“I was very lucky,” says the great commentator Mike Costello, as his steak sandwich goes cold in front of him. “I was blessed that my time at the BBC coincided with the emergence and rise of two of the greatest sportsmen of all time: Usain Bolt and Floyd Mayweather. And then, in the UK, we had David Haye, Ricky Hatton and Joe Calzaghe.”
“I was very lucky,” says the great commentator Mike Costello, as his steak sandwich goes cold in front of him. “I was blessed that my time at the BBC coincided with the emergence and rise of two of the greatest sportsmen of all time: Usain Bolt and Floyd Mayweather. And then, in the UK, we had David Haye, Ricky Hatton and Joe Calzaghe.”
It is a typical Costello remark. Precise. Informative. And, above all, self-effacing.
During the 16 years he spent as boxing and athletics correspondent for Radio Five Live, Costello was the absolute master of his art. With a unique combination of fluency and economy, he would paint such a vivid picture of events that you often felt you could see a fight better on radio than on TV.
And yet, there was a humility to his work that marked him out from some of the other big beasts of radio at that time – notably the fiendishly egocentric Alan Green.
One of Costello’s many fans is his former BBC colleague David Law, who commentates on tennis. “In this job,” said Law, “you want to make the listener grip the wheel a bit tighter, or even drive the long way round to catch the end of the broadcast.
“Mike had so many of those moments, whether he was describing Mo Farah or Ricky Hatton. I was a big Twitter user in the 2010s, and after one of his broadcasts there would always be a massive outpouring of praise for his commentary. But the funny thing was, Mike would never go on Twitter. I once heard him say, ‘I’ve worked hard to get this job, I don’t want to throw it away by posting a few ill-chosen words’.”
Costello’s caution was probably unnecessary, for words have never failed him before. Even so, this shy and softly-spoken man was hardly the type to go down the attention-seeking route on social media. He was never going to be a Gary Lineker or a Gary Neville. For him, the sport was the star, and the broadcaster a privileged witness, doing his best to lay down a first draft of aural history.
“I don’t have an issue with somebody trying to introduce their own personalities and flair into a commentary,” Costello tells me, as we sit down for lunch in a bistro near his home in Kent. “But you always, always, always have to remember that what is happening in front of you – the athlete on the track, the boxer in the ring – is far more important than you are.”
Such views would once have been uncontroversial. Impartiality used to be the first commandment of commentary, to the point where Kenneth Wolstenholme regretted his famous “They think it’s all over” line because he thought it sounded too triumphant.
So, does Costello feel that the old lessons have been forgotten, in a publicity-seeking age when cameras are now trained on the broadcaster themselves? He leans back and thinks for a second.
“I think maybe now there is – not necessarily a pressure, but a tendency to try to make yourself stand out from the pack. When I started to listen to commentary, this was the time of Harry Carpenter, David Coleman. They were singular voices – the only voices you heard. Even in football, up until the creation of the Premier League, there would really only be a couple of commentators on the BBC – John Motson and Barry Davies – with Brian Moore on ITV. Today, I wouldn’t know how many professional football commentators are making a living in this country, but it would be in the hundreds.”
And what about the sense that broadcasters, including those who greet every goal with a yelped “Erling Haa-LAND!” or equivalent, arrive in the box hoping to create viral clips for social media?
“Among commentators, there’s often a discussion about whether you prepare lines or not,” Costello replies. “I was one who didn’t go for that. If you’ve had this great thought in the car, on the train or whatever, you might be thinking ‘Come what may, I’m going to get it in’. But as a listener, I think I can tell when stuff has been shoehorned in. There’s a danger that you try to recreate the drama that’s happening in front of you, so that it fits your agenda rather than the other way around.”
For Costello, the drama is everything. We meet at his suburban semi-detached house, which is fastidiously tidy and decorated with famous prints of Muhammad Ali. There is the photograph of Ali standing contemptuously over Sonny Liston – “He’s supposed to have said ‘Get up, you sucker’,” Costello remarks – and the bird’s-eye shot of him retreating across the ring after knocking Cleveland Williams down.
“I met Neil Leifer, who took both these shots for Sports Illustrated,” Costello explains. “He told me that he was the second photographer for the Liston fight, so he didn’t get his choice of spot. In the end, though, he happened to be in exactly the right place.”
Ali has been Costello’s great hero since his first boxing memory: his father Peter coming in to wake him with the news that Joe Frazier had upset the champion in the so-called “Fight of the Century” in 1971.
At that stage, the family lived in Camberwell, South London, as part of a large Irish diaspora. Mike started boxing at a local club as a boy, and eventually contested 65 bouts as an amateur, including one against future European champion Jim McDonnell. He has previously explained that “Jim hit me at one stage that night and I remember thinking, ‘Blimey, this is different…’”
Leaving school at 16, Costello managed to get a job filing papers in the BBC accounts department. By sheer persistence, he parlayed that into a post as a runner, taking results from the teleprinter to the sports desk, and then earned another promotion to broadcast assistant. It was a painstaking route, involving a long spell at the World Service, and Costello only got his big break when Five Live’s incumbent boxing and athletics correspondent John Rawling lost his voice during the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester. Like the photographer Leifer, Costello was in the right place to take advantage – but only because he was so well prepared.
“When young commentators ask me for advice, I say, using that experience, ‘Just be ready’. There are times when you think you’re never, ever going to get a break. The fact that it took so long definitely influenced my style. I was 42 when John lost his voice and 45 when I became correspondent. I was in awe of being so close to the action, so I didn’t feel any need to impose my own personality.
“A friend who works in the business told me that the distance between my general demeanour, my speaking voice, and my commentary voice is the greatest of anybody they know. Most of the time it’s ‘Speak up, for God’s sake!’ Then suddenly you’re here on Super Saturday at the Olympics.”
Ah, yes. Super Saturday. August 4, 2012, will surely go down as Costello’s best-remembered commentary, the day when he described Farah being carried home on a “wave of emotion” in London’s Olympic Stadium.
It remains a spine-tingling listen, and perhaps the clip he is most proud of. But he also remembers the stress of that famous afternoon.
“I was very aware that, if Mo Farah had been beaten, then that athlete would have been public enemy No 1. For me to have got that wrong would have lived as a mess in the BBC archives forever. I don’t think I’d ever have recovered from it. And yet, there were probably 25 men in that race, and half-a-dozen different leaders over the last two laps.
“It can be a real challenge to identify the athletes, especially when they’re on the far side of the stadium. It’s such a different job to boxing, where the issue is not identification but repetition. You could say ‘Left hook, right hook, left jab, right jab’ all night long, and be absolutely correct, but everybody’s fallen asleep or switched over to a bit of music. That’s where you have to use your experience. You might wait until the referee has stepped in, and he’s looking at a glove or something, and then you introduce an anecdote.”
When asked to choose between his two sports, which have been lumped together by the BBC since Ian Darke filled the same dual role in the 1980s, Costello always offers the same reply: “I love athletics, but I live boxing.”
He has certainly seen the sport from all angles. After fighting himself, he became a part-time boxing coach in his 20s, working with a roster that included future Olympic heavyweight Henry Akinwande. “In that period, my first love was sated by the coaching,” he says. “It had to be that way. I knew I was staying with the World Service for a long while, and they didn’t have anything like the budget necessary to cover the bigger fights.”
Costello’s most emotional moment on air would arrive much later, in 2016, when he travelled to Louisville, Kentucky, for Ali’s funeral. “That was one of the standout moments of my career, as morbid as that might sound. By the time the cortège came past our spot, there were thousands and thousands there: men and women, black and white, young and old. I wandered down to the front and spoke to this local woman who had just thrown a bouquet of flowers onto the hearse, and she said, ‘No more floating like a butterfly, no more stinging like a bee’. It all came back to me, my father walking into my bedroom with the news from the fight, and I cracked up on the air, for the only time in my career.”
He must have regained control swiftly, because he later discovered that his Ali broadcast had persuaded the BBC to pencil him in for a similar role at the Queen’s funeral in 2022. As that momentous day unfolded, some of the most important spots on the route were handed to BBC Sport commentators: football correspondent John Murray in Parliament Square and then Costello at the Cenotaph. As one listener wrote: “Mike painted an exceptional picture of what he could see – I knew how many people were involved, I knew what colour their uniforms were, and I knew what regiment or service they represented. Like John, he was flawless.”
Costello cannot be alone in ranking that broadcast as the peak of his working life. “At the first production meeting, the editor stood up and said, ‘This might be the most important seven or eight minutes of your career’. There were some really seasoned broadcasters in that room, and you heard this collective gasp.
“We had some commentary coaching as a unit. Rob Nothman came in and told us, ‘Look, on this day, just have your first line ready’. My original plan was something about the history of Whitehall. But then this young lad was stood at the front, and just as John Murrray was about to hand over to me, he dragged a banner over the barrier, and it said, ‘Thank you, Ma’am, for everything’. That really got me into the flavour of it, because then I could talk about how this lad was part of a crowd that was 10 deep, all along the route, some of them camping overnight.”
Costello was making a rare BBC appearance at the time, because he had quit his correspondent’s post the previous year in exchange for a role at DAZN. “I felt that, if I didn’t take this job, I wouldn’t get the opportunity to do sustained TV commentary.” His time at DAZN ended in the summer, however, and now – at 65 – he is only breaking his semi-retirement for occasional specials like the recent BBC podcasts to mark the passing of Joe Bugner and Ricky Hatton.
“For the first time in 35 years, every day is mine,” he says. “I’m not having to worry about the phone going with a doping story.”
Despite enjoying his new-found peace, Costello is also considering launching a podcast of his own. While his views on modern boxing would resonate widely, the real joy of such a project would lie in his endless fund of stories from 45 years in the business. He has already gone back through his records, looking for anecdotes about Bolt and Mayweather, Mike Tyson and Tyson Fury, Sachin Tendulkar and Carl Froch while writing a memoir of his life.
Has he published it yet? “I found a company called printnpublish.com online, and asked them for a single copy, so it cost me £80. Oh, and the Snappy Snaps fee for the cover, which was a photo of all my special-access lanyards spread out on the floor of the study.
“I gave it to my son Conor [who works as a producer in football TV]. My dad was a carpenter, worked on a building site till he was 72, and I said to Conor, ‘Look, if that’s the way you want to go, great. But when I was a kid, nobody was around to tell me that there’s a big, wide world out there.’
“He loved it. He rang me from uni and he said, ‘Dad, I didn’t realise how many mistakes you made’. But I was completely open about things that have gone wrong. And there was a little subliminal message about how you are going to get things wrong in life, and you have to recover from that.”
There is still just the one copy, then? “Yeah. I’ve never been good at screaming and shouting about the things I’ve done.”
Mike Costello’s best anecdotes
Mike Tyson
“In 2013, I interviewed Tyson to mark the publication of his autobiography. Everyone said to me, ‘This is Tyson’s life story. You cannot not talk about the rape.’ So about halfway through my hour, I ask him about the women’s groups who had protested at his fights in the 2000s. He replies that they were only small protests, and then he adds ‘Say I did do something bad to that girl, I paid my time.’ So my ears perk up and I reply, ‘You’re saying that even if you’ve done the crime, you’ve actually served the time.’ And he goes, ‘I’m not saying that at all, and don’t put words in my mouth. Do you hear me?’ And he just stares at me. I was in the taxi afterwards with the cameraman, Rashid, and he said ‘My hands were shaking on the camera. I’m not defending you against Mike Tyson!’”
Usain Bolt
“Because of my World Service contacts I got an email from the guy who works at the Jamaica Broadcasting Service. He said to me, ‘You gotta come and see this 17-year-old kid. He’s amazing. Might be the best we’ve ever had.’ So I put forward a proposal to build a half-hour documentary, all about this shy kid, who was very different in those days to the superstar he became. That was in 2004, but a week after broadcast, Bolt flunked out in the first round of the 200 metres in Athens, finishing fifth. I remember a mate of mine leaning over, virtually as Bolt went through the line, and saying ‘Some f---ing superstar, eh?’”
Floyd Mayweather
“In 2007, we went to interview him at his own gym, just before he fought Oscar De La Hoya. When you think of what he became, you couldn’t imagine him being so polite, so funny. He was leaning on a duffel bag, and he started talking about money, and he said, ‘I’ve got $25,000 in here.’ I said ‘How do you know?’ and he lifted it up and said ‘I can weigh it’. Then his dad came in, Floyd Snr, and he told this story about how he and his brother-in-law Tony had fallen out over a drug deal. And when Tony pointed a gun at him, Floyd Snr had picked up two-year-old Floyd Jnr and held him in front of himself. He asked me, “Wouldn’t you do that with your son to save yourself?’ So the young Floyd grew up in this gangster lifestyle, but he boxed like a concert pianist.”
Tyson Fury
“I saw him win the national amateur championships at York Hall, and when I interviewed him afterwards his dad jumped in behind him and said ‘This lad’s going to be world champion.’ But what I really remember is a moment from the [Wladimir] Klitschko fight in 2015. Huge crowd, 55,000 or so. Tyson had a very, very confident first round, and then they come into a clinch, 90 seconds into the second round. He taps Wladimir on the a---, as if to say, ‘Come on, let’s get on with it.’ The most seasoned heavyweight champion in history, apart from Joe Louis, and this relative novice does that to him. That tiny little cameo showed me how he was born for the big occasion.”
Sachin Tendulkar
“My first foreign assignment was for the BBC World Service in 1989: an India tour of Pakistan. Sachin Tendulkar made his debut in the first Test, aged 16, with India struggling. They were 40-odd for four, and he came down the steps, twirling his bat like he was in the nets. He didn’t make many, 15 I think, but he stayed there for a long time and helped steady the innings. It was tedious sport, high scores and four consecutive draws. In one Test, we stayed in the same hotel as the Indians, and the kitchen staff had been told to come in at 5am and make as much noise as possible in order to disrupt their sleep. I also had nightmares for years afterwards about the phone lines. Nothing I ever did was as difficult as not knowing if I would be able to get on the air.”
Carl Froch
“Of all the sportsmen and women I met and dealt with, I probably got the closest to Carl. As an amateur, I worked and worked to reach the level I did, which gave me a great understanding of how many stairs there were between me and the top echelon. It was Carl who gave me the insight into how you’ve gone seven, eight rounds, and you’re thinking, ‘I’ve still got four more of these. I’ve never been so sore. I’ve never been so tired. How am I going to get through this?’ He was just so articulate, so insightful, taking me into the ring.”
Ricky Hatton
“Those weeks in Las Vegas with Ricky fighting Mayweather and then Manny Pacquiao were just glorious times. Everyone on the Strip was talking about it, and we realised that a lot of the British fans had come out without even having tickets. Before Mayweather, there were these crazy queues for the weigh-in, stretching down the escalators of the MGM Grand. They started at midnight, more than 14 hours before the weigh-in was due to start. It was a free event, first come, first serve, and they just wanted to say they had been part of the week. You wouldn’t get that happening in Riyadh.”
Category: General Sports
