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Summary
Summary
Howard Cosell was one of the most recognizable and controversial figures in American sports history. His colorful bombast, fearless reporting, and courageous stance on civil rights soon captured the attention of listeners everywhere. No mere jock turned "pretty-boy" broadcaster, the Brooklyn-born Cosell began as a lawyer before becoming a radio commentator. "Telling it like it is," he covered nearly every major sports story for three decades, from the travails of Muhammad Ali to the tragedy at Munich. Featuring a sprawling cast of athletes such as Jackie Robinson, Sonny Liston, Don Meredith, and Joe Namath, Howard Cosell also re-creates the behind-the-scenes story of that American institution, Monday Night Football. With more than forty interviews, Mark Ribowsky presents Cosell's life as part of an American panorama, examining racism, anti-Semitism, and alcoholism, among other sensitive themes. Cosell's endless complexities are brilliantly explored in this haunting work that reveals as much about the explosive commercialization of sports as it does about a much-neglected media giant.
Author Notes
Mark Ribowsky is a New York Times acclaimed, best-selling author of fifteen books, including biographies of Tom Landry, Al Davis, Hank Williams, and most recently, In the Name of the Father: Family, Football, and the Manning Dynasty. He lives in Florida.lorida.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Both loved and loathed for his nasal, staccato delivery and polysyllabic self-importance-a TV Guide poll ranked Cosell the nation's most popular and unpopular sportscaster-Howard Cosell is the braying voice of America's conscience in this engrossing, bombastic biography. Ribowsky (Don't Look Back: Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball) replays Cosell's towering neuroses and insufferable personality; his hammy come-ons to people he could use and his cruelty to those he couldn't; his paranoid feuding with Monday Night Football colleagues; his on-air drunkenness, horrible lewd repartee and desperate, sweaty craving for approval. Ribowsky also credits him with delivering classic play-by-plays of milestone sporting events, bringing tough, outspoken journalism to the mannerly sports casting arena, and offering semi-gutsy support to everything from the Equal Rights Amendment to free-agency and Muhammad Ali's defiance of the draft. (He pegs Cosell's long relationship with the boxer as a counterpoint between genuine respect and mutual exploitation.) The author is well-nigh Cosellian in his grandiloquence ("he was, in the parlance of mythology-a realm where he actually belongs-Icarus flying into the sun") and determination to wring melodrama from mere sport. Still, Ribowsky's shrewd, evocative color commentary makes Cosell live up to his billing. Photos. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Sports publicist Irving Rudd must surely have spoken for every sports fan in America when, told years ago that Howard Cosell was his own worst enemy, he replied: Not while I'm alive. Such was Cosell's abrasive, self-aggrandizing style that he antagonized athletes, colleagues, friends, and fans alike, even as he drew them into his refreshing, biting commentary on the sports issues of his day, from his lonely but unwavering support of Muhammad Ali's conversion to Islam and resistance to the Vietnam War (which cost Ali three years in the prime of his career) to his support of Curt Flood's challenge of baseball's onerous reserve clause. And as a host of Monday Night Football from the show's inception, Cosell helped deliver the sport into the far broader, vastly more lucrative realm of global entertainment. If, like his subject, Ribowsky runs on a bit, he also draws a complex, full-bodied portrait of a largely unlikable man who, with his radio looks and nasal delivery, triumphed through the courage of his convictions.--Moores, Alan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ONCE upon a time, Howard Cosell roamed television draped in the canary-colored blazer of ABC Sports, smoking a cigar the length of a sequoia, covering his baldness with a toupee the size of a featherweight boxer and speaking of sports in a way no one ever had. He was loud, audacious, obnoxious, perspicacious, brilliant, narcissistic, provocative and haughty. He would doubtlessly agree with those descriptions - and add more if only to prove that he was, as he was wont to enunciate slowly, "HOW-id Cyo-SELL." His was the dominant voice of sports broadcasting for 20 years starting in the mid-1960s - defending the rights of black athletes like Muhammad Ali; calling boxing with a staccato delivery and know-it-all panache; playiog the prolix agitator to Don Meredith's white-hatted good ol' boy on "Monday Night Football"; and producing some of the best sports journalism of his day. His pomposity also rose with his certitude. Woody Allen was so drawn to Cosell's style that he hired him to appear in his 1971 film "Bananas" as a broadcaster interviewing a Latin American dictator who had just been gunned down, a comic take on the way Cosell himself interviewed boxers. Cosell did not mind self-parody but refused Allen's offer to play a pervert in "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex." He drew the line then, but not a few years later when he was persuaded that he alone was capable of reviving the moribund variety show format with his own ABC series, "Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell." The venture was so ill conceived (singing a duet with Barbara Walters was the nadir or the highlight of the show) that it was quickly canceled, enabling NBC's fledgling latenight comedy program, "Saturday Night," to add "Live" to its name. Today, Cosell is either forgotten or regarded as a relic of the era before ESPN seized control of televised sports. A few years ago, I was interviewing a different type of television sports star, Bob Costas, before a college audience. When we began to discuss Cosell, the students appeared flummoxed. Howard Cosell? "Do you want to explain him or should I?" Costas asked. You simply had to experience Cosell back in the three-network universe, when ABC Sports was king. No one who watched Cosell could forget him or resist imitating him. How could a human spectacle as unique as Cosell, with his adenoidal Brooklyn voice, polysyllabic vocabulary and vulpine presence, be forgotten? Here was a man who brought glory, ratings and tsoris to ABC, yet 16 years since his death, he resides largely in the memory banks of fans older than 40. They can still hear his ringing voice shouting, "Down goes Frazier!" as the previously indomitable Joe Frazier was being knocked to the canvas by George Foreman in his pregriller days. In "Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports," Mark Ribowsky, the author of several books on both sports and entertainment, skillfully resuscitates a man who - even as he rose from obscurity to become the voice and the sometime journalistic conscience of his era - felt his achievements were beneath his intellectual gifts. He aspired to anchor the evening news or be a United States senator. That the post-Cosell generation has hazy memories of him, or no memories at all, "borders on tragic," Ribowsky writes, as he argues for Cosell's significance in American life. Certainly, Cosell was admired and abhorred in equal measure. He attracted death threats and needed bodyguards to ensure his safety. An intellectual snob, Cosell wanted to separate himself from everything he believed was wrong about sports, like the noodle-spined sportscasters who wouldn't disturb the status quo; the athletes-turned-commentators whom he sneeringly referred to as the "jockocracy"; and the sportswriters whose dislike for him was returned with equal bitterness. When his nemesis, the bilious Dick Young of The Daily News, died in 1987, Cosell said, "This is the happiest day of my life." Ribowsky, who seems to have read just about everything on Cosell, is a deft narrator of the life of Humble Howard, taking his readers from the skinny kid in Brooklyn who yearned to spend more time with an absent father to the sportscaster who helped make an event out of "Monday Night Football" by being so very different from anyone else who had ever called a game. Cosell did not get his first job in sports, a radio gig as a commentator on the Little League World Series, until 1953, when he was 35, and didn't help inaugurate "Monday Night Football" until 1970, when he was 52. In his later years, as he grew bored with sports, his drinking became excessive and his animosities mounted. At the end, he was living in virtual isolation in his Manhattan apartment, his services no longer wanted, his beloved wife, Emmy, gone. All this Ribowsky describes vividly, with a critical eye and an awareness of his subject's hypocrisies. He understands that nothing about Cosell was more fascinating than his codependent relationship with Ali, a marriage of opposites and opportunists who saw gain in bonding with each other. "Cosell's impulses during the 1970s," Ribowsky writes about his subject's eccentricities and unpleasantness, "were governed by his pathological inability to let slide others' contrary opinions, or even their innocent mistakes, as if by flogging them he had dibs on being the ultimate judge of human behavior." Ribowsky relies too much on Cosell's own books, especially to recount his youth, and he apparently hasn't interviewed any of the relatives. On the other hand, he has conducted nearly 20 interviews with Cosell's contemporaries, and the results are bracing, tough and funny (the book would have been better with 40 more). For example, Jerry Izenberg, a columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, said of Cosell: "He would sometimes lose his way, then he would think of himself as bigger than the great issues, where if you didn't bow to him it meant you just didn't understand anything. He did that to me a lot, and again that was very unfair. It was like the anti-Semitism. If you didn't like him, you were anti-Semitic." Cosell came to sports less as a fan than as a sophisticated gadfly. He had a law degree, and arrived just when his knowledge and intelligence were crucial to understanding the growing power of leagues, antitrust issues, the civil rights movement and athletic celebrity culture. Nonetheless, Ribowsky sometimes overstates Cosell's importance. He did not transform sports as much as he bent the traditional roles of interviewer, game commentator and opinionated analyst to his peculiar skills and personality. He did not dwarf sports events, especially the many Ali bouts he called, but he added something that could not be ignored, even if it made his haters want to shoot out the television screen. When Ribowsky oversells his case for Cosell, he sounds as if he has ingested his subject's gall. "He lives again in these pages, the vital center of American cultural history, a man almost eponymous with post-50s sports and its media confluence," Ribowsky writes. "The not insignificant conclusion is that he was as great as he said he was."
Kirkus Review
both categories, a perfect measure of his ubiquity and the controversy he aroused. Today, with more sports competing for attention in a fractured media environment, it's difficult to imagine a commentator dominating the landscape as Cosell did during the '60s and '70s. Though he'd made tentative forays into radio, Cosell was 38 before he abandoned his law practice to attempt a career in sports. This ferociously ambitious reporter, analyst, interviewer and play-by-play man, with his near photographic memory, nasal voice, staccato delivery and large and frequently preposterous vocabulary, prided himself on "telling it like it is." At his peak, Cosell was everywhere on radio and TV, covering baseball, boxing and the Olympics, producing documentaries, penetrating deeper into the popular culture with sitcom appearances and movie roles. He announced to the world the assassination of John Lennon, presided over signal '70s events like the tennis "Battle of the Sexes," briefly hosted a prime-time variety show and even flirted with running for the Senate. From two platforms, especially, his ringside and reportorial coverage--and courageous defense--of the career of Muhammad Ali and his perch in the tumultuous Monday Night Football booth, Cosell colorfully demonstrated his capacity to hype and eventually overpower the events he covered. Contemptuous of sportswriters (they returned the hate), dismissive of colleagues and bosses--mediocrities, he called them--he attributed every slight to anti-Semitism or jealousy and ended up alienating even his stoutest friends and defenders, with the exception of his devoted and long-suffering wife. Ribowsky (Ain't Too Proud to Beg: The Troubled Lives and Enduring Soul of the Temptations, 2010, etc.) attributes Cosell's arrogance to a deep insecurity and an insatiable desire for acclaim. As he aged, "Humble Howard" descended into drink, cruelty and caricature, bitter at having wasted his talents in the "intellectual thimble" of sports. The definitive word on a loved, loathed, maddeningly complex broadcasting legend.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
For those of us of a certain age, Howard Cosell was an icon of sports broadcasting. He was loud, pushy, and self-serving. He was also an ardent sports fan, a stalwart force against racism, and unflinching in his quest to "tell it like it is." To those following sports on TV in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, he was unavoidable. He was there for Muhammad Ali's fights (much of the book is about their relationship) and the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Olympics and had many tumultuous years at Monday Night Football. Ribowsky's (Don't Look Back: Satchel Page in the Shadows of Baseball) terrific biography is an honest portrayal of a gifted, complex, paranoid, egomaniacal, alcoholic (sometimes inebriated during night game coverage), and pathologically insecure man. So strong was his desire to be loved, that he often left Monday night games to fly overnight to New York to catch NBC executives entering Rockefeller Center the next morning. He was so irritating to some that they'd avoid trains he frequented. A sad figure in many ways. Verdict This book is the biography of Cosell. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in U.S. sports and broadcasting history.-Todd Spires, Bradley Univ. Lib., Peoria, IL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.