The Howard Cosell Show

Howard Cosell (1918-1995) owned a voice no one could mistake for another. Nasal, honking, pressed through the nose and out the front of the face, it cut across a stadium and a living room alike. He bent it like an instrument. He stretched vowels, hammered consonants, and dropped into a staccato bark for emphasis. The cadence rose and fell in waves that had nothing to do with how human beings actually talk and everything to do with how Cosell wanted to be heard.
The diction matched the sound. He came out of Brooklyn and law school and he talked like a man who had swallowed a thesaurus and meant to use every page. He said “ofttimes” and “verily” and called a fighter “truculent” on live television. He built sentences that climbed and turned and circled back, the kind of subordinate-clause architecture sportscasters had never tried because sportscasters mostly came up through the locker room. Cosell came up through the bar exam. He wore the vocabulary as a weapon against the jocks beside him and the jocks watching at home.
He branded himself the truth-teller. “I’m just telling it like it is” became his motto and his shield. He cast himself as the one honest man in what he called the toy department, the lone voice willing to say the unpopular thing while everyone else sold the game. Part of this was pose. Part of it held real. He defended Muhammad Ali by name when Ali refused the draft and lost his title and the country turned on him. Cosell called him Ali when other broadcasters still said Clay, and he took the hate mail for it. The friendship between them crackled on air, two showmen trading jabs, and underneath ran genuine respect. That bond may be the best thing he did.
Monday Night Football made him a national figure and a national irritant. ABC put him in a three-man booth with Frank Gifford and Don Meredith, the smooth ex-jock and the folksy one, and Cosell played the heavy. He talked over the action, lectured, digressed into politics and society, and millions tuned in to root against him. Bars ran contests on whether you wanted him to shut up. He understood the value of the villain. A man you love to hate still makes you watch, and they watched.
His boxing calls reached higher than his football work. “Down goes Frazier, down goes Frazier” rode his rising panic into legend. The voice that grated over a punt return turned electric over a knockdown. Boxing gave him violence and drama and a single combatant to fixate on, and he rose to it. The medium and the man matched.
Then it soured. He came to despise much of what he covered. He grew bitter about football, called it a stupid game, walked away from Monday Night Football, and wrote a memoir that torched the colleagues who had shared his booth and his network. In 1983 he looked at Alvin Garrett, a small fast Black receiver, and said look at that little monkey run. He insisted the phrase carried no malice and that he used it for small players of every color. The damage held regardless. The truth-teller who defended Ali could not talk his way clear of that one, and it marked the beginning of his end on the broadcast.
The arc runs from outsider to icon to exile. A late-starting lawyer with an unloved voice and an oversized vocabulary willed himself into the most famous sportscaster alive by refusing to sound like a sportscaster. The refusal made him. The same arrogance that built the persona curdled into contempt, contempt for the games, the men, the audience that had made him rich. He ended estranged from nearly everyone he had worked beside, a man who told it like it is right up until the telling cost him the room.
Cosell forced sports to take itself seriously as talk. Before him the play-by-play man described the action and got out of the way. Cosell put a literate, combative, self-dramatizing voice at the center of the broadcast and dared you to look away. Every loud opinionated sportscaster who came after works in the house he built, whether they honor the debt or not.