Howard Cosell: Far More Than a Sportscaster
PART ONE OF A TWO-PART PROFILE
HOWARD COSELL, the sportscaster, was one-of-a-kind: a man with an utterly distinctive voice, who knew and loved the self-contained world of sports — but was also eager to explain where they fit in the larger world. He was a man loyal to family and friends, passionate about justice, honorable in his willingness to be unpopular — but also a callous and cruel man, at times, and a royal pain in the ass, even to his friends.
Cosell once wrote of himself: “Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff. I have been called all of these. Of course, I am.” He surprised and disarmed you by admitting that all the mean things people said about him were somewhat true.
Howard Cosell was raised as Howard Cohen in a secular Jewish family in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. He had one brother, Hilton. His parents, Isidore and Nellie Cohen, were unhappily married. His father traveled a lot, as an accountant for a discount clothing chain. When Isidore was out of work, and didn’t pay the rent, the janitor turned off the power in the apartment, and one of Howard’s painful early memories was of watching his father trying to cajole the janitor into turning the power back on.
When Hilton got tuberculosis, there was no money for a sanatorium so Hilton spent anxious months flat on his back, except to get a pneumo-thorax treatment. Nellie Cohen was an emotional person, often the only parent at home, with a son near death, and Nellie became a hyper-protective hypochondriac.
Howard always loved sports. He also enjoyed building up his vocabulary and informing people of his views. At Hamilton High in Brooklyn, Cosell was sports editor of the school paper, the Ledger. He lived close enough to Ebbets Field, where the Brooklyn Dodgers played, to hear the shouts after a home run. He knew the difference between shouts for a Dolph Camili home run and anyone else’s homer. He loved Red Barber’s broadcasts and would sometimes sit with Hilton in the center field bleachers and “broadcast” the game they were watching.
Cosell was pained by Anti-Semitism and by the precariousness of success. His father wanted him to be a lawyer, which made a certain sense. The law was an honorable profession, and it paid well. Isidore Cosell called it “the profession.” So after P.S. 9, and Columbia University, Cosell went to NYU Law School, and became a lawyer.
He married a Christian woman, Mary Edith “Emmy” Abrams. That, too, was a struggle. As a girl, Emmy had adored her father, but he was an anti-Semite who took a quick dislike to Howard Cosell. Forced to choose between her father and Howard, Emmy chose Howard. For two years, she and her father didn’t speak; Emmy’s mother had to sneak into Brooklyn to see her. Howard adored Emmy and totally trusted her. Many people thought Emmy was the ONLY person Howard trusted.
Cosell was restless as a lawyer, painfully aware that the practice of law took weeks, sometimes months, of preparation — in law libraries, in offices. He much preferred reporting where you went on the air within a few hours. So he abandoned the security of a law office for a so-so job in sports radio. His father was worried and hurt by this and, as he lay dying, his last words to Howard’s mother were, “Please have Howard go back to the profession.”
As a radio reporter, there were three problems with Cosell’s voice: it was high-pitched; it was nasal; and it had a strong Brooklyn accent. When he auditioned for a job at WOR-Radio, people told him if he hoped to make it in radio, he needed elocution lessons and to lose the Brooklyn accent. He refused. Cosell was different, and he realized early on that his best chance to reach the top was to EMPHASIZE the difference. If his voice was odd, it was also instantly identifiable.
And Cosell was willing to work very long hours, lugging a 17-pound reel-to-reel tape recorder around on his back. He would wade into a scrum of reporters, buttonhole an athlete, manager or owner, and ask a tough question. He was a little smarter than the average sportswriter, had a better memory, worked harder and had more gall.
In 1956, Cosell got his own radio show, “Speaking of Sports.” At a time when most sports writing and sportscasting came in a fawning tone, Cosell was a skeptic and a critic. He got a wide range of sports figures on his program, and interviewed them boldly and with skill. In the early 1960’s, when the Yankees’ great manager Casey Stengel returned to New York as manager of the expansion team, the New York Mets, Stengel got an excellent press, even when the Mets were awful. One of the few reporters who took him on was Howard Cosell, who felt Stengel was brutally cruel to young players who needed tutoring and encouragement.
The head of sports at ABC, Roone Arledge, was a genius at programming sports on television. Arledge and Cosell bumped into each other one day on 66th Street in Manhattan, and Arledge praised Cosell for his radio work and told him he’d like to use him on TV for ABC Sports. Cosell began taping segments for “The Wide World of Sports.” Arledge was proud of Cosell’s range and guts as a reporter, aware that sports broadcasting lagged behind newspaper and magazine reporting, that TV sportscasters tended to use cliches, and to avoid taking stands on social issues. Arledge let Cosell speak his mind on the air, for which Cosell was forever grateful. He once called the NFL draft “rather a tedious bore.”
When he got the chance to broadcast games live, he liked that better than reporting — because of “the immediacy of effort to result.” He saw something, he said something, and a national TV audience heard it, then and there. One day, Cosell saw a headline in Variety about the Jets owner Sonny Werblin: ‘SONNY WERBLIN TELLS IT LIKE IT IS.’ Cosell adopted that line for himself. He would be someone who “tells it like it is.”
And if his voice was an odd one by network standards, it had its good points. He used staccato very well to emphasize a point, and had the good sense in a great moment in a game to pull back a little, to use a more stately tone or just shut up for a minute. Cosell could project joy and excitement, outrage and compassion, and move quickly from one mood to the next.
High-stakes games with big audiences didn’t faze him. Nor did close finishes. It was the boring, one-sided games where Cosell got in trouble, often putting his ego and pomposity on full display. Any conversation with Howard could leave you shaking your head at the man’s ego. To hear Cosell tell it, only Howard Cosell could have properly broadcast the news that John Lennon had been murdered by a deranged fan, because only Cosell knew that John Lennon was a musical genius, and Cosell had enjoyed such a special relationship with Lennon. The sportswriter Red Smith remarked: “Howard Cosell doesn’t broadcast sports, he broadcasts Howard Cosell.”
Cosell also had a habit, when he had a public figure on television, of referencing an early failure of theirs, then strongly implying that they’d rallied and recovered due to sage advice from Howard Cosell. ‘When I saw you last, you were in sore distress… But now look at you, back on top. Wasn’t I correct in what I told you then?’ The correct answer was: ‘Yes, Howard.’
Cosell exaggerated the extent of myth-making in sports coverage — after all, the final score of every game is there for all to see. He also exaggerated his own success at challenging the myths. But it’s true that there were certain cliches of sports coverage and certain taboo subjects in sports, and Cosell tried, within the limits of network TV, to avoid the cliches and explore the taboos. When people objected, his standard reply was: “I’m just telling it like it is.”
Cosell would watch other sportscasters on TV, handsome, well-groomed men who spouted clichés. “Parrots,” Cosell called them. He vowed to never be a parrot. He would analyze what he saw, and describe the larger context. If a team was playing badly, Howard felt free to call their efforts “a study in futility” — and he didn’t sound sympathetic.
Howard thought there were far too many ex-jocks in sports broadcasting. He resented how quickly they reached the top, never having to lug 17-pound reel-to-reel tape recorders around on their backs. He wasn’t shy about expressing his distaste for jocks-turned-journalists. But few executives or fans agreed with him that ex-athletes were unqualified to talk about sports.
Cosell was also insecure that sports broadcasting was the toy department. Some part of Howard always wanted to be Walter Cronkite, anchoring the evening news. He also toyed with running for the U.S. Senate in New York — because it would be fun, and a way out of the toy department, a way to convince people that Howard Cosell was a serious man who knew “the issues.”
In 1976, he’d decided to run for the U.S. Senate from New York. He announced “There are not ten people in the United States better qualified to run for the Senate than Howard Cosell.” But Emmy wouldn’t allow it. She said: ‘Howard, you can’t do this to me and to your daughters. I can’t endure this.’ And that was it. He adored Emmy and couldn’t take on a new challenge without her support. So he stayed out and Daniel Patrick Moynihan won the seat. Later, he waved off any doubt that he would have been elected. (“No one had ever heard of Moynihan then.”)
Sometimes he knew just the right thing to say. After Bob Knight’s 1969–70 Army basketball team lost an excruciating game, Cosell sought out Knight, who was sitting alone in a little room, too distraught to do the postgame press conference. “Bobby,” said Howard Cosell, “Don’t forget: the sun will come up in the morning, and they’ll still be fighting in Vietnam.” Cosell then turned and walked out, and Knight never forgot those words. The two men became friends.
Another friend of Cosell’s was Muhammad Ali. Ali and Cosell made quite a pair — the brash boxer and the brash reporter. Cosell had a fine sense of humor, and Ali knew how to reach it. Ali was a lot smarter and more calculating than he seemed, and Cosell knew how to reach that part of Ali. As Ali loved to spar in the ring, he also loved to spar verbally, and Cosell made a great foil.
It was a time when many sports reporters called Ali by his given name, “Cassius Clay,” refusing to use his Black Muslim name, “Muhammad Ali.” It was said that Ali’s allegiance to the Black Muslims had led him to refuse to fight in Vietnam. But to Cosell, so sensitive to bigotry in America, it made sense that Cassius Clay, named for a slaveholding Kentucky politician, would want a different name. Cosell always called him “Muhammad Ali.”
In 1967 when the New York State Boxing Commission stripped Muhammad Ali of his heavyweight title for refusing to join the Army, most sportswriters applauded —but Cosell ripped the decision, and Muhammad Ali admired Cosell’s stand, and never forgot it.
END OF PART ONE, OF A TWO-PART PROFILE