Howard Cosell

For 10 years he was a Manhattan lawyer who wanted to be something else. Howard William Cohen was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to an accountant and his wife, grandson of a rabbi, and raised in Brooklyn. He took his degree at New York University's law school and, as a student, changed Cohen to Cosell — a version, he said, of the family's original Polish name. Sportswriters threw the change back at him for the rest of his life, and the hate mail that arrived with his fame was frequently antisemitic. In 1953, representing the Little League of New York, he was asked to host an ABC Radio show featuring the children. He did it three years for nothing, then in his late 30s quit the law.

What he did with a microphone had not been done. Sportscasting was promotion — house men calling games for the leagues that fed them — and Cosell reported it instead, asking about contracts, drugs, race and money in the same voice he used for a kickoff. Roone Arledge put him in the Monday Night Football booth in 1970 with Frank Gifford and Don Meredith, and the broadcast regularly topped the weekly Nielsen ratings and became an argument in every bar. A poll of viewers returned the whole story in one result — most liked sportscaster in America, and most hated.

He called the fighter Muhammad Ali when most of the press was still printing Cassius Clay, and he treated the refusal of induction as a legal question rather than a betrayal — which, as a lawyer, was how he saw it. He argued on air that Ali had lost his title and his licence to work before any court had ruled, and that the religious objection was serious. The mail that came back carried death threats and antisemitic abuse, and columnists worked him over for years. In 1971 he was the one who brought Ali the news that the Supreme Court had ruled for him, unanimously. Eleven years later, calling Larry Holmes against an outmatched Randall Cobb two weeks after Duk-koo Kim died in the ring, he said he was finished with professional boxing. He was.

In September 1985 he published I Never Played the Game, a memoir that handled his ABC colleagues roughly. The network pulled him from that year's World Series and then dropped him, TV Guide printed excerpts and reported more reader responses than it had ever received, overwhelmingly against him, and the friendships did not come back. Five years earlier he had done the thing people still remember: on Monday Night Football in December 1980, with the game running, he told the country John Lennon had been shot dead outside his apartment. His wife Emmy died in 1990 and he largely disappeared. He died in Manhattan on April 23, 1995, at 77.

Howard Cosell's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Cosell book
  The first memoir, written at the height of the Monday night years 1973
• Monday Night Football television
  Fourteen seasons in the booth, and the reason people watched who did not follow football 1970
• Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell television
  His own ABC variety hour — cancelled in three months, having put Billy Crystal and Bill Murray on national television 1975
• ABC SportsBeat television
  The first regular network programme devoted to sports journalism — three Emmy Awards, and the work he called his favourite 1981
• I Never Played the Game book
  Written with Peter Bonventre — it ended his television career 1985
• What's Wrong with Sports book
  Written with Shelby Whitfield, and his last 1991

• 1953 aged ~35 Hosts a Little League show on WABC and does it for three years unpaid He was still a practising lawyer, and he had come to ABC Radio as the Little League of New York's counsel.
• April 28, 1967 aged 49 Ali refuses induction and Cosell defends him on the air Cosell had already been using the name Ali chose while much of the press stayed with Cassius Clay.
• October 16, 1968 aged 50 Backs Tommie Smith and John Carlos after the Mexico City podium salute Most broadcasters kept away from the story. Cosell said publicly that the sprinters were right.
• September 21, 1970 aged 52 Monday Night Football debuts with Cosell in the booth Roone Arledge had bet that prime-time football needed a third voice that argued with the game.
• December 8, 1980 aged 62 Announces John Lennon's death during a live Monday night game ABC had the story because one of its employees happened to be in the same emergency room. NBC had broken into The Tonight Show minutes earlier.
• November 26, 1982 aged 64 Calls Larry Holmes against Randall Cobb and quits professional boxing on the air Two weeks after Duk-koo Kim died of injuries from a televised fight, Cosell asked whether the referee understood that he was constructing an advertisement for the abolition of the sport. He kept calling amateur bouts through the 1984 Olympics and never another professional one.
• September 5, 1983 aged 65 The Alvin Garrett broadcast, and the end of his Monday nights Cosell said of the Washington receiver, "That little monkey gets loose, doesn't he?" Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference called it racist and demanded a public apology. Garrett, Jesse Jackson and Ali said they took no offence. Cosell said the word referred to Garrett's size and not his race, and that he had used it of the white running back Mike Adamle in 1972 and of his own grandchildren. He left the booth after the season.
• 1985 aged ~67 I Never Played the Game is published and ABC lets him go He was pulled from the World Series broadcast and dismissed soon after. Most of the colleagues in the book stopped speaking to him.
• April 23, 1995 aged 77 Dies in Manhattan of a cardiac embolism at 77 He is buried at Westhampton Cemetery on Long Island.

• Muhammad Ali 1942–2016
  Boxing legend and cultural icon known for his athletic brilliance and principled stance against the Vietnam War draft. defended
• Billie Jean King b. 1943
  Tennis champion and advocate for gender equality who defeated Bobby Riggs in the famous Battle of the Sexes. called her match
• Arthur Ashe 1943–1993
  Tennis champion and activist who broke racial barriers and advocated for education, civil rights, and AIDS awareness. reported with
• Jackie Robinson 1919–1972
  First African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era, breaking the color barrier. interviewed