HOWARD COSELL…AND MUHAMMAD ALI, JOE NAMATH AND DON MEREDITH

“I feel good Howard. I feel good. Howard, I feel good.”

— Muhammad Ali —

“Howard and Dick Schaap were in my living room. We were going to go somewhere. Howard was talking. Ray Abruzzese, who was a safety on the Jets and my roommate, came stumbling out of his bedroom. He said to Howard, ‘Oh, I thought you were on the television. I was coming out to turn you off.’ Howard was speechless. It was the best! Howard tried to come back. He started calling Ray every name in the book: ‘You Italian so-and-so.’ It was too late. Ray just destroyed him.”

— Joe Namath —

“I’d just wait for Howard to make a mistake. Didn’t usually take too long.”

— Don Meredith —

Howard Cosell was very smart. Articulate. He had a broad vocabulary, large and wide as the great outdoors but not quite as prodigious as his hugely oversized ego. Gigantic colossal ego in fact.

At least he was able to say of himself, “Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff. There’s no question that I’m all of those things.”

Describe Howard William Cohen this way: blustery, cocksure, brassy, abrasive and infuriating in nasal tone of voice and, at times content of dialogue, but deep down he was honest.

Polished yet occasionally unvarnished and always provocative, but honest.

He was a showman with a plan. A real hambone but thinking all the time.

He may have fooled us with the “honest” thing.

Phil Mushnick of the New York Post wasn’t at all duped.

When he was a “kid columnist” at the Post in the early 1980s assigned to the sports department, Mushnick got a call from Cosell. He (Cosell the megalomaniac) invited Mushnick to lunch, up to his office and into the ABC radio studio as he taped his “Speaking of Sports” broadcast.

Why?

The back story involves the kid advising Cosell one day on the phone that the latter’s emphasis on time-of-possession stats during the Monday Night Football extravaganzas was largely meaningless and thereby, not only superfluous but daresay he, borderline embarrassing.

Then he proved it by citing a weekend’s worth of college and professional games in which the stats were of no value. In each case, they had no bearing on the games’ outcomes.

On his next MNF telecast, Cosell opined to the national television audience ad nauseum that time-of-possession numbers were vastly overrated and grossly overstated.

Further he posited — as only he could — that those who thought otherwise and chose to highlight this information clearly didn’t understand football.

What Cosell was doing was two-fold.

He was stealing the ideas of others, masquerading them as his own and he was currying favor with an up-and-coming sports journalist in an effort to ensure the unstemmed flow of good ink. He demanded a tidal wave of positive press. For Howard Cosell.

As Mushnick ascertained with a gift of facility, Cosell’s outrage and blatant disregard for many sportswriters was based exclusively on how he was characterized and perceived in print.

“Good” sportswriters — bona fide journalists — wrote glowingly of him. “Bad” sportswriters who saw and typed right through him, were on-the-take hacks.

What Cosell didn’t realize was that each faction had him pegged. To the core.

And apparently Dick Young, Ralph Branca and boxing referee Arthur Mercante — three among many who shared local and national broadcasts with ‘The Mouth’ — were on to Cosell as well.

It became glaringly and shamelessly obvious that during commercial breaks Cosell would pick their brains to gather information and out of the breaks paraphrase what he learned, eager to pass off the insights as his own.

Mercante for one was so furious that he was tempted to deliberately give Cosell misinformation between rounds, “just so that, back on the air, I could disagree with him.”

[Sidebar: As I think about it, Howard Cosell and Donald Trump may have had — and have — the two biggest egos and grossly inflated ideas of themselves as any pair of human beings God ever created.]

Howard Cosell and Muhammad Ali were boxing’s oddest of odd couples. They shared no life experiences beyond being the victims of overt discrimination and their respective change in surnames.

Ali was a black man born in the South, a supremely athletic sort with no formal education. As a world-renowned fighter he embraced a religious sect which frightened white America.

Cosell (Cohen) was Jewish, born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and raised in Brooklyn. He was erudite, garrulous and voluble; he could neither keep quiet nor be relegated to the background.

He graduated from NYU Law School and eventually turned to broadcasting, a pursuit that would fit him like a hand in a glove.

The connection between the two was forged and cemented forever when, following his knockout of Sonny Liston to win the world heavyweight championship in 1964, the then-Cassius Clay became the Black Muslim Muhammad Ali.

Cosell began immediately to refer to Ali by his new Islamic name. Few others could or would do so at the time.

Later, when Ali refused induction into the military based on his religious objections, Cosell quickly took the unpopular position and choked the life out of it. He defended Ali early, often and boisterously and supported his rights.

His inalienable human rights, Howard might have asserted.

The bombastic fighter found a staunch defender and the acerbic broadcast journalist had identified the perfect foil. It was an on-air match made in heaven.

There was nothing like it then or since and there most probably will be nothing like it.

Cosell longed to be seen as well as heard.

Hitching his wagon to the likes of Joe Namath came as a surprise to no one who knew and understood him, in spite of the fact that Cosell had achieved his own fame and notoriety.

Howard Cosell remains today, some 22 years after his death, perhaps the most polarizing sports figure in television history. And Namath well, was Namath.

In a 2015 USA Today (For The Win) poll ranking every MNF announcer in the program’s then 45-year-history, all eighteen were critiqued.

Joe Willie who did color in 1985 and had the shortest stint of any color analyst, finished seventeenth, one notch above cellar-dweller O.J. Simpson. Don Meredith (1970-’73; and 1977-’84) was 5th.

Cosell? He won in a landslide.

Namath had only what he had: duende; charisma. He was overrated as a player and as a television personality or presence he was on the weak side of weak. As an actor? The same. But he had plenty of star quality, certainly enough to attract Cosell. Because Namath had figured out how to own the limelight.

Don Meredith was more country than Namath; after all, Meredith was raised in Mount Vernon, Texas and “Broadway Joe” on the other side of the Beaver Falls, PA. tracks.

But “Dandy Don” in his own right had it goin’.

Namath may have even patterned himself after Meredith, at least at the beginning. A third-round Chicago Bears selection in the 1960 NFL Draft (#32 overall) out of SMU, he was considered by many to be the original Cowboy because he became their property before the franchise had adopted a nickname, named a head coach or participated in either the 1960 NFL Expansion Draft or its first NFL Draft in 1961.

(The Cowboys, formally granted league admission when it was too late to participate in the ’60 Draft, signed Meredith to a personal services contract a month prior on November 28, 1959 through the Tecon Corporation. Clint Murchison, the Cowboys owner also owned Tecon. The contract specified that Meredith would play for the ‘Boys if and when they received an NFL franchise. Interestingly, Bears owner George Halas made the pick to help ensure that expansion Dallas would get off on the right foot).

Meredith spent all nine seasons of his professional playing career (1960-’68) with Dallas and was named to the Pro Bowl in each of his last three as a player.

When his gridiron days were done he became a color analyst for NFL telecasts and an original member of the ABC Monday Night Football broadcast team, joining venerable Keith Jackson (“Whoa Nellie!!” with his singular and unmistakable inflection) and Cosell.

The laid-back, folksy, light-hearted and wily Texan became another of Cosell’s comic foils.

Not hard to become when your early sports broadcasting career is punctuated by on-air references and remarks such as these: anointing then-President Richard Nixon, “Tricky Dick”; proclaiming that he was “mile-high” before a game in Denver; and turning Cleveland Browns receiver Fair Hooker’s name into a double entendre by saying, “Fair Hooker…well, I haven’t met one yet!”

Fresh meat for Howard but Dandy was nobody’s fool.

Not even when Howard had to be excused at halftime of a frigid Monday Night telecast in Philly because he’d had too much to drink and began to slur his words. Before he was escorted off the broadcast, he bent over and decorated Meredith’s very fine cowboy boots.

Back on-air Meredith, attributed Cosell’s absence to having the bug which was going around.

When the perhaps inevitable rupture with ABC television burst wide open, it wasn’t that which signalled Cosell’s downfall and ultimate demise.

It was the death of his beloved wife Emmy in 1990 after 46 years of marriage.

She was the only person on the face of the planet to whom he would listen. To daughters Jill and Hilary maybe once in a while. To Emmy? Always. In his book Cosell, he wrote, “Emmy’s my life…I go nowhere without her. I wouldn’t do ‘Monday Night Football,’ I wouldn’t travel, I wouldn’t cross the Triboro Bridge without Emmy.”

Howard Cosell was 77 when he died of a heart embolism on April 23,1995 at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in Manhattan.

Sports Illustrated’s William Nack keenly noted at the time that his death was met with profound ambivalence. There were clear acknowledgements of his seismic impact coupled with a decided lack of emotion.

To Nack, the feelings toward Cosell were encapsulated “in the eulogies served up….with a side of ice.”

Both Roone Arledge, his boss at ABC, as well as an unnamed obituary writer for The Economist stirred and shook that ice professionally enough to make even James Bond proud.

Said Arledge without much feeling, “Howard Cosell was one of the most original people to appear on American television. …He became a giant by telling the truth in an industry that was not used to hearing it and considered it revolutionary.”

Feh.

The scribe representing The Economist offered this in an attempt to finely delineate Cosell’s place in history:

“Mr. Cosell’s decline owed something to an early skirmish in the political-correctness wars…Probably, there will never be another sportscaster like him: not because he symbolized a bygone era, but because he was himself such an extraordinary human being. He was a genius, a braggart, a cynic and a boor. And if few tears were shed at his death, he will be missed just the same.”

Woody Allen begged to differ rather starkly, buttressed by his first-hand knowledge as he featured Cosell in several of his productions.

In Entertainment Weekly Allen commented (with verve and vigor, for him), “He was in a class by himself as a sportscaster…with an urgent voice, wit, and first-rate intelligence. And most importantly, he was his own man.”

He was that.

He was also at times a world-class putz.

I’m sorry but of all people, Howard Cosell would understand. And agree.

He would have been happy to wear each and every — and any — badge of distinction with almost as much pride as he wore his lemon-yellow ABC blazer.

If he was being truly honest, that is.

[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in December 2017.]