Sally Jenkins and Bob Costas Hit Home Runs
MVP Performances Highlight Annual Dinner
The MLRC’s Annual Dinner program last week was, by all accounts, a smashing success. The conversation between Hall of Fame sports journalists Sally Jenkins and Bob Costas was riveting to both sports fans and non-sports enthusiasts alike. But as many Broadway productions – and Gotham Hall is on Broadway – there was a lot of drama behind the scenes. Forthwith a short summary of the backstory and some thoughts about their discussion itself.
Not surprisingly there was a heated discussion about the basic nature of our Program. Should it be on the attacks on the press and the First Amendment by our President or should it be on a topic somewhat different and more uplifting? Eventually a consensus developed for the latter. There was a feeling that we had covered the Trumpian assaults on the media sufficiently at the recent Virginia Conference, and that somewhat lighter and more entertaining fare seemed appropriate for a Dinner affair. While Trump-bashing was ruled out, time was getting late and there was no immediate solution to the question of what should take its place.
As it happened, the vaunted sports columnist Sally Jenkins had just left the Washington Post after a prize-winning 20 years there to go to The Atlantic, and one of our leaders was speaking to its counsel about her. One thing led to another, Sally was available and delighted to appear at the Dinner, and the date was confirmed. But it was felt that it shouldn’t be a one woman show, that someone should be on stage to question Sally, but we were unclear on who that someone should be. Fwiw, I felt it needed to be someone with name recognition to draw members to the event and entice the purchase of tickets, but the couple of people we invited who fit that bill had scheduling conflicts. So we asked Sally if she had any thoughts on who her interlocutor might be.
She suggested Bob Costas, who sounded great, except that we were unable to find viable contact information for him. I asked Sally, and she furnished me his phone number. I loved the throwback quality of that response: decades ago, when I organized panels, calling people to invite them was standard operating procedure, but over the last decades that was totally replaced by invitation by email. I hadn’t made a blind telephonic approach in years. Bob graciously returned my call, and I mentioned in my first sentence that I was calling at Sally’s behest about his joining us at our Dinner spotlighting her. He said he would be honored, and it seemed like we were all set. But Broadway productions usually present a few wrinkles, and this one was no exception.
First, the premise for the program was that it would be a discussion not about (what turned out to be an incredible and historic) World Series or who was likely to be in the Super Bowl, but about the intersection of sports and American culture and society. We planned to cover more substantive topics such as sports and politics, business, journalism and the like. Since both Sally and Bob were well known to write and speak to controversial sports issues well beyond balls and strikes, that was an easy sell – and, indeed, their discussion did not include one game or score. In our conversation, Bob had requested a “one-pager” so that he could see what I had in mind. Not being prone to short briefs, I sent him a two-pager. Usually I would follow that up with a discussion with our moderator as to what topics s/he might prioritize and get a feel whether he or she planned to follow my outline. But in this case, I relied on Bob’s 50 year career of conducting interview with leading sports and other figures, and decided he really didn’t need my advice on that.
But a few days before the event, Bob sent an email that it was likely that a funeral of a lifelong friend might well be sometime during the week of the Dinner, that he would make every effort to make it nonetheless, but that we might consider putting a backup in place just in case. The day before the Dinner, he wrote that the funeral indeed was on the day of, and in St. Louis, but that it was in the morning and that he was booked on a flight arriving back in New York at about 5pm, time enough to make it to Gotham Hall for the program. Some of my colleagues got very nervous, and considered calling in Bloomberg’s Jason Kelly, who had agreed to be our backup, but the consensus was that since Bob was obviously making every effort to show up, it would be unwise and unfair to pull the plug on him now. (What I learned at the Dinner – which I am glad I didn’t know earlier – was that the 11:00 funeral ended at 12:30, and his plane was scheduled to depart at 1:35, making it a very close call, but he said he was comforted by the fact that since he had just flown out that very morning, he had no luggage at all.) Having woken at 4am to make his morning plane, his performance at the Dinner was nothing short of heroic.
Which brings us to the Dinner program itself. The great irony of it was that although the decision to have a non-political theme was made partly to limit focusing on Trump, the first half of Sally’s and Bob’s discussion was exactly that – sarcastic and humorous commentary on the president. Bob had left my two-pager and his notes in the dust when he saw that the program included excerpts of some of Sally’s provocative columns. And first among them was a column entitled “The MAGA-fication of Sports Continues”, quoting her as saying “Donald Trump’s partnership with the Ultimate Fighting Championship takes his desire to identify with winners to snarling new heights.” Our two protagonists agreed that the vision of having wrestlers kick and punch each other in matches on the (former) White House lawn was nothing short of disgusting and gave our country exactly the opposite image we should be seeking. Indeed, though my view is irrelevant, I can’t imagine anything more gross, except perhaps renaming the Kennedy Center for Trump’s wife.
Throughout the entire discussion Sally and Bob had a great rapport. Though they didn’t seem like close friends – and hadn’t prepared together for a moment for the program – their interchanges were seamless, lighthearted and amusing – but delivering on their experiences and expertise on all the subjects they touched upon. So Bob’s questioning on this White House wrestling inanity led Sally to say that Trump often uses sports just to impose himself into visible situations presumably for public relations benefits. Indeed, she noted he had named himself head of the Los Angeles ‘28 Olympic Commission, and that he was the most athletic-interfering President in history. (They politely ignored his habitual cheating in golf, which is legendary.)
The discussion about the Olympics led to their considering the obvious conflicts the networks face in paying huge sums for the right to cover the event and their news responsibility in covering the surrounding politics objectively. Bob noted the difficulty of reporting on the glamor and pagentry of the Sochi Olympic ceremonies in the way the IOC desired while Putin’s soldiers were preparing for an invasion not very far away. He said he slept at night by focusing on the sports events without intermixing politics, but ensuring that time was saved for the news stories in the pre- and post- game interludes. Sally chided him and herself by noting that both of them had occasionally gotten into trouble with their bosses for stating their political views.
The intersection of money and business interests into sports and broadcasting led to a conversation about Saudi money into sports – the so-called “sportswashing”, the Saudi efforts to own teams and pay for tournaments to attempt to cleanse their unclean reputation. The biggest example of this, they cited, was the LIV golf tour, where immense sums of money were paid to golfers to leave the PGA tour to play in Arab lands. They agreed that players who chose this route were unpatriotic, and that efforts to assist the Saudis in sports, even by partial ownership of teams, seemed to undermine State Department interests.
The discussion about money’s outsized role in sports inevitably led to a back-and-forth about gambling, and the recent marriage between the sports leagues and Las Vegas, a marriage which was unthinkable just a decade or two ago. My two-pager’s question about whether with all the money in sports gambling a betting scandal was inevitable had pre-saged an alleged betting scandal connected to pro basketball just a few days later (though, despite the early headlines, the betting seemed to be on poker, not the games themselves). Bob’s main point was that prop bets, which can focus on just one pitch or one moment in a game, and have become very popular, are far easier to fix than betting on a games’s result, since you only need the cooperation of one player to fix such a bet.
Inevitably related to sports gambling was a discussion about Pete Rose’s being so far barred from the baseball Hall of Fame. This may also have come up in the dialogue about Trump’s interference in sports, as our President has weighed in that his fellow-liar Rose should be admitted into Cooperstown. Sally cited her column which argued that they are only barring his enshrinement, it’s not a “guillotine or a second chance in life.” Bob compared it with the many ballplayers who have been denied entry into the Hall because of their steroid use.
As you can see, Bob and Sally had vibrant discussions about all these points, but they generally agreed on most issues. One topic on which they diverged was in trans athletes competing in elite women’s sports. Bob began by extolling how Title IV equalized participation in sports, but questioned the fairness of allowing trans women to participate at the elite college or high school level. He cited examples where mediocre male competitors won events after transitioning. He also made the rhetorical point whether anyone would want their small daughter competing against or struck by a formerly genetic male. Sally was much more empathetic. She said this is one of the hardest questions to ever face sports and more research is needed, and so wasn’t ready to bar such trans athletes from competing.
Not surprisingly, our panelists couldn’t help but refer back to “The Battle of the Sexes,” the famous 1973 tennis match in the Astrodome between a long retired Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King. Sally remarked that it actually was a horrible tennis match (won by Ms. King in straight sets). Bob said that wasn’t the point, and that Billie Jean played mainly to redeem women after Riggs had beaten the then world’s #1 Margaret Court (who totally choked, though Bob didn’t quite say that). The highlight of that part of the program was Costas’ imitation of Howard Cosell’s description of Billie Jean’s physical features as she entered the court, a description which would be unthinkably politically incorrect today.
Speaking of tennis, what I considered to be the climax of the presentation was Sally’s description of the relationship between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, both of whom she knew quite well. She described the beginnings, where they were both youngsters on the tour and acquaintances with Chris reaching out to help the new immigrant; the next stage when they were vying for the #1 ranking in women’s tennis and fiercely competing for Grand Slam titles, when they would not to talk to each other in the locker room before a big match; their post-retirement phase when they became good friends and could speak knowingly to each other about the trials and tribulations of competing in such storied matches; and more recently their both contracting cancer and going through punishing treatment regimes , and calling one another for guidance and support. Part of the story was Sally’s ability to meet with each and then together and capture their innermost thoughts about all these moments and histories. To say that part of the program was moving would be an understatement.
I had told Bob that we had a hard stop at 8:55, as we had recently been trying to shorten the Dinner program. He easily blew through that, and a few minutes later, I mounted the stairs to the stage to be in a better position to signal the close of the program. They were having such a good time chatting, that they ignored me then as well.
Finally, I started gesticulating, not quite doing a Simone Biles routine, and then about 9:10 Bob wound up the discussion. Oftentimes the only criticism I have gotten for the Dinner program is that it runs too long. This time the criticism I received was why did you try to stop them; I could have listened for another hour.
Further affiant sayeth not. (A recording of the entire program is available here.)
George Freeman is MLRC Executive Director. All opinions are his and not those of the MLRC. Comments welcome at gfreeman@medialaw.org.