The Prime of Howard Cosell
HOWARD COSELL could be a good friend. Beneath the bluster was a good listener, a thoughtful, loyal guy who cared deeply about his friends. Cosell allowed his friends to tease or mock him. He even seemed to enjoy it, and would smile as he retorted, “Oh, that’s garbage — and you know it.”
He liked to take friends or young journalists to the Hotel Dorset on West 54th Street in Manhattan. He would sweep in and ask for “my usual table,” smack in the middle of the room. Howard sat facing the door, and watched as people came in, saw him, and whispered to their companions. With a young reporter like Al Michaels of ABC or Phil Mushnick of the New York Post, Cosell could be charming and say, ‘You’re not like those other wretched sportswriters. You have class. You have a mind of your own.’
But if these young reporters ventured any criticism of Howard Cosell, then everything changed. Now they were disloyal cynics and he wouldn’t even say hello. Public criticism from “inferior” journalists enraged Howard. For someone so blunt, so proud of “telling it like it is,” Cosell was oddly thin-skinned. He’d save hostile notices from a newspaper in Des Moines, Iowa — and read these to his friends and fellow broadcasters, adding that the writer of this piece was a $10,000-a-year hack.
To emphasize that he was NOT a hack, Cosell quoted from memory — in his thick Brooklyn accent — sentences from the essays of Sir Francis Bacon. And Cosell used fancy words. He loved the noun “coterie,” the adverb “adversely” and the adjective “beguiling.” If he criticized a guest, and the guest took offense, Cosell might smile and say: “You’re becoming truculent.” He praised athletes who had “weathered the vicissitudes of life.”
Another thing Cosell was very good at was filling time. If a guest was late or there were technical problems and a taped piece couldn’t run as planned, a producer could tell Cosell in his earpiece “Fill 20 seconds” and Cosell would speak smoothly for exactly 20 seconds. Many announcers, even good ones, can’t do that.
In 1970, came “Monday Night Football,” the brainchild of Roone Arledge. Where a typical NFL game might be shot with three cameras, Roone used 10 or 12 cameras. Viewers saw pro football as they’d never seen it before. Arledge gave the play-by-play to Howard Cosell. Dandy Don Meredith was a color man with a Texas twang and Frank Gifford played the straight man — but it was Howard Cosell who opened and closed the show. Just before the opening night of Monday Night Football, Cosell told Don Meredith, “You’ll wear the white hat; I’ll wear the black hat.”
When the producers of “Monday Night Football” added a package of halftime highlights, they asked Cosell to narrate them, and he did it very well. There was no script and only the briefest description given to Cosell about what these highlights contained. He sat down, watched them and improvised a compelling narration on the spot.
Many viewers hated Cosell, feeling the man’s ego and big-city airs. After a few shows, there were boxes of mail coming in from viewers saying ‘Get Cosell off Monday Night Football!’ When Cosell said of Cowboys running back Robert Newsome “He’s no Calvin Hill,” Cosell got death threats from viewers in Texas. Emmy was worried that her husband was going to be murdered, as was Howard’s daughter Hillary. He often traveled with bodyguards.
Yet Arledge stuck by Cosell. The show’s ratings remained high, which made it easier. “Monday Night Football” made Cosell much more famous, and gave him the audience for his first book — a memoir naturally, a book about himself.
Over the years, he was friendly with his “Monday Night Football” broadcasting partner, Frank Gifford. The two socialized together. But then Cosell cruelly turned on Gifford. Gifford had been a star halfback for the New York Giants and Howard was jealous of his football career, and the ease with which he’d gotten into broadcasting. Cosell wanted Gifford to rip the players at times, but Gifford had played the game, knew how hard a game pro football is, and how brutal the spotlight can be, and didn’t want to rip the players. So Cosell felt Gifford was a poor broadcaster — a parrot — and Cosell said so in his books.
Cosell was a very good boxing announcer, quick to see a fight changing, and able to express that in succinct phrases that he made famous. In 1973, when George Foreman beat Joe Frazier, Howard called out: “Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!” It was the perfect call.
Cosell broadcast the 1976 Olympics in which Sugar Ray Leonard emerged as a star. Cosell later boasted, “I created Sugar Ray Leonard.” Ray and his trainers would have disputed that. In 1980, when Sugar Ray Leonard beat on Roberto Duran, and Duran finally told the referee: “No mas,” Cosell had a famous call: “What? Duran has quit! Roberto Duran has quit! There can be no other explanation!”
In 1982, Cosell was broadcasting a fight between Ernie Holmes and Randall “Tex” Cobb in the Astrodome in Houston. Holmes was pounding Cobb, Cobb was bleeding heavily and Cosell said the fight should have been stopped, it was a disgrace, and furthermore professional boxing was a disgrace and he wasn’t going to broadcast it anymore.
To some, it was another admirable stand Cosell was taking. But to others, Cosell was a hypocrite, waiting until he’d made millions of dollars and was on his way down as a broadcaster before he discovered that boxing was brutal. (For his part, Tex Cobb was glad Cosell wouldn’t be broadcasting boxing anymore. Cobb even volunteered to play in the NFL for a week if that would get Cosell to stop broadcasting football.)
One night, the broadcaster Pat Summerall found out just how visceral the reaction to Cosell could be. Summerall was riding a commuter train with Howard out of New York City. The train broke down in the Bronx, and Howard announced he wasn’t going to wait for the train to be repaired. He told Summerall to rustle up a third passenger; they’d split cab fare home three ways.
A half hour later, Cosell returned in a cab. Summerall got in the front seat, and an advertising man got in back with Cosell. Within minutes, the ad man was telling Cosell what a jerk he was. Cosell replied in kind. Soon the two men were brawling in the back seat, with Cosell getting the worst of it. Blood was spurting everywhere. An appalled Pat Summerall told the driver to stop the cab and made Cosell sit up front. Summerall sat in the back with the ad man. Cosell’s toupee had come off and there was a big gash on his head. He and the ad man apologized to each other. The ad guy said: “I overreacted and I shouldn’t have. Whiskey was involved.”
Finally, after a long ride, the ad guy reached his own street and asked to be let out of the cab. But instead of paying his third of the fare, he sucker punched Cosell in the back of the head, and ran. Cosell was hit so hard that his head slammed into the windshield and cracked it. Summerall got Cosell home, but Howard was bleeding badly, half-conscious, with an ominous lump on his forehead. Summerall almost carried Howard to the front door, and rang the doorbell.
Emmy arrived at the door: “What in God’s name happened!” “Oh, nothing. Just the usual trip home,” said Pat Summerall. But that was Cosell, always the need to agitate, to stir the pot. Always combative, even when tact would have served him much better.
In the 1970’s, there were so many suspicious fires in the Bronx that the state legislature often stopped insurance payments, and landlords began walking away from their properties. During the 1977 World Series, when a school near Yankee Stadium caught fire, Howard Cosell said, “There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning…” Many people had seen it, but it took Howard to say it on national television. “The Bronx is burning” went into the language.
And when Reggie Jackson hit three home runs in the final game, on three swings of the bat, Howard had the perfect call of Reggie’s last home run: “Oh, what a blow! What a way to top it off!”
In 1981, Al Michaels broadcast a night baseball game with Cosell in Kansas City. Late at night, the two of them were returning to their hotel, in Cosell’s stretch limo. The limo driver stopped at a red light in a sketchy Kansas City neighborhood. Just outside the car, two African-American teenagers were fighting, while a crowd looked on. Michaels was eager to return to the hotel, but Cosell, fortified by eight vodkas, stepped from the car, and strode over to the brawlers.
“Okay, okay,” said Cosell. “Now, listen up. It’s quite apparent to this seasoned observer that the young southpaw does not possess a jab requisite to the continuation of this fray! And, furthermore, his opponent is a man of inferior and diminishing skills. This confrontation is summarily halted, post-haste!” Cosell got back into his stretch limo, and the fight stopped.
People who had seen Howard Cosell on TV often wondered “Is it an act? The overbearing manner — is he always that way?” Cosell’s friends said ‘Yes, he is.’ It was draining to spend time with him. Don Klosterman once saw Roone Arledge and begged him: “Roone, come help me listen to Howard.”
Arledge thought Cosell had a compulsion to say whatever was foremost on his mind. If what was foremost on his mind was the racism involved in stripping Ali of his title, or the crassness of continuing the 1972 Olympic games when Israeli athletes had been butchered by terrorists, then Cosell looked honorable and brave.
But, Arledge said, sometimes what was foremost on Cosell’s mind was that Frank Gifford was a poor sports announcer. Cosell wanted applause for hammering his gracious longtime partner — but most people saw what Cosell did to Gifford as both inaccurate and gratuitously mean.
Cosell took to saying that no one told the truth on sportscasts anymore because the people who ran the industry lacked the integrity of Roone Arledge and Howard Cosell. In 1986, when Cosell was finally leaving ABC, he was very bitter about it. ABC hoped to host a ‘Farewell Howard’ dinner. but Cosell told the head of ABC, “I don’t want to be honored. If you want to talk about my departure, talk to my lawyer.”
In 1990, when Emmy Cosell died, Howard was miserable. All the travel for work was possible because she came along. (“I wouldn’t cross the Triboro Bridge without Emmy.”) After she died, he wouldn’t see anyone but family. By 1992, he had a bad heart, bad kidneys, Parkinson’s Disease and a drinking problem.
In 1995, when Howard Cosell died of a heart embolism, he was 77 years old. No one in sports journalism has ever taken his place. Cosell was not as great a broadcaster as he thought he was, or as he told us he was — but he was excellent. He had trouble weathering the vicissitudes of life.