Costas Tells Students to Dream Big

​May 23, 2014 

While his father risked the family home betting on sports inside Long Island bars, he sent a young Bob Costas to the car, not to wait, but to check the score of the various ballgames, and bring him updates.

There, Costas fiddled with the dial to find the faraway voices that traveled the radio waves and brought the ballgames to life. Those voices instilled in Costas a love for both sports and broadcasting.

Memories of those nights stick with Costas. Through hot and cold streaks, hardships and windfalls, he developed a bond through sports with his father who died at 42 from a heart attack.

“What my father had inadvertently left me through all the ups and downs was this fascination that I had…with the voices that described those games when I was a kid and a desire to become one of them,” Costas said Thursday as the guest speaker for Coaches for Character’s annual Advocates for Character and Education Awards held at Redemption World Outreach Center in Greenville.

Costas told a crowd that included a male and female honoree from each Greenville County School District middle and high school that those life experiences intersected with luck and his own dreams to put him on a path to success in the broadcast booth.

“If I didn’t have something beyond the narrow limits of my own youthful existence, if I didn’t have something beyond what the world was then telling me what I was capable of, then I might not have wound up being as fortunate as I wound up being.”

Costas has won 25 Emmy Awards, broadcast 11 Olympics and become the most-decorated sports broadcaster of all time.

He became familiar with Greenville when his son attended Clemson University and called it “one of his favorite towns.”

He said he was struck by the inscription on the statue that honors those students from Sterling High School who fought for civil rights through lunch counter sit-ins in Greenville.

Their story should inspire today’s generation of students, that have their own hardships and obstacles to overcome to find success, Costas said.

“They had the deck institutionally stacked against them and yet so many of them went on to become doctors, to become lawyers, to become teachers, even as they were working to improve society, they were not using whatever obstacles society threw in front of them as an excuse to wallow in self-pity,” he said.

Costas said athletics at the high school and college levels must be put in perspective with academics. Influence from fans and alumni in college sports have put that balance “out of whack,” he said.

“Really, would we rather have South Carolina or Clemson or whatever team we root for, would we rather have them go 10-1 or 11-0 and 10 percent of them graduate, or would we take 8-3, a nice team, and 90 percent of them graduate and none of them get arrested,” he said.

By: Nathaniel Cary -- Greenville Online

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