Howard Cosell

• Born: March 25, 1918
• Birthplace: Winston-Salem, North Carolina
• Died: April 23, 1995
• Place of death: New York, New York

Sportscaster and journalist

Cosell’s controversial reporting style and outspoken commentary often made more headlines than the sports events he covered.

Early Life

Howard Cosell (HOW-urd koh-SEL) was born when his family was living for a brief time in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Before he was a year old, the family returned to their original home in Brooklyn, New York. Cosell’s father, Isadore Kassel, came to the United States from Russia in 1890. As often happened, immigration officials arbitrarily changed surnames, and the family became Cohen. Howard later adopted the name Cosell, which was closer to the original family name. Although his mother’s father was a rabbi, Cosell did not become an observant Jew. He occasionally accompanied his father to synagogue, but he was never bar mitzvahed. In 1944, he married Mary Edith Adams (who went by the name Emma). Adams was a Protestant woman Cosell met while in the Army. Her parents attended their civil wedding ceremony at the city hall in New York, but both sets of parents opposed the mixed-faith marriage.

Cosell was educated in the public schools of New York, and later he graduated from New York University with a degree in English. He also graduated from the New York School of Law. From 1941 to 1945, he served as an officer in the U.S. Army Transportation Corps. After the war, he began practicing law in New York City. His practice involved union labor matters primarily, but he also represented some actors and athletes, including the baseball star Willie Mays.

In 1953, Cosell was asked to host a weekly radio program dealing with Little League baseball players in New York; this came about because of his work as a lawyer for the New York State Little League organization. Cosell worked with this show without pay for three years, and then he decided to abandon his legal practice to pursue a career in broadcasting. After lining up his own sponsor, he convinced the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) to hire him for a radio show. This began an association between Cosell and ABC Radio that lasted more than thirty years; he continued doing variations of his radio show, even after he became prominent as a television broadcaster.

Life’s Work

Cosell covered sports in many different aspects over his long career with both ABC Radio and television. Early on, he was considered an expert on boxing, but he also became known for his play-by-play coverage of baseball, football, and several Olympic events. While he enjoyed this aspect of sports journalism, and developed a unique style of color commentary, he believed the heart of sports journalism was covering the lives of the athletes and the institutional aspects of American sports.

Cosell first gained national attention for his association with the heavyweight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali. In 1967, the New York State Boxing Commission stripped Ali of his heavyweight world championship because he had been convicted of refusing induction into the U.S. military, after the Selective Service had rejected his request for conscientious objector status. Cosell believed this action was a hypocritical expression of racism, and speculated that Ali would have never been stripped of the title if he had been white.

Cosell covered several Olympic Games during his career. Two of the most memorable were the 1968 Mexico City games and the 1972 Munich games. In 1968, two African American sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raised a “black power” salute and stood with their heads bowed while the American national anthem was played during the medals ceremony; they were protesting the treatment of African Americans in the United States. Cosell interviewed Smith shortly afterward, and Cosell’s sympathetic approach to the two athletes was resented by many viewers who believed Smith and Carlos had embarrassed the United States. When Arab terrorists killed two Israeli athletes and took nine others hostage in Munich in 1972, Cosell broadcast emotionally moving live updates from inside the Olympic Village; later, when the terrorists took the nine hostages to a military airport near Munich to try to fly to the Middle East, all the hostages were killed when German authorities tried to rescue them in a raid.

In 1970, Cosell became one of the three broadcasters involved in Monday Night Football, an innovative move to broadcast a National Football League game during weeknight evening prime time. Cosell was teamed with two former football players, Frank Gifford and Don Meredith. Their banter, often including barbed comments aimed at one another, became a standard part of the broadcasts. In September, 1983, Cosell referred to Alvin Garrett, an African American receiver for the Washington Redskins, with the comment, “Look at that little monkey run.” Although Cosell denied any racist intent in what he said, he was widely criticized, despite his long association with many prominent African American athletes. Later that fall, he left the Monday Night Football program. Cosell occasionally did other sports broadcasts for ABC television until the mid-1980’s, when his outspoken critiques of some of his fellow broadcasters in his book I Never Played the Game (1985) led to the end of his association with the television network. He continued working in radio until the early 1990’s. After his wife, Emma, died in 1990, Cosell suffered a series of strokes and largely withdrew from the public spotlight until he died in April, 1995.

Significance

Cosell pioneered a new form of sports journalism that focused on hard-hitting reporting and erudite commentary. He saw himself as a journalist who reported on the dramatic aspects of the sports world, rather than just reporting scores, statistics, and play-by-play. As part of the original crew of ABC’sMonday Night Football, he helped to create a new venue for professional football broadcasts in weeknight prime time. Monday Night Football became an institution to many fans across the United States. Cosell’s reporting of the 1972 Olympics, when the Israeli athletes were taken hostage and later murdered; the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, with the protests by African American athletes; and his vocal defense of and long association with Muhammad Ali will be long remembered as some of his major accomplishments.

Bibliography

Cosell, Howard. I Never Played the Game. New York: HarperCollins, 1985. Cosell is critical of what he called the “jockocracy”—former athletes who were made sports journalists simply because of their previous experience in professional sports.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. What’s Wrong with Sports. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Cosell’s last book, with his commentary on the American sports scene in the 1980’s and early 1990’s.

Cosell, Howard, and Mickey Herskowitz. Cosell. Chicago: Playboy Press, 1973. Cosell’s memoir deals almost exclusively with his career in sports broadcasting.

Kindred, Dave. Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship. New York: Free Press, 2006. An in-depth examination of the relationship between Cosell and boxer Muhammad Ali. Includes more information about Cosell’s early life than any of his memoirs.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Telling It Like It Was.” The Sporting News 226, no. 3 (January 21, 2002): 64. A brief retrospective of Cosell’s career, written shortly before the debut of Turner Network Television’s made-for-television film Monday Night Mayhem (2002), about the early days of ABC’s Monday Night Football broadcasts.