Brash, but Respectable: This Was Cosell

H owwwwww -ward! Cohhhhhh -sell! Wherever you are, listen up!

You didn’t earn our affection. Many times, though, you earned our respect.

It was obvious from the start that you weren’t meant for the sandlot. Big television programs like ABC’s “Monday Night Football” and “Wide World of Sports” were your stage, as were foolish ones like “Battle of the Network Stars.” But so were big issues.

You sought them, never shrunk from them, in and out of sports. For a time, you even discussed books with their authors on radio. From your support of civil rights to your support of Muhammad Ali’s refusal to serve in the military during the Vietnam War, you were that rare TV sports figure who transcended sports. To many, that alone won you a pedestal. NBC’s Bob Costas has some space on it, too, for adoring and working in sports without becoming a myopic sports zombie. As does Roy Firestone for the depth of some of his ESPN interviews. Perhaps Jim Lampley and a few others are there, as well.

Now calm down, Howard. You may be right about them being shrimps compared with you. But here’s the part you’ll like. They may have a corner of it, but you own that pedestal.

*

You’re right, Howard. That is telling it like it is.

But some of your eulogizers should get a grip. These embalmers, Howard, are pumping you with enough helium to launch a blimp. TV news reports have described your death Sunday as marking the end of an era. That’s the brand of extravagant puffery from sportscasters that you would have condemned as a totality of ignorance. If there was anything approaching a Cosell era, it was a lone-man era, one that ended not with your death but much earlier--with your withdrawal from full-time broadcasting. After that, TV sports reporting resumed being routine, snapping back like a piece of elastic that had been briefly stretched.

On Sunday, Howard, someone with a wand anointed you “the father of serious sports reporting on television.” Yes, yes, you’re nodding your approval while lighting that blasted cigar. Yet if you sired a movement, where are your progeny, all the crusading little Cosellians who by now would have been going forth on the airwaves and spreading your gospel? As you know, Howard, they either don’t exist or are so minuscule that they don’t even register.

Cable has brought ESPN, ESPN2 and smaller, specialized sports networks, but their mandate is to go wider, not deeper. It’s true that there’s a mouth on ESPN named Dick Vitale who is your match when it comes to eclipsing the event he’s covering (college basketball). And get this, Howard, he screams even louder than you did while covering Olympic boxing, when you earned the gold medal for gall. But unlike you, all he does is scream.

Oh, here’s something you’ll like, Howard. Just recently HBO launched a highly promising program titled “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel,” staffed by such real reporters as Lampley, Sonya Steptoe and Frank Deford, whose segment depicting golf’s snooty Masters tournament as a quasi-anachronism would have made you proud. Perhaps (excuse the impertinence) even envious. As if it were an academic journal, however, “Real Sports” is scheduled to air only quarterly.

You’re right, Howard. That’s totally inexcusable.

The fact is that with few exceptions, TV sportscasting today is not significantly tougher than when you entered the business full time in the 1960s and began building your reputation as an opinionated broadcaster with the reporting instincts of a good newspaper sportswriter and a fancy vocabulary that you wielded like an ice pick. When it comes to sports, the digging in the ‘80s and ‘90s has come mainly in print, from such journalist-authors as Ron Powers and John Feinstein and others. There’s the occasional attacker and an entire legion of smirking smart-alecks in TV sportscasting today, as the United States has become a society increasingly skeptical of large institutions and increasingly ravenous for gossip about celebrities, sports or otherwise. But the essence of sportscasting hasn’t really changed very much.

What’s that, Howard? You can cite a plethora of reasons for the status quo?

*

All right, all right, slow down. You may be right. Yes, yes, sorry about that. You’re always right. But here’s one you probably haven’t considered: Because your grating, condescending arrogance and constant showboating made it easy for your critics to dismiss your serious achievements, your impact as a sports journalist was fleeting. Even at your zenith, you were an object of ridicule, one largely of your own making.

How ironic that someone who correctly savaged jock journalists and others who covered sports on tiptoe as if they were extensions of the industry, should undermine himself by becoming a self-mocking extension of the entertainment industry. What you once wrote about pro football commentator John Madden when he was with CBS--”He’s allowed himself to become an overblown parody of himself”--also applied to you, Howard.

Still, you were a character, an original, someone everyone remembers, and that is an achievement in itself. As great as your vocabulary was, though, the one word you never comprehended was humility . The more spotlight you got, Howard, the more you wanted. You sought fame like a miser burying himself in coins. You tried on too many hats. When you strayed from sports and serious issues, you were a New Yorker at a dude ranch, falling from your horse. You epitomized camp while toadying up to prime-time’s VIPs on those “Battles of the Network Stars” faux athletic events. Your ABC variety show, “Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell,” was a quagmire of inanity on which you attempted--big mistake--to be lovable. Your appearances as yourself in sitcoms, to say nothing of two Woody Allen movies, nourished your ego, your celebrity and your bank account, but not your reputation as a sober critic and observer of sports journalism.

In other words, you could have been taken even more seriously than you were, and should have been, Howard. If only you hadn’t been you.