Howard Cosell once said to me, “Bobbin, you have a face for radio and a voice for print.” This, coming from a horse-faced man with a bad toupee whose nasal voice was the most irritating on the airwaves, was nothing less than inspirational. The opinionated loudmouth was one of the main reasons that ABC was no longer the Almost Broadcasting Company, why Monday Night Football was the blockbuster hit of prime time, why a white sports audience came to understand Muhammad Ali’s persecution. One year, in the same poll, he was voted both the best-liked and most-hated sportscaster.
I had no such ambivalence. I loved Howard Cosell. He was encouraging to me, personally and by example; he used his radio and television pulpit to become the most important commentator on sports-related news in the country. Sure, he hustled sports—football, boxing, baseball briefly, the Olympics, and some made-for-TV early reality games—but he also delivered thundering jeremiads against greed, exploitation, racism, and the spurious use of tax dollars and eminent domain to build stadiums that would enrich the owners with whom he loved to mingle.
I took his credo—“You can’t always be popular and right at the same time”—as a moral lesson and sometimes as a shelter when I was attacked for being a contrarian. In those days, it was rare for someone on TV or radio to stand up to public opinion. Cosell stood up. He was often called controversial because he wasn’t bland. His attacks—on his radio shows, on his excellent, short-lived TV magazine, SportsBeat, and in interviews with anyone who would listen—against the news media’s pandering to illegal sports gambling, the inconsistencies of drug testing, and the brutality of boxing were unusual for his times.
Cosell’s sudden refusal in 1982, after the brave but untalented Tex Cobb lost a one-sided bout to heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, to broadcast any more professional fights was considered a grandstand play. What took him so long? asked his critics; the hypocrite made a fortune at ringside with Ali and so many other boxers. It was late. But among those who demanded reform when the overmatched Duk Koo Kim died after a fight with the lightweight champion, Ray Mancini—which was only days before the Holmes-Cobb mismatch—Cosell was the only one willing to sacrifice a job, which he did, helping push through reforms. Cosell’s play-by-plays and color commentary were entertaining and informative but not irreplaceable. What was irreplaceable, as he knew, was his presence, which gave a kind of moral seal of approval to the increasingly corrupt sport.
I once wrote that he was “a living mixed metaphor . . . symbol, know-it-all uncle, stern coach, comic relief. He was even a dichotomy: Who else could lure us into the SportsWorld tent with promises of jockomamie delights, then, once inside, berate us for wasting our time at such foolish entertainments?”
He often told me how annoyed he was at the dichotomy line, but I think he liked the idea of someone taking him so seriously. Cosell criticism usually came down to variations of Jimmy Cannon’s lame put-down: “Cosell put on a toupee and changed his name [from Cohen] to tell it like it is.”
He could blunt criticism with his own self-assessment: “Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff. I have been called all of these. Of course, I am.” The twist, of course, was that he reveled in being able to get away with bad behavior. He modulated it with an exaggerated charm around tycoons, sports stars, and famous entertainers, as well as hot dog vendors and kids on the street, especially if there was an audience.
Cosell recognized the transcendent importance of baseball’s first modern-era black ballplayer, Jackie Robinson—the word he used was “unconquerable”—and long before anyone knew what Howard was talking about, he dubbed O. J. Simpson “that little lost boy.” If Cosell seemed a bit fulsome in his praise of Green Bay Packers Coach Vince Lombardi and harsh in his condemnation of baseball gambler Pete Rose, it was because he was, at heart, a True Believer. “I believe in all the clichés,” he said. “I am a sports fan.”
He was a True Believer in America. A Brooklyn Jew, a lawyer, an army officer in World War II, of course he would believe in the country’s promise to all of fairness, constitutionality, meritocracy, order. In that sense, I was a True Believer, too. We saw that in each other. And he was an accidental sportscaster.
As a Manhattan lawyer, he was representing the Little League of New York when ABC radio asked him to host, for free, a Little League show. After three years, in 1956, he decided to become a full-time broadcaster and proposed a weekly show. He was giving up the law, so he wanted to be paid. He was told to get a sponsor. He did. That interview and opinion show, Speaking of Sports, and later Speaking of Everything, were ABC mainstays, intelligent, contentious, unafraid. He did pre- and postgame TV shows. He produced and voiced such groundbreaking documentaries as Grambling College: 100 Yards to Glory, which brought national attention to the historically black Grambling College and its legendary football coach, Eddie Robinson.
I met Cosell in 1962, at the Mets first spring training camp, when he whacked me with the thirty-pound Nagra tape recorder slung over his shoulder. This pushy stork—a radio reporter, yet, then the lowest on the lodge brother pecking order—was merely trying to get closer to the subject of a news conference.
It was a few spring trainings later that I saw him at a hotel poolside, ostentatiously annoying an attractive middle-aged woman and her two cute teenage daughters. As I came closer, he brayed, “There he is, Bob-bee Lip-syte of The New York Times, destined for stardom.” I froze, embarrassed. The woman he was hitting on said, in a husky contralto, “Now just shut up, Howard, can’t you see you are embarrassing the boy.” And he shut up. He sat back with a sheepish grin, and he looked very happy. The woman was Emmy, his wife and keeper.
Through the next thirty years, Howard became my colleague, my friend, briefly my employer, and a loud booster of my career—which did not endear me to other sportswriters and sportscasters, most of whom he treated with vicious, almost pathological contempt.
I liked the idea that Howard made so many in the sports media so crazy. His celebrity—he was often better known than his sports star subjects, who seemed delighted by his attention—gave him great access. His insistence that he was “telling it like it is” made it seem as though everyone else was fudging and piping, which was often true. But his sarcastic contempt for most other sports journalists often came from jealousy or paranoia. He didn’t understand that most of the younger ones just wanted to sit at his feet. So he kicked them.
The first time Bob Costas met Cosell was at the 1983 World Series as both were entering the Baltimore ballpark. “I know who you are,” brayed Cosell, “the child who rhapsodizes over the infield fly rule. You’ll have a great career.”
I later asked Costas if he had been offended or flattered. He thought about that. Sort of both, he said. Who else but Cosell could so neatly recognize your existence and then sarcastically dismiss it?
“I wanted to be his friend,” Costas told me.
That never happened. Ten years later, when Cosell was out of television and ill, Costas called him. “I told him that I had admired him and that I and my generation just wanted to be friends with him but that he had pushed us away.
“There was a pause, and then he said, ‘Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re right. We’ll talk again.’ We never did.”
It was Howard’s relationship with Muhammad Ali that was both the high-water mark of his career and the target of journalistic resentment. It was even the subject of one of the best books of the Ali oeuvre, Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship, by Dave Kindred, a rigorous reporter and a phrasemaker with insight. “Before Ali,” he wrote, “sports was a slow dance. After, it was rock and roll. Before Cosell, sports on television was a reverential production. After, it was circus.”
I particularly liked Kindred’s recounting of the late-night flight in which Ali read to me at high volume his lecture on friendship. “ ‘Whenever the thought of self-interest creeps in that means destruction of friendship. It can never develop into a real friendship, it can only develop into a business relationship. It will last as long as the business relationship lasts. Like me and Cosell. I lose, he goes to somebody else.’”
Cosell never went to somebody else with such intensity, because, as for me, there was never another subject that deserved it. And for Cosell, no other subject for which he would be the willing straight man. Ali was the star, and Cosell, to remain a journalist, had to keep some distance. Cosell gave airtime to Ali’s religious, political, and social opinions when they were under attack by the government and the mainstream media, but he never endorsed them. He defended Ali’s right to have his opinions. It was a standard that I tried to emulate, although in my arrogance back then I wouldn’t have allowed that anyone else was my model.
At the end of his career in 1992, during a celebration of him at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York, Cosell was asked if there was anyone to whom he could “pass the torch.” He cleared his throat and glared, and coldly said he didn’t think there was anyone in broadcasting who could cover the range of topics he had covered with similar intelligence or morality.
Sitting there that night, I totally agreed. There was no one with his range of knowledge, his biblical old prophet’s rage, his insider information. But I also had to laugh. This was from someone who loved playing himself on sitcoms, who had hosted “Battle of the Network Stars” where the likes of Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Wonder Woman (Lynda Carter) competed in goofy athletic events. Of course, he did storm off the set of Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*but Were Afraid to Ask)—when he found out he was cast as a sperm. But it was probably because he was only one of many.
I could find the dichotomy endearing, but many fans and media could not. And they never forgave him for patronizing and later ridiculing his teammate in the Monday Night Football booth, Frank Gifford, who as a New York Giant in the fifties and sixties was the beau ideal of jock manhood, handsome, brave, pleasant, bright enough. Gifford was beatified by a former University of Southern California classmate, Frederick Exley, in the critically acclaimed A Fan’s Notes: A Fictional Memoir, which fixed Frank in the literary imagination. As advertising found sports, Frank became a Madison Avenue favorite. Frank was not a talented broadcaster and certainly no journalist. Howard must have resented Frank’s looks and athletic credentials, the unfairness of his coasting through the world while Howard was always, as he said, “on the precipice of professional peril every day of my career.”
Which was true. Howard could be in trouble for slurring his words on a broadcast (he said flu, they said drunk) or calling a black football player “a little monkey” (Cosell, a stalwart antiracist, often called quick little players of any race “monkeys”), while Frank, sweet-natured and cooperative, managed to be forgiven by the media for an incident in which a woman successfully lured him to an assignation to get photos and a story for a tabloid newspaper.
By the end of 1975, the high drama of the Muhammad Ali saga was winding down. Ali had regained the heavyweight championship in “The Rumble in the Jungle,” in which he outlasted George Foreman in Zaire, and he had completed the Joe Frazier Trilogy with “The Thrilla in Manila,” which he won as both men took terrible punishment. But Howard was still at the top of his game, and his turns on Monday Night Football were clearly not enough for him. If he couldn’t be a senator, he thought, why couldn’t he take that personality, that celebrity, that incisive intellect, that penetrating wit into the wider world of entertainment?
Well, he couldn’t, and the proof was a variety show called Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. In his best joke, the head writer, Walter Kempley, wrote, “This show is so bad not only is no one watching, they are going next door to turn off their neighbor’s set.”
Before the show made its debut, while I was waiting for my supposed valedictory to the lodge brother biz, SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, to be published, Howard asked if I would be interested in working on it. I had no TV experience as yet, didn’t consider myself a particularly funny writer, and wasn’t plugged into the entertainment scene. But Howard didn’t think those were problems, and we batted around the idea that I would be the show’s “journalist in residence.” I would make sure the scripts didn’t fawn over guests too obviously, and I would scout for stories that Howard could break on air. I jokingly suggested that one such story would be getting the fugitive heiress Patty Hearst, who had been kidnapped in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag group of criminals and radicals she had then apparently joined, to surrender to Howard live on stage. His eyes lit up. More than a year after the kidnapping, Patty was still a Big Story. Then he asked me how I would introduce the show’s first booked act, a Beatles wannabe Brit band called the Bay City Rollers. I said, “Are they the hope or the hype?” Next thing I knew, I was offered twice as much weekly salary as I had ever earned.
I hated the job, hated it more than being a copyboy in the sports department. I had very little to do and few friends because most of the staff assumed that I had been hired by Howard to spy on them, which was probably true. Howard took me to lunch a few times a week and tried to pump me, but I knew nothing. He mostly wanted to know what the staff thought of him.
There were some very talented people on that show, including Kempley, who had written for David Frost, Johnny Carson, and Jack Paar. He dreamed of writing novels and considered his TV and Hollywood work “pillaging.” I was the number three writer on a two-man team and would sit in the writers’ room with Kempley and David Axlerod, laughing myself breathless at their old jokes, repartee, and skit ideas, few of which got on air.
They were further frustrated because the show’s recurring comedic actors, the Prime Time Players, insisted on writing most of their own material. They were unknown youngsters named Christopher Guest, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Bill Murray. Their best stuff didn’t get on, either. To make matters even worse, the show’s executive producer, the imperial Roone Arledge, routinely called on Saturday mornings to impose a new idea for that night’s show, sometimes based on something one of his kids had told him. The Eagles are hot, Dad. Book ’em!
And Howard was no Mr. Tell-It-Like-It-Is here. He kissed up to John Wayne, sang “Anything You Can Do” with Barbara Walters, and showed little of his arrogance, feistiness, or wit among the nonjock celebrities he fawned over.
I wanted to quit, but the amazing $1,150 per week was my pillaging.
I did try to generate some work for myself on the show. I put out feelers about Patty Hearst and got the sense that having her surrender live to Howard was unlikely but also not impossible. There were people out there, some of whom I knew . . . (about which more later).
I wrote a recurring skit for the Prime Time Players in which Howard and “the boys,” as we called them, sat in a Monday Night Football–like booth reviewing the nonsports events of the week as sportscasters might. But the edginess of the parody was blunted by Howard’s new timidity, and the boys got bored. Soon after our show was blissfully put out of its misery, they joined the Not Ready for Prime Time Players on the rightful Saturday Night Live.
But before we got canceled, I got mad at Howard for the first and only time.
Time Warner had announced plans to produce a blockbuster Superman movie. It was holding auditions for the Man of Steel. I wrote a skit in which Howard wins the title role, dons the Superman suit, and brings on stage Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who as teenagers in Cleveland created the comic hero but never shared in the bonanza. They were old men now and down on their luck. In my skit, while Howard, Siegel, and Shuster were onstage, the real head of Time Warner walks on to give each of the Superman creators $10,000 a year for life.
A Time Warner executive brusquely dismissed my idea over the phone (“You have to be fucking joking, Howard Cosell?”), but I decided to press on, if only to embarrass Time Warner. With the help of Mickey Kelley, a young researcher who would become Bill Murray’s first wife, I had Siegel and Shuster flown to New York with their families and put up in a good hotel. Since I was considered Howard’s spy, no one on the staff challenged my orders.
At the Saturday-morning rehearsal, Cosell and Emmy, who was never far from his side, decided that the two men were “too unattractive” to be onstage with Howard. Besides, if Time Warner wouldn’t cooperate, why make it look bad? My entire segment was canceled. I was furious. I threw a tantrum. How could anyone be too unattractive to be onstage with this horse-faced creep with a bad toupee? And what did Howard Cosell stand for if not righting old wrongs? I told Howard that if Siegel and Shuster did not appear, not only was I quitting, but I would be writing about it. In some weird way I think Howard enjoyed my outburst, like the Halsey Junior High principal Dr. Nussey trying not to smile after I beat up my bully Willie. Except that Howard was both the bully and the principal here.
We compromised: Siegel and Shuster would sit in the first row during the live telecast, and Howard would walk down from the stage to chat with them on camera.
That worked out fine, live on Saturday night, and on Monday morning we got a request from the National Cartoonists Society for the phone numbers of Siegel and Shuster. The Society was going to threaten to strike if Superman’s original creators did not get a piece of the action. Eventually—and I want to believe Mickey and I had a part in this—Siegel and Shuster each got $20,000 a year for life.
The show went off the air after eighteen weeks. I went off on a book tour for SportsWorld. People along the way asked me about Cosell almost as much as they asked me about Ali. Soon after I returned, Howard and I were coming back from a lunch when we passed a bookstore selling SportsWorld. He suggested I go inside, announce myself, and offer to autograph copies. I shrank at the thought. I was too shy.
He grabbed my arm, pulled me into the store, and bellowed, “I am standing here with Bob-bee Lip-syte, the greatest sportswriter of . . . our . . . time. If you buy his new book, SportsWorld, I will autograph it.”
We sold a pile.
In 1985, Howard published his third and best memoir, I Never Played the Game, written with my old friend Peter Bonventre. His critiques, particularly of Monday Night Football, were more than the network suits could bear. And, in truth, ABC didn’t need him anymore. Roone Arledge had won. ABC was one of the big three networks. Cosell was fired. He began to fade away.
In 1990, Emmy, who had been under treatment for lung cancer, died of a heart attack. The fight went out of Howard. The next summer, already in failing health, he had a cancerous lump removed from his chest. When I called after the surgery, he said, “Leave me alone, Bobbin, I just want to die.” I called the next day, and he said, “I told you, leave me alone.”
I decided to skip a day. I was busy, working on a documentary about him for ESPN, and I found out that the new management at ABC had refused to release his videotapes for our production. When I called Howard, after he told me yet again to leave him alone, that he wanted to die, I thought I might get his blood moving by telling him about the refusal. There was a brief pause, and then he roared, “That man is dead!”
Cosell was back.
It is probably unnecessary to add that he made some calls and we got the videotapes.
Dave Kindred thinks I talk about Cosell as if he were a crazy favorite uncle, and that is certainly part of the story, maybe more than I think. There were those lunches when I couldn’t match iced teas to his martinis (his so-called silver bullets), when he would lean back and say, “Bobbin . . . ,” the start of a monologue in which he would rail against his enemies, bemoan the world’s misunderstanding of his genius, and excuse my naiveté. He talked lovingly, sometimes mawkishly, about his wife, his daughters, his grandchildren, but sooner or later he would come back to rail against the fools he refused to suffer, the worst of the “jockocracy,” the ex-athletes on the air. (I gave him that term after hearing it from the feminist activist Flo Kennedy. Howard gave me credit the first few times, and then it was his.)
But his own naiveté might have been his flaw, his grandson Jared Cohane told me. Now a lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut, Jared spent summers with his beloved “Poppa” in his Hamptons summerhouse, absorbing his work ethic. Only the broadcaster Keith Olbermann, whom he worked with at ESPN, came at all close to Cosell in intelligence and insecurity, according to Jared.
“From a distance now, I think there was a certain naiveté,” said Jared in 2009, “in that Poppa never saw the possibility of repercussions in the things that he said. And when there was a negative response, he immediately said that people were out to get him. You just can’t be controversial and thin-skinned.
“And he never got the team concept. He didn’t grasp that he was part of a team with people he worked with, that it wasn’t right to criticize them the way he did in his books.”
I found myself defending Cosell to his grandson. “I think he always saw himself as an outsider, a Jew, an English major in the jockocracy, a kind of Lone Ranger. He didn’t feel like part of the team. He was on his own. It was probably his strength and his weakness.” After I said it, I wondered how much of it applied to me, too. Maybe that was what we saw in each other.
The last time I saw Howard was on March 25, 1993, his seventy-fifth birthday. He was already drifting away. I gave him a teddy bear in a baseball uniform and what turned out to be a good-bye kiss. I also wrote about it in my Times column, which infuriated his daughters, perhaps rightly, because they were such fierce curators of his legend. They couldn’t bear their father being portrayed as weak and vulnerable, as less than Howard Cosell. (Over the years, Jill and Hilary both told me I had “no idea how hard it is to be Howard Cosell’s daughter.”)
I’m still not sure if I crossed some boundary between the personal and the professional. They didn’t invite me to his memorial service, although I went anyway. After all, I had spoken at Emmy’s memorial service, at Howard’s invitation. Jared remembered that.
When I told Jared that Howard would be rediscovered, especially since no one has replaced him, he said, “Maybe you’re right. Listen to this.”
He pulled up a bookmarked interview on his computer. A few days earlier, on November 3, 2009, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ head coach had talked about his upcoming game against Denver. “If you like challenges,” said Mike Tomlin, who at thirty-seven was exactly Jared’s age, “this one has just about everything you’re looking for. You’ve got a great team in their venue, it’s Monday Night Football, it’s going to be awesome, and all we need is Howard Cosell.”
I’d second that but extend the need beyond Monday nights. What would Howard be saying now about pro football, a violent sport that has lost its moral compass? Players’ salaries are limited by an owner-imposed cap, there are no guaranteed contracts and no long-term responsibilities for players’ health, even as we’re finding out how dangerous the game is to the brain, the heart, and the joints. I like to imagine Howard rising in his version of a biblical old prophet’s rage, telling it like it is, right if not popular.