ALWAYS FEISTY:Howard Cosell (center) was known for sparring with Frank Gifford (left) and Don Meredith on Monday Night Football, but he also clashed with the media. (AP)
(
)
A new book about Howard Cosell, written by Mark Ribowsky, has inspired a lot of opinions, recollections and discussion. I knew Cosell well. Too well. So here’s my abridged version:
To be a kid columnist summoned for lunch with Howard Cosell was heady stuff. But there I was, waiting for him at his “usual” table at the Hotel Dorset in Midtown.
I’d figured that his “usual” table would be somewhere in a corner toward the back, for privacy. But it was a round table up front. When Cosell arrived, he sat facing the front door, watching that door. It struck me that he was intent on seeing the astonished looks on those entering to immediately and unmistakably see Howard Cosell.
Yet, when one of those people whose attention he so clearly cultivated approached the table, he’d give them the cool breeze. How dare they!
That was my first clue.
Almost from the start, I could tell I was being worked, conned. What did Howard Cosell care what some kid columnist wrote about him? But he cared, and immensely. And incredibly. His studied regard for every form of media, magazines to motion pictures, seemed based only in how Howard Cosell had been treated within. Nothing else mattered. That became the recurring theme of our conversations.
Could Howard Cosell, the biggest name in sportscasting, be that insecure? Was he seeking to establish a preemptive coziness with me? Yeah; he was. How crazy was that?
But I played along. For a while. Swapping cordial phone calls with Cosell, attending tapings of his “Speaking of Sports” ABC Radio segments and, as per unspoken agreement, dropping in a nice word or two about Cosell in my column.
One day, I suggested to him that on ABC’s Monday Night Football he was placing far too much emphasis on time-of-possession stats, that they’re too often irrelevant.
Days later, during his next MNF telecast, Cosell repeated everything I’d told him about time-of-possession stats, which was pretty cool — not that he provided credit — but then he added that those who emphasize such a stat are know-nothings.
Wait a second. . . the guy who most emphasized such stats was Cosell.
Gradually and inevitably I became a detractor of Cosell’s. His sense of everything good he claimed to represent was so inwardly pointed that it would be a betrayal of readers — and the truth (my version) — to any longer indulge him with insincerely printed flattery or even by ignoring him.
He didn’t recognize that he’d tried — and failed — to con me. All he felt was betrayal, so much so that he listed me, in one of his self-aggrandizing books, as one of his three mortal enemies, along with Dick Young and Newsday’s sports TV/radio columnist Stan Isaacs. Shucks, I was just a kid.
Cosell was not merely vainglorious; he was a bully. Self-sold as a social activist, he often was downright cruel, cruel not just to strangers, which he certainly was, but also to those enlisted to serve him.
ABC had a sports publicist, Irv Brodsky, now deceased, whose job description included calling TV columnists to defend Cosell, often blindly, but always loyally. In return, Cosell gave Brodsky nothing but back-of-his-hand contempt, tearing into him and belittling him in private and public as a feckless lackey. Brodsky knew it, took it. It was sickening.
Brodsky’s only failing as Cosell likely saw it, was that, try as he did, Brodsky couldn’t convince everyone to write nice things about Howard Cosell.
As a national powerhouse journalist, Cosell was a fraud. His legendary battles with Dick Young were rooted in Young’s and others’ conviction that Cosell was a serial thief of others’ work.
Arthur Mercante, Sr., the noted boxing ref who died last year, for a time worked as Cosell’s analyst on ABC’s boxing telecasts. When the rounds ended, and ABC immediately cut to commercials, Mercante recalled, Cosell would pump him for his takes on matters.
“When we came back from commercials,” Mercante said, “Cosell would repeat everything I’d just told him, as if they were his opinions. He’d leave me with nothing to say.
“It reached the point where I was tempted to tell him a lot of nonsense, so that when he repeated it I could disagree with him.”
I likely moved to the top of Cosell’s mortal enemy list two days after ABC televised the eliminations to determine the 1984 U.S. Olympic Boxing Team. Before the results were handed to referee Chuck Hull, I’d been tipped, they were passed to Cosell, at ringside, who then gave viewers his expert “opinion” on who would be declared the winner of the fights, never revealing that he already knew.
Seconds before Pernell “Sweet Pea” Whitaker was officially announced the winner of a lightweight fight, Cosell said that it was close, but in his opinion it would be Whitaker.
When Whitaker was announced the winner, Cosell said, “There you have it Whitaker, 3-2.” That was a further tip-off — the scoring from the fights was not announced by Hull. Ah, but the scores were on the results handed to Cosell before Hull announced them.
After Hull confirmed that Cosell knew the results before they were announced — thus was able to expertly “guess” at what he already knew — I wrote the entire dirty story. Cosell wouldn’t comment on any of the specific allegations, but he did decry the continuing print media conspiracy that was out to defame him. A few “good” Cosell-cozy columnists rushed to defend him, also without touching the specifics.
And, as a truth-seeking journalist it only took him about 25 years of covering boxing to discover that it was fraught with bad guys so beneath him that he’d no longer provide it his credible and majestic TV presence.
There were times I wondered whether Cosell was sickening because he was sick.
In the early 1980s, Don Dunphy, the revered blow-by-blower, then in his 80s, was honored at a dinner, at the Waldorf, if I recall. Cosell spoke one of the tributes, calling Dunphy one of the greats of boxing, television and radio, and an indefatigable gentleman. Good stuff.
Roughly an hour later, at the hotel bar, Cosell held court. His topic? Don Dunphy. Cosell called him a crook, a bum, every dirty name he could spew. It was sickening.