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

Introduction

1 Cosell can be seen in the dressing rooms of fighters, both before and after every major bout, at the ballparks and just about every other place sports news is likely to develop. “I try to get my guests to think out loud,” explains Cosell. “My approach to sports coverage is threedimensional . Being on the scene where news of dramatic impact is being made, going beyond the news story itself by asking searching questions and maintaining a spirit of friendship with sports personalities.” —ABC Radio Network press release, August 29, 1958 In 1976 Yale University refused to allow radical historian Herbert Aptheker to teach a seminar on his friend and colleague W. E. B. Du Bois as part of a one-semester student-organized program for undergraduates. The course would have paid Aptheker very little. It was a class that offered lecturers from outside the university an opportunity to teach, and gave students the chance to work with emeritus faculty and nonacademics who had built interesting careers. Aptheker was a historian whose work in the 1940s on the history of slavery in the United States had broken new ground. He seemed to be ideally suited for such a program, except for one thing: he was a communist. The same semester that Aptheker was denied a seminar position at Yale, sportscaster Howard Cosell was allowed to teach a class titled “Big Time Sports and Contemporary America” in the very same program. To the leftist historian and Yale Ph.D. Jesse Lemisch, this was an irony that symbolized a larger corruption which he saw historically characterizing Yale, an irony he drew upon in the title of an article he had published in the Newsletter of the Radical Historians Caucus, “If Howard Cosell Can Teach at Yale, Why Can’t Herbert Aptheker?”1 Introduction 2 i n tro d ucti o n For Lemisch, it seemed that Yale was far more fascinated by the glow of media celebrity than it was by the ideas of a scholar who could teach from firsthand experience about one of the most significant historical figures of the twentieth century. What is more, Yale’s blacklisting of Aptheker was for Lemisch a manifestation of what he had seen as the institution’s long-standing racism and anti-Semitism. Yet if he had looked more closely at Cosell’s biography, Lemisch might have been able to add yet another ironic twist. Just a little over twenty years earlier Cosell had himself been in danger of being blacklisted for having represented a union whose West Coast secretary had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Just fifteen years earlier he had been kept off the air for reasons that he felt had to do with anti-Semitism. And just eight years earlier he had put his career on the line as one of the few broadcasters to have defended loudly and publicly the political actions of African American athletes such as Curt Flood, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Muhammad Ali. While Howard Cosell may not have been a Trojan horse for the Left when he arrived at Yale for the 1975–76 academic year, neither was he simply a talking head. By 1976 Cosell may have been a relatively benign—if not, for many, annoying—popular entertainer and sportscaster , but he was also a remarkably unlikely person to emerge as perhaps the most universally recognized figure in sports broadcasting . He was a sportscaster, yet the flickering screens of the country’s television sets had rarely projected before viewers the image of a less athletic physical specimen. He was respected for bringing journalistic integrity to sports reporting, yet he had very little training in professional journalism before he entered broadcasting. He excelled in a medium that, by the mid-1960s, rewarded banality and homogeneity, yet he thrived on controversy, forcefully expressed strong opinions, and spoke with an accent seasoned by his Brooklyn upbringing. He entered broadcasting in the wake of the McCarthy era during the 1950s, yet he excelled in part because of his outspoken support for the controversial cause of civil rights. Understanding who Howard Cosell was and why he became such a central figure in the media culture of the United States is part of the mystery that I explore in this book (but do not promise to solve). When I asked media insiders their opinions, they often explained the Cosell phenomenon with a single word: “storyline.” The term refers to the ability of a media...