Bob Costas is the perfect specimen of a class of sports/athletics broadcasters my father describes simply: “These people have never played a professional sport. They’ve never pitched a baseball or swam a competitive lap or biked 100 miles or slid through the mud on their way to the end zone. But they talk more than anybody else. They’re experts. They know it all.”
I was so looking forward to the televised exchange between Mark Spitz and Michael Phelps. As soon as I saw that asshole Costas was the host, my spirits plummeted. I can’t remember a less inspired, more boring, plastic, and information anemic interview.
Instead of coaxing Spitz and Phelps out of their robotic exclamations of mutual admiration — i.e., inspiring in them some sense of emotional spontaneity — Costas spent his time with foolish trains of thought such as: if you could swim against each other today, who would win? That’s at about the level of the arguments I used to have when I was 6 years old: who would win in a fight, Wonder Woman or Superman?