Bob Costas issued a warning against legalized sports betting while speaking to “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker on Sunday, emphasizing its impact on families.
“In the big picture, the house always wins,” he said, “[and] now you’ve got young guys with a phone in their hand, it’s right there. And some of those people are going to become addicted to it and it’s going to ruin some lives, that’s inevitable.”
Costas, who has been open about his father’s own sports gambling addiction in the past, also admitted to Welker he could not read gambling promos while calling games for the Major League Baseball Network.
“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,” he explained.
Watch his full “Meet the Press” interview below:
There are 38 states in the United States that allow some degree of legal sports betting. Since the Supreme Court dismantled the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) in 2018, nearly every state has attempted some form of legalization.
“It’s not fair enough to know exactly what the legislation would look like, but perhaps there should be more regulation. We’re moving toward nearly all 50 states legalizing gambling at this point,” Costas warned. “And it’s inevitable if in fact as a group and over time gamblers didn’t lose more than they win, then no back alley crap game, no casino in Atlantic City or Vegas, no racetrack, and now Bet MGM, Draft Kings, whatever it is, would ever exist.”
The renowned broadcaster emphasized that sports gambling strikes a personal nerve. “Well, my father was an inveterate gambler,” he later said, “and I looked at him as a sort of Runyon-esque character: colorful, humorous, high-spirited. But it would be untruthful to say that it was all smooth sailing.
“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 continued. “And he didn’t bet on, you know, cards or poker games or crap games or go to the racetrack. He bet on baseball, football, basketball games.”
He attempted to bond with his father through sports. “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,” Costas said.
Costas also discussed the intersection of sports and politics with Welker. “I think that politics inevitably has intersected with sports. Anyone who says that politics has no place in sports has to be abysmally unaware of the history here, a history that goes all the way back to Jack Johnson and Jesse Owens and Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson and Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe and Curt Flood and Tommy Smith and John Carlos,” he insisted.
“Now, of the names I’ve mentioned, with the exception of Billie Jean, most of them are African American. But that’s part of the story because until fairly recently in our nation’s history sports and some aspects of entertainment have been the only avenues that were broadly – and even then there was a fight, Jackie Robinson didn’t come until 1947– that were broadly accessible to people of color or where someone like Billie Jean King could make a larger statement about women’s rights, not just within sports. And to turn your back on that is to wear a blindfold.”
Watch the interview with Bob Costas in the video above.
