COSELL, Howard

(b. 25 March 1918 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; d. 23 April 1995 in New York City), brash, egotistical sports journalist who inspired admiration and loathing from colleagues and sports fans alike in his zeal for "telling it like it is."

Cosell was born Howard William Cohen, the younger child of Isadore Martin Cohen, an accountant for a chain of clothing stores, and Nellie Rosenthal Cohen, a homemaker. His family moved to Brooklyn, New York, before he was three. He indulged his passion for athletics by serving as the sports editor of the newspaper at Alexander Hamilton High School. He enrolled in New York University in 1935 and studied liberal arts before switching at his parents' request to the law school. He obtained a law degree there in 1940.

Cohen enlisted in the U.S. Army Transportation Corps in 1942 and was stationed at the New York Port of Embarkation, where he rose to the rank of major and supervised all personnel. There he met Corporal Mary Edith "Emmy" Abrams, a pretty blonde whom it was against army regulations to date. Undaunted, he obtained written permission from a general for his courtship. The two married in 1944 and had two children. They remained devoted partners until Emmy Cosell's death in 1990.

At some point in his young adulthood Cohen legally changed his surname to Cosell. To those who viewed the change as a denial of his Jewish heritage, he replied that his family's name in Poland ("Kasell") was actually closer to "Cosell" than "Cohen" and had been mangled by the U.S. immigration authorities.

After the end of World War II, Cosell established his own law practice, continuing his lifelong interest in sports by numbering athletes among his clients. In 1951 he helped to incorporate Little League baseball in the New York area, and in 1953 the restless lawyer found the opportunity he had been seeking, as the host of the ABC radio program All-League Clubhouse, in which Little Leaguers asked questions of major-league players. In 1956 ABC offered him a contract as a radio sports reporter, and he abandoned his law practice.

Cosell embraced radio eagerly, lugging around the heavy tape recorders of the period. He developed contacts in the sports world and earned a reputation for hard-hitting interviews. He slowly moved into television, becoming the nightly sports reporter for WABC-TV in New York in 1961 while continuing his radio work.

From 1959 on, Cosell covered boxing for ABC and finally achieved nationwide familiarity through his championing of the boxer Muhammad Ali in the 1960s. When the boxer abandoned the name Cassius Clay and converted to Islam, Cosell was the first broadcaster to use the new name. He also supported Ali in his battle to retain his heavyweight title and right to box in the United States, when officials penalized the boxer because he was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. Cosell loudly proclaimed Ali's persecutors racist and their arguments unconstitutional.

Cosell came into his full glory when Roone Arledge, president of ABC Sports, decided to court viewers in 1970 by expanding football telecasting beyond the weekend. Monday Night Football, a program in which Cosell was a fixture through 1983, gave him a forum for his athlete interviews, his three-dollar vocabulary, and his frankness.

He viewed himself as a maverick and a pioneer, a "hard" journalist in a field that had hitherto consisted of jocks and cheerleaders. Cosell took his mission to serve the U.S. public so seriously that in the mid-1970s he even considered running for the U.S. Senate. "That wasn't chutzpah," remarked the Washington Post sportswriter Shirley Povich of the sportscaster's political aspirations. "That was Cosell."

Cosell became a huge celebrity during his stint at Monday Night Football. He worked on a variety of sports broadcasts, including those of several Olympic Games and the famed 1973 tennis "Battle of the Sexes" between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. He also appeared on television programs such as The Odd Couple, The Dean Martin Show, and Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. His Brooklyn accent and middle-aged, toupee-enhanced appearance evoked instant familiarity.

He guest-hosted talk shows and even briefly hosted a variety show, Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell (1975). Such was his cultural currency that the filmmaker Woody Allen employed him, most notably in Bananas (1971), in which Cosell rushed to interview an assassinated Latin American dictator on his deathbed and performed a play-by-play analysis of the consummation of a marriage.

Despite his visibility, Cosell was not universally popular. "Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a show-off. I have been called all of these," he wrote in his book Cosell (1973). "Of course I am." Cosell expressed his opinions about sports and his life off the air in several other books: Like It Is (1974); I Never Played the Game, with Peter Bonventre (1985); and What's Wrong with Sports, with Shelby Whitfield (1991). Like his on-air commentary, his books made enemies. Of I Never Played the Game, Povich wrote, "Oh yes he did, and he played it spitefully and with self-promotion always in mind as he homed into the big story, this poseur of the public's right to know, who for years played his own game of How Great I Am and Don't You Forget It."

In 1982, after witnessing a particularly brutal fight, Co-sell announced that he would no longer cover boxing; after he retired from Monday Night Football the next year he extended his disdain to that sport as well. He continued to perform radio sports commentary until 1992, although after the cancellation of his ABC program SportsBeat in 1985 he no longer appeared regularly on television. In 1991 Cosell underwent an operation for cancer, and a series of strokes left him weak and increasingly reclusive. He died of a heart embolism in New York City on 23 April 1995.

Cosell exerted considerable influence on sports journalism. Although he was not always the champion of the people he thought he was, he took a stand against racism in sports and fought for coverage of such difficult issues as drugs in the athletic world. He helped to make Monday Night Football an institution that changed network sports programming. In the final analysis, however, it was his loud personality rather than his subject matter that struck his audiences—so much that a 1978 poll found him both the nation's most liked and most hated broadcaster. In 1984 the Washington Post columnist Tony Kornheiser summed up Cosell's legacy: "Yes, he was contentious. Yes, he was controversial. But damn it, he was compelling."

Aside from his own works, the best book about Cosell is by the television producer Terry O'Neil, The Game Behind the Game: High Pressure, High Stakes in Television Sports (1989). Cosell inspired a number of profiles, including three in TV Guide: Saul Braun, "The Voice You Love to Hate" (28 Aug. 1971); Melvin Durslag, "Howard Cosell vs. the World" (27 Sept. 1975); and David Shaw, "Before You Boo Howard Cosell" (9 Feb. 1980). Also helpful are Harry Waters, "This Is Howard Cosell," Newsweek (2 Oct. 1972); Tony Kornheiser, "Cosell's Legacy," Washington Post (23 Aug. 1984); and Shirley Povich, "Cosell: What's a Low Punch Among Friends?," Washington Post (11 Oct. 1985). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 24 Apr. 1995), and Povich's remembrance is in the Washington Post (2 May 1995).

Tinky "Dakota" Weisblat