COSELL, HOWARD

COSELL, HOWARD (Howard William Cohen; 1920–1995) U.S. sportscaster, commentator for ABC's "Monday Night Football" from 1970 to 1983; one of the most outspoken, colorful, and controversial national sports reporters and personalities in American broadcasting history. Cosell was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His father had arrived in the United States from Lodz as a child and his mother was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, the daughter of a rabbi. After serving as an army major in World War II and a lawyer in New York City, Cosell joined ABC as a radio sports reporter in 1956 and first gained national attention in 1959 with his commentaries on world heavyweight fights, and then for his work on ABC's Wide World of Sports. But it was Cosell's relationship and interviews with the heavyweight champion Cassius Clay in the 1960s that thrust the sportscaster to the center of racial controversy in the United States. Cosell was the first person to use publicly the champion's black Muslim name Muhammad Ali, and in 1967 he vigorously defended him against charges of draft evasion. Cosell's meteoric rise as a sports journalist paralleled the equally meteoric career of Ali, as Cosell was the broadcast commentator for every one of Ali's fights in the 1960s and 1970s. But in the emotion-charged era of the Vietnam War and civil rights agitation, the relationship between the provocative black from Kentucky and the equally forthright Jewish lawyer from New York evoked a storm of protest and expressions of antisemitism, with many demanding that Cosell be fired. "I've been more vilified than (mass murderer) Charles Manson or Richard Nixon," he said. In 1970, Cosell was hired to launch an innovative venture in television, the broadcasting of football in prime time, and the overwhelming success establishing "Monday Night Football" as an American tradition was attributed in large part to Cosell. Considered candid, opinionated, often insightful but also annoyingly verbose, his provocative style redefined sports play-by-play and "color" commentary. Cosell's shrill speaking style, incessant preaching, overbearing manner, and abrasive personality were irritants to many – "I tell it like it is" was his famous pronouncement – but they made him, according to one poll, both the most liked and most hated TV reporter in the country. Cosell hosted his own show, Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, in the fall of 1975, but it was canceled after three months. He provided color commentary on ABC's "Monday Night Baseball" beginning in 1976 and hosted numerous other sports commentary shows on both television and radio, including Speaking of Sports, Speaking of Everything, and Sportsbeat. Cosell grew disenchanted with boxing and quit the sport after a brutal, one-sided fight between Larry Holmes and Randall Cobb in 1982, and he left "Monday Night Football" before the start of the 1984 season, claiming that the NFL had "become a stagnant bore." Cosell retired from ABC in 1985, and the following year he became a sports columnist for the New York Daily News. Cosell was elected to the American Sportscasters Hall of Fame in 1993 and the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame in 1993. In a July 2000 ranking of sportscasters of the 20th century by the American Sportscasters Association, Cosell finished second, followed by mel allen . The product of a non-religious family – his brother was bar mitzvahed though not Cosell, and his father would go to synagogue on holidays – Cosell never involved himself in the life of the Jewish community. That all changed after he covered the 1972 Olympics, with the kidnapping of Israeli athletes from Building 31 in the Olympic Village and their subsequent murder at the airport in Munich, West Germany. "I'll tell you when you know you're Jewish," he said in an interview, "you know you're Jewish when you're lying on the slope of a hill 30 feet from Building 31 and Dachau's (22) miles away.… When you undergo the experience that I underwent in Munich, you realize that no matter how you live, no matter what your feelings are about any formalized religion, in this world if you're born of Jewish parents you're Jewish. I married a gentile girl, my two daughters were not raised in the Jewish faith, but I'm Jewish." Cosell became a patron of the American Friends of   the Hebrew University, which built the Howard Cosell Center for Physical Education in Jerusalem. Cosell, who appeared as himself in Woody Allen's movies Bananas, Sleeper, and Broadway Danny Rose, is the author of Cosell (1973), Like It Is (1974), I Never Played the Game (1985), What's Wrong with Sports (1991), and Cosell on Sports: An Unexpurgated Look at American Sports in the Age of Big Money, Easy Drugs, and Fast Sex (1991). "In my field, not in conceit but in fact, I am historic," he said in 1981. "I changed the nature of my profession totally, completely. I brought it a whole new look. I brought it education, I brought it literacy, I brought it questing, I brought it journalism, and there's not going to be another like me – because of the corruption of my industry it won't be allowed. Circumstances were right for me and I was a freak. It's not going to happen again." (Elli Wohlgelernter (2nd ed.)