Soccer, LAFC? Yeah. Yeah, it's, Magic has had the most unpredictable, he would tell you he couldn't predict it. Second act, maybe in the history of sports, maybe. It's certainly on the short list, but now you're gonna have to be thinking about this one. This is gonna keep me up about what other athletes. Yeah, about midnight tonight. Yeah, we're gonna come up with somebody else. This lady has been holding a microphone for a while. So thank you so much for a great talk. I did wanna mention to everybody that Smithsonian also has a baseball exhibit at the Postal Museum and on display at the African American Museum right now is a MVP trophy of Jim Brown and it says Jimmy Brown. Yeah, that's what he was called. And as the Planned Latino Museum, one of the donations from the Clemente family is gonna be a trophy that says Bobby Clemente and I was, to me, those are very disrespectful trophies that they're not calling them by their real names. And then I also wanted, so I wanted your thoughts on that and then we've had some talks at Smithsonian about the new Planned Museum and a lot of the current players wanna retire Clemente's number and I wanted to get your thoughts on that. Well, Jackie Robinson's number 42 is retired throughout baseball and there's obviously 21 is retired in Pittsburgh. The right field wall in the ballpark in Pittsburgh is 21 feet high. Almost no one knows that, but it's 21 feet high for Roberto Clemente. And there's a day, there's a Roberto Clemente day where everyone wears a 21 patch but those who have won the Roberto Clemente Award are allowed to wear a number 21 just like everybody wears 42 on Jackie Robinson day. So could they retire Roberto Clemente's uniform number throughout baseball? I guess they could and they could do what they did with 42 which is grandfather in anybody who's currently wearing it. Mariano Rivera wore 42 until he retired because he already had it at the time that baseball decided to make that step. Jimmy Brown, who was certainly a prideful man had no problem being called Jimmy Brown and then later it became Jim Brown. But with Clemente, that was a conscious thing because they felt that an Hispanic name that calling him Roberto would make white fans uncomfortable. There are baseball cards that say Bob Clemente and announcers called him Bobby or Bob Clemente into the early 60s. But when the Pirates won the World Series in 1960 and in 71, when he was interviewed afterwards, he spoke in English but then he stopped and addressed fans in Puerto Rico and his mother and father in Spanish which was deeply poignant but also bold. So Clemente to Hispanic players, they'll never be someone that's exactly equal to Jackie Robinson because the circumstances can never be replicated. But and there were Hispanic players before Roberto Clemente but he's the first indisputably great Hispanic player and then what he did with that both as a player and then he died a hero on a mission of mercy to take supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua and his plane went down, left San Juan, never recovered so he's got that James Dean Marilyn Monroe thing going for him. He never got old and he died heroically. Forgive me for telling the story here but I'll go ahead anyway. Somebody discovered, not just somebody, the archivist, we're here at the archives, the archivist of the Bing Crosby estate. Bing Crosby owned a piece of the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 50s and 60s. Bob Hope owned a piece of the Cleveland Indians at the same time. He was in Paris making a movie when the pirates played the Yankees in the 1960 World Series and he was afraid he would jinx them by coming home for game seven. So he had somebody make a kinescope. A kinescope is just you take a camera and you point it at the television set. By then in 1960 the World Series was in color if you had a color TV, most people didn't. This happened to be a black and white TV. Okay this archivist in 2010 is going through a bunch of stuff. Road to Rio with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour, a bunch of dusty stuff. What's this? He takes a look, oh my gosh, what am I gonna do? Just because I guess I'd been around. He calls me, I'd never met the guy. What do I do with this? So I'll tell you what you do with it. We'll show it in its entirety on the Major League Baseball Network. What we did was on the 50th anniversary, it was 2010, on the 50th anniversary we showed it in a theater, an old ornate theater in Pittsburgh. And we invited every living pirate and Bobby Richardson came and represented the Yankees from the losing team. We invited Franco Harris and other luminaries of Pittsburgh sports. So it's like a 3,000 seat theater. And these people watched this as if they cheered and groaned like when the Yankees went ahead and they groaned. Wait a minute, you know the outcome. You know you win, don't you? I was, oh no, no, no, no, we're losing now, okay? They cheered, they winced, but every time, and Roberto Clemente didn't do that much in game seven, every time Roberto Clemente came on the screen, even if he was catching a routine fly ball or in the on-deck circle, there was this reverent response and his widow, Vera Clemente, was there. Michael Keaton, the actor, grew up in Pittsburgh, was eight years old when that happened, flew from California to be there. And one of the most touching things was, now there's video of everything. You watch a game, a guy strikes out, he goes back in the dugout, he's looking at an iPad, he's looking at his at bat. I looked at guys who had never seen themselves on video. Vernon Law started that game for the pirates. He was the Cy Young Award winner in 1960. Then I guess he was, I don't know, 50 years later, he's 80 years old, looked like Central Casting, Senator Judge or Senator, Senator Wavy Silver Hair. And here was this guy watching himself in the flower of his youth, albeit in black and white, pitching to Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle. He was transported to a different time. Now, is that sociologically significant? Of course not. Is it a human story that I was happy to be able to tell? Yeah. Well, because we're the people focusing attention on other industries, right? I mean, who's focused? Who covers media? Nobody really. I mean, if you are, you have the New York Post, God help us. But so I always, you can find the same things in science and technology, in business, in religion, in education. The industry doesn't vary that much. It's just that nobody's there. We're so busy training our attentions outward that nobody's covering the people who cover. So I always make the case that journalism is no different, the broadcast or print industries are no different than any other industry. No different than the NFL, to your point. We'll talk about this back with some very angry late night sessions sitting and talking to Tony Dungey, who couldn't get a job, literally. Tony's about two years older than I am. I watched him. We were in the big 10 at the same time in Minnesota and Northwestern and followed his whole life. And we would talk about what was going on also in my industry, in our industry. You know, in my part of it, the print part first. I mean, in 1990, I was one of three or four black sports columnists in the country. Three or four. In 1990. What is it now? I don't know, which is great. Good, yeah. I don't know anymore, which is great because I've lost track because there's enough that. And you know what the corollary to that is? That nobody notices when a black coach is hired or fired in the NBA because it's part of the mix. But in the NFL, it stopped the presses one way or the other. And when it gets to where, we don't know because it's behind us. But I will say that if you watch TV now, almost any sport that includes African-Americans is covered substantially by African-Americans. The studio shows, you look at the NBA show with the exception of Ernie Johnson, everybody's black, all right? And it's probably the best studio show of any sport in the history of American television. Just a great show, the camaraderie that they have. It's not surprising to anybody if you turn on a thing and there's a panel and everybody on the panel is black or three of the four people are black. And there are more and more women than there used to be. Maria Taylor is the host of Football Night in America and before that it was Mike Tarrico and then he became the play-by-play guy. When you talk about the lead, the lead analysts, Romo and Collins Worth and whatnot, as you said, they're there because they're good. But the second and third, there are more people of color in the ranks and eventually, inevitably, they'll be represented on the top teams. But there's only, that's a game of musical chairs with very few chairs and there's seldom given up. And you do see the sports are different. Whether you're looking at Gus Johnson on the last play-by-play, not in college football. Whether you're looking at the Ascension and he's got different hats on all the time of Grant Hill with Jim Nantz. Mark Jackson. Mark Jackson was with Van Gundy. So it is interesting. And replaced by Doc Rivers now. And replaced by Doc Rivers is in like two weeks. So it is, but it, you know, the NFL, the NFL is an interesting study. And I have a lot of thoughts on the NFL I won't share tonight. But as someone who has switched over from Sunday Ticket on Direct TV, I got Direct TV in like 1995 for two reasons. I was like the first person to get in where I lived so I could watch every game Michael Jordan played the rest of his life after he came back. And so I could watch the Bears out of market. So I'm a fanatic over watching all this stuff. But I wonder about certain things that drive interest. And by the way, I'm not gonna say that they result from bigotry. They result from tribalism. Everybody, not any one group, but the NFL is a real fascinating study. And people are afraid to study it because it's so big and powerful. People don't wanna study it. There you go. Hi, I've got a just a general question of how many sportscasters, sports journalists really, really wish they would be at that moment that they're covering the game or just didn't have the skill set to become a professional basketball, baseball, whatever player. And also, Mr. Wilbur and I, you and I graduated from Northwestern together and worked at the Valley Northwestern together. I was in advertising sales so we never interacted on campus. Even though we were both there until like two in the morning. Well, speaking only for myself, I wanted to be a sports broadcaster. I think it's a common thing where people say, oh well, all of them, they wanna be the players or worse yet, they're jealous of the players. No, I wanted to be a sports broadcaster and I was lucky enough to become one. So the only thing I measure myself against is myself. Am I doing as well as I'm capable of doing at least in my own mind? I don't begrudge anyone else their success. Other people in my industry who've done well, if they're younger than me, I've tried to support them and encourage them. What does anyone else's success have to do with my own? I've been very fortunate and I've been lucky enough to do exactly what I wanted to do when I was 10 years old. It's an interesting thing with sports fans. Where they'll say, oh, he never played the game at a high level, therefore he doesn't have credibility. Walter Cronkite was never an astronaut, he covered the space program. Ted Koppel was not the Secretary of State, put a damn good job on Nightline during the Iranian hostage crisis. Now, it would be crazy if we didn't have plenty of former players and coaches as analysts. That would be crazy. And even though I can identify a curveball, if I'm sitting next to someone who's thrown a curveball or stood in against Nolan Ryan when they were expecting the fastball and they got the curveball, even if I know it, it's better if they say it. And yet there are things that I can bring to it or that Joe Buck or whomever can bring to it that the former player cannot. And a good broadcast is a good amalgam of those things. I will tell you this, so I am doing exactly what I wanted to do starting about the age of 16 because at 15, I thought I was gonna replace Ernie Banks as the Cubs' first baseman, the next first baseman. And a kid who was, you know, could best be described, my friend that was laughing, he knows the story already, best be described as a fat kid. You would call that kid that in the neighborhood. He had a homerun off me that's still going. When I think I was 15, he was 14. And I go back, I turn around, I go, who was this kid? I was an hitter bull as a 14 year old. And then people start to grow and come into their own athleticism. And I said, who was the kid who hit the homerun that's still going? And they said, you don't know Puck, you don't know him? I don't know him. He's from the neighborhood next to ours, Kirby Puckett. I found out recently, Doc Rivers and I were talking about this story, Doc Rivers was kept out of Williamsport because Kirby Puckett hit a homerun off him. He didn't go to the Little League World Series. The Little League World Series for Doc Rivers. How about that? So anyway, so I thought, at that point you go, wait a minute, I better go to plan B here. Because I'm not quite as good as I thought I was. But. That was never good enough to kid myself. So my path was clear. Kid myself to 16. And then I've done exactly what I wanted to marry the two things. I thought I knew something about the language and sports. But the notion that everybody, you know what, good if you're a frustrated jock on some level. As long as you can then put that in its place. I think it helps you. I don't trust people who don't respect competition. But that doesn't mean it has to be physical competition. It doesn't mean it has to be athletic competition. I believe in competition. And as I've said to a great many of my friends in sports, don't for one second think that physical and athletic competition is the only place where people are competitive. That would be a grave mistake. So, yes, that happens. But I wouldn't give back my time playing sports from four to 16. I wouldn't trade that for anything. And I think, does it color what I do? Does it form or shape what I do? At some point it probably did. I know the frustration of it. I know the frustration of striking out in my own little league championship and ending my life, the last that bad I ever had at 12 years old. I hit a grand slam in the previous that bad. So I know the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. I know that myself. I know it enough on a golf course too to be, God help me. But I think that there are, I think that all those experiences shape what you do and they should. And even if you haven't played sports at a high level, you have to, if you're going to cover it at all and you've been around for a period of time, have a healthy respect for how difficult it is. Because you sit down to write a column. No one's trying to stop you from writing a good column. There's someone there on the other side that's trying to stop you. And here's, let's suppose somebody, it's impossible to judge this. Let's suppose somebody is the 500th best lawyer or doctor in America. Good lawyer, good doctor, had a good career. You're the 500th best baseball player in the major leagues. You suck. But you don't really suck. You don't, you don't. The worst player in the NFL, the worst player in the NBA, the worst player in the NHL or MLB is so good that if they were at your high school, they would kick everybody's ass. And you should never lose sight of that. That doesn't mean you can't be critical of them. But you shouldn't be glibly and harshly critical because the best of them are very good at what they do. This guy's got the mic. First of all, I just want to say thank you. You talked about some iconic voices from, you know, Vince Scully, Jack Buck, Alan Michaels and, you know, the choreography. But for me, you're always going to be Mr. Olympic. So I think you have some iconic moments yourselves. Just to go back to baseball, I think you mentioned, you know, for my office, maybe for you, is, you know, America's pastime and you started also as a writer in baseball. I guess for me, you know, the best rule five player for me would probably be Roberto Clemente. But talk about writers and how things change over time. Maybe in the 20s, 30s, 40s, the best baseball player wasn't Babe Ruth. It was more regarded as Ty Cobb. But I guess his home runs became more important. Babe Ruth became the iconic player he is today. As we see nowadays, no one chokes up on two strikes and no one knows how to, you know, no one do a tribating average is all about launch angles. And so baseball has kind of, you know, progressed longer and kind of lost some of the younger audience. So Major League Baseball has made some changes to try to, I think, bring back some of the younger viewers. I guess what are your thoughts, some of the rule changes and maybe why baseball might have lost some of its luster and why it's not the America's pastime or number one sport like it used to be? Well, that could be a whole session just about baseball. And we should be into the lightning round here, but I like the changes. The pace of the game is much better. It's not just the length of the game, it's the pace within the game. There's more action than there was even a year ago. Is it perfect? No, I think some of the texture of the game still is missing. No one plays small ball anymore. No one lays down a bun. But they do steal bases more, not so much because the bases are larger. I think that's a marginal aspect of it. But because you're limited in pick off throws, base runners are a bit more adventurous. So, and you can't deny that there's more athleticism in the game than ever before. If you watch QuickPitch on MLB Network for an hour, you'll see as many ridiculously impossible defensive plays and catches as you saw in a whole season, you know, generations ago, not just because there's more video available. I see plays now that I never saw at all when I was a kid, unless it was Willie Mays, you know, which is another smaller point which we'll not elaborate on, which is this, you can only fairly judge people in the context of their time. So, if somebody was, you know, when they talk about who's the Mount Rushmore, they're gonna have to put more heads on Mount Rushmore. You know, because- Don't start there, don't start on that one. Well, you know, yeah. Yeah. Everyone knows where we're going until we don't have to bother. But, look, Ty Cobb, Ty Cobb, or his equivalent in the Negro Leagues, Oscar Charleston, they were the best in their time. That's the best you can say about somebody, really. Somebody's gonna come along and 20 years from now, 30 years from now, and the game has further evolved. Oh, is this guy better than Michael Jordan? Is this guy better than LeBron? They were each the best in their own era. One last question. This lady, let me hear it, let me hear it. Down here? We'll take too quick, it's too quick. Yes, lightning round, lightning round. Yes. I took a good question. That's a great question. That's a great question. You know, I've rooted harder for Dion in the last month than I've rooted harder for anybody that doesn't have my last name. And just because there's some social and cultural forces out there that I did not like that I found ugly and reprehensible even. Football's an interesting study. Like I said, don't get me started. I'm the, by way of commenting on this, I am the grandson of a Georgia Baptist preacher. Okay, so I'm here growing up in Chicago, but there's a whole lot of other stuff that made up who I am and the son of people who fled the South from Tennessee and Georgia. So I say that and need to say that by way of my observation about college football, particularly which at times frightens me. And all that the culture is of college football and the comments that come out of even coaches mouths. And all of a sudden people try to backtrack that because Dion won that first game against TCU. And that's what made me put me in this posture, this crouch, if you will. And so it became just very easily the most attractive story in college football. There's no great team out there, despite what the Ohio State coach thinks of his team. There's no great team out there in college football right now. There isn't, one couldn't evolve, but there isn't today. And Dion gave us this. Well, he's always been a colorful character. God, yes. But he also in a way personifies for better and for worse the changes within it. I mean, we can't even have a pretense anymore that this is a some sort of mutually complementary academic and athletic experience. You know, maybe it is at Swarthmore, or Amherst or something, but come on. Between NIL, name, image and likeness, and the transfer portal, and the idea that, look, if you tell a kid, here, we're gonna recruit you to UCLA as a freshman. Your first game will be against our traditional rival now in the Big Ten Rutgers. And you're gonna go to practice in August, and you're gonna play a game before you ever go to a class. And we're gonna ask you to travel across the country and back. We're gonna ask you to practice and practice and practice. Even somebody who came there with the intention of being a legitimate student. What is the message that's being sent to a young basketball player over Thanksgiving when you should be home? You're at a holiday tournament. You're at the great Alaska shootout, or you're going to Hawaii or whatever it might be. What is the message that's sent? And so, even though I understand atmosphere, you know, you watch a game, and the alumni don't seem to care, and the students don't seem to care whether any of these kids ever go to class, or whether they're really getting an educational experience because they like being there on a Saturday afternoon. And certain settings like Notre Dame for Ohio State, it's riveting. But in truth, this is just lower case professional football. So why should I care about it when I know that even the Denver Broncos who lost 70 to 20 on Sunday could beat the national champion 70 to 20? Why should I care? The thing that's supposed to distinguish it, even if it was previously imperfect, is now a complete another sham. And they have been a sham in many places for a long time. But even with that, and I agree with every syllable Bob just said, even with that we are riveted when somebody stands, or appears to stand apart from everybody else even for a minute. Yeah. And that's what Dion has done. Circle back to your point to capture. And by the way, it's probably over. And one of the reasons I was so excited about the Colorado State game is because I'm looking at the schedule going, they're not gonna do this with Oregon, or probably USC, and then that will move on and we'll have to find something else to fascinate us. The ugly part of it too is, and he's a compelling and entertaining personality, no question, and he's so magnetic that he's gonna be able to recruit in this new environment he's gonna be able to recruit. But he came in there, and this is the NFL, I came, we're gonna rebuild. All these kids he didn't want, they're gone. They're gone. Let's say you came in a football scholarship and against all odds you actually were on the Dean's list. Too bad, you're gone. You can't play for us. Well, that doesn't sit real well with me. And now it's legal. Yes, it's completely legal. Completely, everybody. You don't have to honor the scholarship. A lot of coaches are doing that anyway in their own phony way. Deion, of course, because as we know, there's no sort of shame in it. Deion's gonna be the showman he's gonna be. And he just was out front about it publicly. But I mean, the two of us have gotten many phone calls from the parents and players in their time saying, you won't believe what this coach did to myself. We've both gotten that. One last. One last, better be good. Better be good. Who's got the mic? That's what you're close enough. Go ahead. You're on the spot. Bill White, Bill White, excellent, not Hall of Fame level, but excellent first baseman, primarily with the Cardinals, became the first full-time African-American play-by-play man, not analysts, play-by-play man alongside Phil Rizzuto. They were quite a colorful pair in the 70s with the Yankees. Bill is still with us, slowed down considerably, he's nearly 90, and he's very reclusive. He doesn't do interviews, he doesn't show up for old-timers stuff. The Cardinals wanted to put him in their team Hall of Fame and he didn't want to come to St. Louis for it. So I think, you know, he's partly, blame is not the right word, but he's partly complicit in his being out of sight, out of mind. By the way, before we end, let me just say that for those of you who watch Baseball, this will not be much of a chore that I'm about to ask, but those of you who don't really follow it or follow it casually or follow it when it gets to October when we're there, you get a chance to listen to Bob call Baseball, do it. Oh, thank you. Do it, because one of the regrets of our profession, the profession for me, print, broadcast, no matter what it is, is that so many people are given over to just the numbers. It's a tyranny of numbers and nobody knows how to tell a story anymore. And certainly nobody, if they did, knows how to tell it as well as Bob. And so if you watch the games, at least now that Vince Scully's not when I said it wrong. Yeah, but you're gonna hear storytelling. And so I tune into your storytelling and I tune out of things where it's just gonna be a recitation of statistics. Thank you. I can't stand it. My wife has to hear this rant all of a sudden every day. And so I- She's a saint. Yeah. She's heard that. And so I can't, so I enjoy sitting, well I love sitting next to Bob and having this evening and thank you for traveling. Thank you, Mike. Thank you so much. This is awesome. This is incredible. Incredible, it is. I am going to, I'm actually gonna enjoy him more when I hear him from LA, especially if the Cubs are in that damn series, I'm gonna be even happier than Bob was part of. Dodger's Cubs would be so great because of the setting and the history of both teams. That would be so great. You know, people think they say national announcers. So I'm continuing this even though they said no. This would be the last thing. People think national announcers, even intelligent people, people with PhDs get so wrapped up in their own team that they think the national announcers are always against their team. People hear the exact same words, and fans of team A take it as an insult to team A, and fans of team B take it as an insult to team B. Fans who are not invested in terms of rooting and just watching the game don't think anything of it. You know? I don't know what other point I wanted to make. It's just stuck in my cron, then this just kind of died out. I would like to say I was appreciative you mentioned Magic Johnson and Kirk Gibson, both Michigan State Spartans. Thank you very much. Now, but more seriously, on behalf of our archivist, Dr. Colleen Shogun, the executive director of our National Archives Foundation, Patrick Madden, all of our board, but most especially this fabulous audience, thank you for giving us a memorable and wonderful evening. Thank you, Governor Blankin. Thank you, thank you. Thanks, Governor, thank you. Have a great night.