TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/85/85capmil.1

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 3.9 KB | 80 lines

                                                                                MILESTONES

This Was How-wud Co-sssell


Speaking in spurts on the passing of a tremendous earache


Year-end compilations of bests and worsts recall a TV Guide poll
of 1978 that determined the most disliked sportscaster in
America was Howard Cosell and the most liked was Howard Cosell.
So when Cosell asked out of his ABC contract a few days ago,
completing a sputtering withdrawal from television at 67, it was
an occasion of both joy and wistfulness, good news for the
national eardrum but bad news for news.

Phenomenon, Cosell's most conservative description of himself,
hardly begins to tell it. A homely Jewish lawyer from
Brooklyn--the grand slam of network liabilities--achieved a
celebrity so enormous and unlikely that he has only naturally
mistaken it for love. Walking along the avenue now, stooped and
trembling, Cosell is sung to by construction workers and cops
who proffer rides in their patrol cars when cabs are scarce.
Strangers cheer him. "Oh, what hatred," he sneers triumphantly,
a sarcasm aimed at every detractor he had survived. "Look at
the hatred dripping from their tongues."

The phenomenon opened, like a play in three acts, with breezy
Jimmy Cannon lines:  "If Howard Cosell were a sport, he'd be
roller derby"; "Cosell put on a toupee and changed his name
[from Cohen] to tell it like it is."  Once, raging about the
shortage of experts in sports journalism, Cosell forced Red
Smith to commiserate with a twinkle. "There's one fewer than you
think."  Cosell certainly was a journalists, though first and
foremost an attorney.

His historic alliance with Boxer Muhammad Ali, a boon to both
of them, was rooted in constitutional law. Cosell knew that
Muslim Ali stood on firm legal ground in conscientiously
objecting to the draft. But he also felt Ali was right.
Regarding race, Cosell's clear record should have forestalled
that unfair flap over his "little monkey" remark on Monday Night
Football two years ago. Applied to black Washington Receiver
Alvin Garrett, it was obviously a term of fond familiarity on
the order of Cosell's other peculiar references to Joey
Theismann, Petey Rose or Danderoo. He is capable of alluding to
a Pope as Johnny Paul.

In the second act, at the end of the '70s, the fun went out of
hating him. It got ugly and even scary. The anti-Semitic
joined forces with the anti-semantic. Denver bar patrons started
chucking bricks through TV screens. One World Series night in
Baltimore, Cosell was rocked in his limousine like a deposed
general after the coup. He was the only sports figure one could
actually imagine being assassinated, and the influence of
newspapers was not exactly calming. With typical
understatement, he estimates, "I have been vilified more than
Charles Manson."

When the smoke abruptly cleared, it was hard to tell whether the
fire first had gone out of Cosell or his public. He was still
preposterous and pedantic but no longer passionate, and no
longer did he arouse passion. First from boxing, then from
football, he started withdrawing, Cosell became most comfortable
ad congressional hearings condemning the fact of boxing and on
the Nightline show decrying the lionization of athletes.
Savaging colleagues in his newly published megalomaniac's
manifesto, he next took his leave from TV.

ABC News and Sports President Roone Arledge's terse farewell
was written with a dry eye, but the cameramen will miss Cosell.
"One- Take Howard," they called him. He had hoped to become
Walter Cronkite or at least Hugh Downs (for a hilarious few
weeks in 1975, even Ed Sullivan), but that was so long ago. He
will continue on the radio, and he will not be alone. For 41
years, his wife Emmy has stood by him with a devotion that might
awe Mother Teresa. Besides that, he has all the love on the
street.

--By Tom Callahan