Sportscaster Bob Costas is worried about the impact of sports betting and would not contribute to promoting the industry.
Costas sat down with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press on NBC where he talked about how his personal experience with sports betting shaped him into the sports fan that he is, but also how it has kept him concerned of the potential downfalls.
Welker asked Costas if he is concerned at a personal level about what sports betting could mean for some families:
“I am, and on both the Major League Baseball Network and when I did a handful of games for Turner, I refused to read the gambling promos,” Costas said. “They had to have someone else read them or use a voice of God type person to read them.
“I just couldn’t, in good conscience, encourage people to do something which, I know for some of them it’s obviously just a little recreation and it’s fine, but there’s an insidious aspect to it that I didn’t want to be part of.”
Costas introduced to sports betting young
Costas called his father an “inveterate gambler” and said it was not always “smooth sailing” in his household when sweating out a bet.
“There was a lot of trauma in our family life because he had a volatile temper and the mortgage was often riding on how his bets went,” Costas said. “And he didn’t bet on cards, or poker games, or craps games, or go to the racetrack, he bet on baseball, football, basketball games.
“And so I bonded with him by following those games. I’m sure I would have been a sports fan anyway like most of my fans but I became even more knowledgeable. I became granularly knowledgeable because he was following all this so closely and I was by his side.”
‘Inevitable’ that betting ‘ruins some lives’
Costas is sure the easy access to sports betting these days will have a negative impact on some gamblers.
“Now you’ve got young guys with a phone in their hand, it’s right there, and some of those people are gonna become addicted to it and it’s gonna ruin some lives, that’s inevitable,” he said.
He noted that “perhaps” there should be more regulation on sports betting and noted that gambling is built on the backs of losses.
“If, in fact, as a group and over time gamblers didn’t lose more than they win, then no back alley craps game, no casino in Atlantic City or Vegas, no racetrack and now no BetMGM, DraftKings, whatever it is, would ever exist,” Costas said. “In the big picture the house always wins.”
