Cosell Special Retells It Like It Was

WATCHING SOME hockey this weekend? Maybe college football or the pros? The guys

calling those games are just sportscasters. But it wasn't so long ago that TV

sports boasted its own household name and cultural icon.

Howard Cosell called more than game action during the tumultuous '60s and '70s.

Cosell, who died in 1995, was a social commentator, a muckraking reporter-and

a nasally accented New Yorker whose famous tongue could cut through leather.

Compare his impact to that of today's bland sports voices by watching first

this weekend's games and then HBO's smart Monday 8 p.m. remembrance, "Howard

Cosell: Telling It Like It Is."

And did he ever tell it. Loudly. Persistently. Egotistically. Now producer Joe

Lavine tells all about Cosell, in a robust hour packed with vintage clips and

interviews. Even the afflicted Muhammad Ali speaks.

It becomes clear Cosell was often considered an arrogant SOBby many of those

close to him, some who still admire him, and others who yet speak of the man

with affection even though he excoriated them. Frank Gifford's gentle Cosell

imitation is a wonder after the way his "Monday Night Football" cohort sliced

him to shreds every chance he got. "He could be infinitely cruel," says former

ABC Sports producer and NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer, but Cosell "would consider

his cruelties the tough love of 'telling it like it is.'"

HBO's hour wonders whether that tough love had its roots in a tough youth for

Cosell as a Jewish Brooklyn kid beat up by the local Irish Catholics, then

rebuffed by the family of the Presbyterian woman he would marry. After leaving

his law career in his 30s for sports broadcasting, he was kept off '50s

television because he looked and sounded like a New York Jew. Yet by the '60s

he had "carved out a niche as a contrarian," denouncing beloved Mets manager

Casey Stengel on WABC Radio. Cosell also acutely assessed TV's then-staple

sport of boxing, which would remain his career-long forte.

"It was when he connected with Muhammad Ali that he really became part of the

national fabric," notes sportswriter Dave Anderson. The outspoken heavyweight

was at the heart of '60s social upheaval, becoming a Black Muslim, changing his

name from Cassius Clay, and refusing military induction, thereby inspiring an

international fame of unprecedented magnitude. And Cosell "latched on."

In the '70s, his work as the "provocative catalyst" in the booth of ABC's new

"Monday Night Football" made that doubtful brainchild a national institution,

and a fixture of water-cooler conversation. Cosell already had shown his stuff

at the contentious '68 Mexico City Olympics: When gold medalists Tommie Smith

and John Carlos raised their black fists in protest, he boldly provided them a

forum from which to speak. "The single most significant media issue in the 20th

Century is race," says writer Maury Allen, "and Cosell was unafraid about

race."

It's hard to realize today just how mold-shattering his intrepid approach

seemed in an era when shy sports coverage merely glorified the games. His

plunges into controversy, his on-air challenges, his far- flung

explanations-all came to seem standard, solely because of Cosell. His language

also offered a rare eloquence, which unfortunately started to appear smug in

its own erudite obscurity.

That deep-seated propensity helped end Cosell's career in the '80s. He

alienated ABC colleagues by behaving as if he were bigger than the roles

assigned him. He wanted to run the show at the '72 Munich games, when Israeli

athletes were assassinated by Arab terrorists, and rejected ABC executive Roone

Arledge's caution that "he is not a journalist in the normal sense of the

word; he's a columnist, a person who dispenses opinion." Peter Jennings says

Cosell thought he should have been anchoring the news. Yet Cosell was by this

time turning into "a caricature of himself," strutting his inimitable self in

movies (Woody Allen recalls his "Bananas" cameo) and sitcoms (Tony Randall

remembers his "Odd Couple" appearances), even an absurd prime-time variety hour.

"He was a strange mix of monumental ego and tremendous insecurity," says author

Ray Robinson, making for "tough chemistry." Cosell had estranged even his

allies so that when he said "that little monkey" to describe black football

player Alvin Garrett during a 1983 game, the door was already open for his

exit. HBO does its homework to show this was not a slur; Cosell's grandkids

testify he called them that, too, and a 1972 clip shows him using the same

words for scrambler Mike Adamle, a fleet, compact white guy.

But by then Cosell the truth-talking innovator had overstepped the boundaries

of sportscasting in a different way. He had come to view himself as more

important than the events he covered. In a way, he was, at least culturally;

but his bluster had become disaffecting.

That doesn't mean we couldn't use his unabashed candor today. Earlier this week

after World Series Game 3, when Yankees hero Chad Curtis rebuffed NBC's Jim

Gray on the air to protest Gray's dogged Pete Rose inquest, game anchor Bob

Costas-who'd proudly declared in TV Guide a week earlier how he speaks out

about baseball's problems-uttered not a peep. Cosell would have seized the

incident, chewed it up and spit it immediately into his microphone.

He remains an original.