COMMENTARY : Cosell: He Told It Like It Was

It is 4:19 on a New York afternoon, June 13, 1988. We are in Howard Cosell’s 69th Street apartment. At 4:30 he will do his ABC radio show live from his study. His hand has an old man’s tremors as he punches in a phone call to his ABC assistant. The phone is ringing and Howard Cosell is saying, “Come on!” But no answer. “COME ON!” Cosell holds the phone at a distance, as if the instrument is to blame. The telephone is very close to losing its job with Howard Cosell.

Someone once happened upon Cosell at lunch during which Cosell did his Cosell act, inimitably and inevitably insulting any friend who passed his table. No surprise there, and no one thought a maniac had gotten loose when they heard that voice raise a commotion: “Sonny Jurgensen was the worst quarterback I ever saw! The absolute most overrated nothing, from the very beginning! I gotta sit in the stands and watch you introduced as a Hall of Famer? That’s the worst thing in my life!”

“Hello, Howard,” said Sonny, happy to hear such high praise.

Friday, the hurricane of verbosity who was Howard Cosell has a birthday, his 77th. We should pause to remember him, an American original. Sportswriter Jim Murray on Cosell: “He has the vocabulary of an Oxford don and the delivery of a Dead End kid.” Filmmaker Woody Allen: “Howard in person is just the way he is on television. When you have dinner with him, he broadcasts the meal.”

In the last year, Cosell has been inducted into Halls of Fame and given awards for his craftsmanship as well as his personal and professional courage. All of it is deserved and more, but there is a melancholy to it because Cosell is sick, unable to leave home, unable to be Howard Cosell.

“I’m happy he’s able to get the recognition, and he’s enjoyed it,” says his friend and colleague, ABC Radio’s Shelby Whitfield. “The downside is that he couldn’t attend any of the functions.”

On this day in 1988, it is 4:22 and Howard Cosell does not know the sports news upon which he will base his day’s commentary. His assistant, Michelle, answers the phone and Cosell’s voice becomes a whisper of flirtation: “The sports news, Michelle--what has happened today in SportsWorld?” At his kitchen table, he scratches a name onto a notepad. “Larry Brown. How much money? Three-point-five. For how many years? Five. And Don Chaney takes the Houston job.” It is 4:25. “Anything else? Johnny Mac. Eighth. Who’s first? Lendl? Where’s Becker? Sixth. In-CRED-ible. SIXTH!”

If you never heard Howard Cosell’s work, you missed an unforgettable performance across 40 years of sport. He once put an arm around the baleful fighter, Sonny Liston, and said, “Tell the truth now, Sonny, you threw the first fight with Ali, didn’t you?” Someone wrote that Cosell was “arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, persecuting, distasteful, verbose, a showoff.” No one gets away from Cosell without injury, not even Cosell. He wrote those words himself.

Those words were caricature, for the whole truth is that what Edward R. Murrow was to broadcast news, Cosell was to sports: a giant of principle. A champion of Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali, Cosell forced sports journalists to ask our games about their morality, ethics and justice.

It is 4:27 on this day in 1988 and Howard Cosell has the news and he is in his study where he speaks into a microphone. “Michelle? Mi-CHELLE! Is this up? Michelle, are we up? Let’s do it, MICHELLE! IS ANYBODY THERE?” Michelle answers at 4:29 and now the old man is alive, Cosell doing Cosell in that which is to voices what the Grand Canyon is to ditches, that voice: “HELLO AGAIN, EVERYBODY, THIS IS HOWARD COSELL SPEAKING ON SPORTS. Everyone is a role model. We know that . . . “

In denigration, the New York sportswriter Jimmy Cannon once said, “Howard Cosell changed his name and put on a toupee to tell it like it is.’ ” The full measure of Cannon’s unfairness is revealed in Cosell’s family history.

Howard Cohen was the son of Isadore Martin Cohen, an auditor who traveled for a clothing company. The family’s Polish name was Kassell. Immigration people made it Cohen, and Isadore always wanted the family name returned. His son did that for his father, who, on the road, alone, died at 65.

World War II had just ended when Cosell began radio work. He was a lawyer with a Phi Beta Kappa key. But he loved his hometown Brooklyn Dodgers (he took his wife to Ebbets Field her first night home after delivering their first child) and he loved the drama of games. As a freelance radio interviewer, he did his work with a bulky tape recorder strapped on his back.

“A whole generation thinks I was born rich,” he once said. “The truth is, nobody ever worked harder and longer hours than I did.” When word came of his father’s death, he was at a ballpark “with Dick Groat and Don Hoak, trying to make a name for myself, interviewing them for radio.”

Winging it from his study, Cosell ties Larry Brown, Don Chaney and John McEnroe into a two-minute commentary on role models. The glorified winner Larry Brown is a carpetbagger chasing money; Don Chaney has paid his dues and deserves this chance, and Cosell defends the usually vilified McEnroe as a decent man who turned down $1 million to play in South Africa.

“So who,” Cosell says, “is the proper role model here?”

In 10 minutes, Cosell has gathered the news, divined a connection and ad-libbed a provocative commentary on what he calls SportsWorld. When a visitor declares it an impressive performance, especially from a man who claims to be disinterested in sport, Cosell explains why he keeps doing the radio work.

“Nobody else will tell the truth. Somebody has to do it,” he says. Then, telling it like it is, Cosell smiles. “Besides, they pay me $7,500 a week.”

He rises from an easy chair to go see his wife, Emmy. On the chair is a pillow. On the pillow, these words are embroidered: O, Lord, Give Me a Bastard with Talent.