Cosell biography pulls no punches

Posted Nov 27, 2011 by Bob D'Angelo

Updated Nov 27, 2011 at 02:17 AM

It’s the kind of book Howard Cosell would have appreciated — hard-hitting, abrasive and uncompromising. A book that tells it, as the legendary ABC Sports broadcaster said many times during his career, “like it is.”

He would have appreciated it — had the subject not been Howard Cosell.

Author Mark Ribowsky comes out swinging in “Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports” (W.W. Norton and Company, $29.95, hardback, 480 pages). At first glance, it appears that Ribowsky has dug up every negative thing ever said or written about Cosell, whose distinctive announcing style, hard-hitting interview technique and bombastic nature invited plenty of abuse.

Granted, a lot of it was justified, but Ribowsky, who has written 12 books, does not present a one-sided look. He gives Cosell his due as a pioneer in sports broadcasting and lauds him for the positive achievements during his long career in television — and there were many.

In September, Ribowsky wrote on Publishers Weekly’s website that the reward he gets as a writer is “the chance to tell the story — any story — in a way it has never been told.”

He achieves that with “Howard Cosell,” digging deep into Cosell’s past as young Howard Cohen (his birth name), the influences from his family and education, and the drive he had at an early age to excel. Much of Cosell’s early years had been blurred (perhaps by Cosell himself), but Ribowsky does a nice job of bringing those formative times into sharper focus.

Trying to sift fact from fiction can be tough where Cosell is concerned, and Ribowsky spends a lot of time with small details. For example, Ribowsky writes that Cosell took his wife, Emmy, to her first baseball game, at Ebbets Field two days after the birth of their first child, Jill, who was born June 1, 1945. Cosell “meticulously recalled that Emmy watched Luis Olmo hit two home runs that day.”

Now, that got me thinking. Would a new mother, two days after giving birth, head to a Dodgers game, even if prodded on by Howard Cosell? Would that woman even be out of the hospital at that point?

Retrosheet.org documents that on June 3, 1945, the Brooklyn Dodgers were playing in Cincinnati, where they lost 6-2. Olmo hit five home runs during June 1945, but not two in one game; his lone homer in Brooklyn that month came on June 23 against the Boston Braves.

That was Cosell’s memory, so I can’t fault Ribowsky.

This book lumbers on at first, but picks up speed and really hits its stride when Ribowsky focuses on Cosell’s work as a boxing commentator, and specifically, his banter with heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali. But even before that, Ribowsky shows Cosell at his finest, a descriptive announcer and a reporter who didn’t take “no” for an interview. Case in point: heavyweight champion Sonny Liston tried to rebuff Cosell’s request for an interview, telling him “I ain’t talking.”

Ribowsky picks up the tale, quoting Cosell: “‘I don’t give a damn if you hate me; I don’t like you either, and I just met you,” he said, somehow not wetting himself. ‘But you’ve gotta do this interview.’

“A big, and rare, smile crept across Sonny’s face,” Ribowsky writes. “He did the interview, and was even ingratiating at times.”

Cosell, not afraid to take an unpopular stand, attached himself to Ali’s cause as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war. And while he was indelibly identified with Ali, Cosell’s most famous boxing call came in 1973, when George Foreman defeated Joe Frazier in Kingston, Jamaica, yelling, “Down Goes Frazier!” several times (or, as Ribowsky titles one of his chapters, “Down Goes Fray-Zhuh!”).

During the 1968 Olympics, Cosell showed his reporting skills again when he secured an interview with Tommie Smith, who had won the gold medal in the 200-meter finals and used the medal ceremony to give a Black Power salute (along with bronze medalist John Carlos). Persistence paid off when Smith granted a brief interview that was riveting not only for what was said, but also for Cosell’s restraint.

“The interview — perhaps the sparest one he ever did — was picked up by newspapers and TV stations worldwide, and for Cosell this marked the apogee of his career as a ‘sports journalist’,” Ribwosky writes.

An interview Cosell did four years later at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, however, was not received so charitably, Ribowsky writes.

Sprinters Rey Robinson and Eddie Hart were disqualified because they did not get to the starting blocks on time because their coach, Stan Wright, had the wrong schedule. Cosell came under heavy fire for these kinds of questions: “I feel deeply sorry for you, but we all have to answer to the American public. Why in the world was America the only country to have the wrong information?”

That’s a darned good question, if you ask me.

It is well documented that Cosell had his critics, among them New York Daily News columnist Dick Young, who referred to him in print as “Howie the Shill.” However, Cosell would never be more famous — and infamous — than during his 14 seasons in the broadcast booth of “Monday Night Football.”
I covered a Monday night game in Miami 28 years ago this week — the Dolphins won, 38-14—and I saw Cosell getting onto the press elevator at the Orange Bowl. What struck me about Cosell was how tall he was (I’d imagined him to be short and dumpy), and how he calmly smoked a cigar while fans who could see him were berating him.

“Monday Night Football” became an American institution, and Cosell was the lightning rod. Ribowsky touches on the highlights, particularly the night Cosell announced the murder of John Lennon and gave an impromptu, heartfelt eulogy. And the lowlights, when Cosell had to leave a game in Philadelphia because he either fell ill (his story) or was too drunk to continue (his critics’ story). Indeed whispers of Cosell’s drinking were common during his tenure at “MNF,” Ribowsky writes.

Ribowsky quotes liberally from Cosell’s books, particularly “Cosell” and “Like It Is,” and also from “I Never Played the Game,” in which Cosell was critical of his “Monday Night Football” colleagues, bemoaning the “jockocracy” in the booth and taking shots at Frank Gifford and Don Meredith. The book accelerated the end for Cosell’s broadcasting career, coming after his ad-libbed comment about Redskins receiver Alvin Garrett that was perceived as racist.

Cosell’s descent from fame to oblivion was swift and sad. And yet his contributions to sports journalism cannot be ignored. Broadcasters had approached athletes with a “gee whiz” mentality. Cosell showed it was possible to ask hard questions and call athletes, coaches and officials into account.

“Howard Cosell” is richly researched, with Ribowsky culling information from such diverse sources as Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan, People, Playboy and Mad magazine. Ribowsky’s writing is crisp and clear, and he approached Cosell head-on, twitting him for his largesse and praising him for his contributions to sports.

He tells Cosell’s story in a way that had never been told, and it’s a fascinating read because of that.