There You Have It: The Life, Legacy, and Legend of Howard Cosell

5. Bigger than the Game

89 Cosell did not creep onto the scene; rather he burst onto it—and to some people, not as a journalist but as “that obnoxious Jew from New York.” —Jim Spence with Dave Diles, Up Close and Personal, 1988 In June 1966 Roone Arledge wrote to congratulate National Football League commissioner Pete Rozelle for negotiating a merger with his league’s rival, the American Football League. Part of that merger was an agreement to hold an interleague championship game, an event that would someday come to be known as the Super Bowl. Ever adept at recognizing a programming opportunity, Arledge wrote Rozelle, “I assume it is too early for you to know what your plans are concerning television rights to the inter-league Championship game, but I would like you to know that we are very interested in being considered as the carrying network for this game and we would appreciate the opportunity of discussing this matter with you prior to its resolution.”1 In 1966 the idea of ABC winning the rights to cover such an important game was laughable . In just a few years, however, Rozelle would come up with a new idea for the NFL schedule, and ABC would be chosen as the network to broadcast it: Monday Night Football. Cosell would not merely be a part of the “package” of announcers relaying the game to viewers each week; he would be the first one hired, and the key ingredient to establishing the show’s brand. If there were any viewers left in the United States who did not know who Howard Cosell was before the fall of 1970, they would learn more than enough about him in the decade that followed. In five years he had risen from relative obscurity to become one of the most recognized sports personalities in the country. Over the next decade his fame and fortune would rocket to almost unprecedented heights. He 5 Bigger than the Game 90 chap t er 5 would become not just a famous sportscaster but a celebrity. His professional credits would range from the sublime (his somber field reports from the 1972 hostage crisis at the Munich Olympics) to the ridiculous (Battle of the Network Stars). No program was more important to Cosell’s newfound status as an icon of American popular culture, however, than Monday Night Football. Huge audiences tuned in every week—more than ABC had ever experienced before—often simply to watch football, but just as often to hear the back-and forthbanter in the broadcast booth between a New York Jew, Howard Cosell , and a good-ol’-boy Texan, a veteran football quarterback named “Dandy Don” Meredith. Paradoxes seem to be a defining feature of Howard Cosell’s life, and Monday Night Football would contain paradoxes of its own. During the first season, the team chosen to work together included Keith Jackson doing play-by-play alongside the Cosell–“Dandy Don” show. Arledge had long wanted former football star Frank Gifford to be the third man in the booth, but in 1970, when Monday Night Football was inaugurated, Gifford could not get out of his contract with CBS. The following year, however, Gifford became free. Arledge signed him, and Jackson was reassigned to broadcast college football games. Most saw this at the time as a slap in the face, but Jackson ended up becoming the iconic voice of college football, and one of the most revered playby -play sportscasters in television history. While Cosell’s fame also grew, many of those who knew him saw a change in his personality as the 1970s progressed. They saw how the success of Monday Night Football, and Cosell’s celebrity along with it, increased in almost inverse proportion to Cosell’s happiness. By the end of the decade, Cosell was not just one of the most recognized sports personalities in America; he was one of the five most recognized people in the nation. Yet he also became increasingly tormented personally, and according to many of his oldest colleagues, he grew defensive, paranoid, and angry. The reasons for this personality change are probably too complex to grasp completely. Cosell, however, writes about a number of developments during the 1970s that affected his perspective. One, of course, was Monday Night Football. As much as the program provided Cosell with a regular national audience, it also cast him in a role with which he was not always comfortable, and in ways that he felt played to the...