Howard Cosell: The Man, The Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports
By Mark Ribowsky (W.W. Norton & Co., 2011)
You don’t have to be sportsminded to have an interest in Howard Cosell. He was a popcult touchstone throughout the 1970s. I never watched Monday Night Football or a boxing match, but I knew Cosell from Woody Allen’s political comedy Bananas and from his attempt to inherit the mantle of Ed Sullivan with the TV variety show Saturday Night Live (unrelated to, well, you know, except that both shows featured Bill Murray, Christopher Guest, Brian Doyle-Murray and Howard Cosell at one time or another). Both Bananas and SNL are covered here, and not casually, so the book satisfied me right there. But Mark Ribowsky’s book prodded my curiosity more than I though it would. He covers the obvious highlights of Cosell’s career, in much the same trajectory that Cosell’s own autobiography did. But that’s just the play-by-play. Ribowsky adds a whole layer of color reporting by constantly reminding us of Cosell’s colossal ego. Cosell didn’t just think he could be the next Ed Sullivan, for instance: he thought he could bring the Beatles back together on his variety show, by dint of his passing acquaintance with a bemused John Lennon. This book is a litany of grand schemes and humiliating comeuppances. Cosell is shown to be an excellent broadcaster with great instincts, who undercuts his talents with his annoying air of superiority and his inability to stop drinking on the job.
Not sure what Howard Cosell means to folks today—his non-sports resume was slight, and while he’s still probably one of the best known (and most impersonated) sportscasters in history, mainstream recognition of sportscasters is fleeting if they’re not still broadcasting, and Cosell left ABC in the mid-1980s and died in 1995. If anything’s able to bring him back, it’s books like this which recognize both the myth and the man.