'Howard Cosell': The mouth that roared

HOWARD COSELL: The Man, the Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports, by Mark Ribowsky. W.W. Norton & Company, 477 pages, $29.95.

How is it possible that 16 years have passed without a definitive biography of sportscaster Howard Cosell?

Mark Ribowsky (author of a superb book on Satchel Paige) may have lost something by waiting so long after Cosell's death in 1995. A generation has grown up thinking that ESPN's Chris Berman invented Cosell's signature call -- "He could ... go ... all ... the ... way!" -- for a breakaway touchdown run. (Was there an American male who watched "Monday Night Football" from its inception in 1970 to Cosell's final broadcast in 1983 who didn't do an impression of the man?)

But Ribowsky also gained something: perspective. "Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports" is an exhilarating look back at a man and a time that are inextricably entwined.

It may seem Cosell-like hyperbole when Ribowsky writes, "There can be no overestimating how unique, and even unprecedented, Cosell's fame was by the middle of the 1970s. He had done no less than make himself a one-man industry by turning scabrousness into an endearment," but that must have been the way we felt about Cosell, because even when we cursed him we kept on watching. Even Woody Allen was a fan, giving Cosell guest spots in three of his movies -- playing himself, of course.

Arrogant, tempestuous and ambitious, Cosell dragged sports journalism kicking and screaming into an era when electronic media replaced print. Born in 1918 to Isidore and Nellie Cohen, and raised in Brooklyn, Cosell studied law at NYU and floundered for years, trying to find his niche. He finally found it in 1956 with a radio show, "Speaking of Sports," sponsored by a relative who owned a shirt company. After waiting so long for his break, Cosell pursued stardom with a vengeance, bringing the big guns of his scathing, contrarian wit and bludgeoning pomposity to bear on sport's stuffed shirts, such as International Olympic Committee head Avery Brundage and baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn.

He made more enemies than friends with his aggressive interviewing style -- New York Yankees manager Ralph Houk famously compared Cosell to excrement, telling him, "you're everywhere." Cosell didn't care. A tireless self-promoter, he ignored his critics and pressed onward. But there was, as Ribowsky points out, a hard kernel of integrity in his bluster.

Cosell wasn't alone in supporting Muhammad Ali in his legal battle with the U.S. government over the military draft, or in backing Curt Flood, who sued the baseball establishment in an attempt to become a free agent -- but he made the most noise for their causes. For several years, the public practically saw Ali and Cosell as an act; Ali actually told Cosell to call him by a racial epithet in public so that "They'll think we hate one another."

The irony to Cosell's life is that he yearned for the more serious journalistic work that would surely have stifled his individuality. He lost ABC's "Wide World of Sports" job to the far less abrasive Jim McKay, and never got over his bitterness when his longtime supporter at ABC, Roone Arledge, passed him over for the network's coverage of the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics (again for McKay). Sportswriter Jerry Izenberg, who often served as ghostwriter for Cosell's radio and TV commentary, thought, "[It] ate him up that he wasn't the focal point when it all happened."

Cosell was so truculent -- to use one of his favorite words -- that when ABC arranged a farewell dinner for him in 1986 he informed the network head: "I don't want to be honored. If you want to talk about my departure, talk to my lawyer."

"His coda," Ribowsky writes (correctly I think), "more than anything else, is his singularity -- a long-lost quality in the postmodern culture that has wiped men like him off the slate." Howard Cosell made his own mold, and then broke it.

EXCERPT: Howard Cosell

BY MARK RIBOWSKY

INTRODUCTION

In endless variations and permutations, jokes about Howard Cosell's outsized ego and nonstop verbosity proliferated during much of his lifetime. It may be surprising to those who were not alive then, or were too young to know, but his presence so dominated popular American culture that it was virtually impossible not to know who he was. During those heady times, especially during the late 1960s and 1970s, it was hard, in fact, to find someone who didn't take a whack at the world's most inflated ego. Yet nobody laughed more than Howard Cosell did himself, knowing full well the hold he had on the media-driven culture he had helped define and cannily exploited for thirty or so years. Indeed, the more Cosell's detractors twitted him, the bigger he became. Too big, way too big. If, in the modern vernacular, Wall Street is too big to fail, Howard Cosell was exactly the opposite -- he was too big to not fail, which is why this biography isn't merely an examination of the media phenomenon called Howard Cosell but something of a modern fable, complete with shadings of Greek tragedy.

The main reason I decided to undertake this work was to fill a vacuum that has existed for the last two decades since his final, and surprisingly quiet, exit from the stage. It doesn't seem to make much sense, given the giant that he was. That a mainstream biography of his life hasn't been previously undertaken might be construed as inevitable: Perhaps Cosell dug his own historical grave, ensuring neglect of his achievements, because what he did he did so well, and so obviously, was outrageously singular. In retrospect, it's easy to dismiss him in the epitaphic words of one of the few sportswriters he held in high regard, Red Smith, who said, "Howard Cosell doesn't broadcast sports, he broadcasts Howard Cosell." Guilty as charged.

We can call his time the Age of Cosell, so total was his saturation of American sports and popular culture. Now, in his absence, it has been far easier for people in the sports universe to treat him as if he were a passing freak show: fascinating, but in the end just a circus performer who overshadowed the athletic purity of the games. This may or may not be true, but such an assumption seems to be a way to grant themselves immunity for their lack of conviction, perspective, and stomach for fighting the fights he did. That mindset has surely meshed with the post-Cosell times, when network sports executives have pretty much determined that a Howard Cosell not only is no longer possible in the world as we know it, but is no longer needed. That is the unkindest cut in the legacy of Howard Cosell. What's more, they are wrong. Clearly, we do need a Howard Cosell. In fact, we need one real bad.