Eminentoes
Duggan, Joseph P.
byJoseph P.Duggan Eminentoes I would be squandering my ink and your time were I to attempt the introduction of a man who is, by his own humble admission, the "third-best-known man in the United...
...Mara, the owner of the New York Giants, actually seems to be in business for the money...
...After an inauspicious beginning that led insensitive sponsors to announce she program's imminent cancellation, the entertainment began in earnest...
...Cosell can neither contain his fury nor inhibit his comments within the strait jacket of rationality...
...It is estimated that ;osell's employers impose on him an inome of $300,000 to $400,000 annually...
...I think he will be laid bare for what he is: A man deeply rooted in the philosophy of medieval times...
...is obscene almost...
...byJoseph P.Duggan Eminentoes I would be squandering my ink and your time were I to attempt the introduction of a man who is, by his own humble admission, the "third-best-known man in the United States...
...He fancies himself as the fons et -go of a sportsman's solace, a kind of a ,iritual comfort-station...
...A voice kept urging him, "Tell it like it is, Howie...
...The latte term tends to ring through the Gospel ac cording to Howard much likes Amens Hallelujahs ring through cow town re vivals...
...I don't know of any other avenue of endeavor where that's possible...
...Shriver regaled the audience with reminiscences of brother Jack, the family man, until Cosell had to tell her, no doubt with some embarrassment, that the show must move on to another act...
...R. Sargent Shriver...
...and Cosell makes no secret of his availability for high public office...
...He serves no master other than the truth...
...Such crassitude in a medium that should be purely for entertainment is more than Cosell's aesthetic and moral sensibilities can bear...
...Make your next meeting a memorable occasion...
...Surely Co-sell doesn't equate a straightforward effort to describe with accuracy the events of a contest as the "truth about sports...
...Television, Cosell contends, "is the economic unde, 22 The Alternative:, An American Spectator March 197 pinning of baseball...
...I don't blame the men for taking the jobs and making the money...
...Box 877, Bloomingon IN 47401.me to accomplish in sports, and I have an inner drive to do something more meaningful with my life before my string has run out...
...How can there be trut when the owners hire announcers to d the games for the people back home...
...Add to that list of qualifications failure as a variety show host...
...He has his sights trained on a United States Senate seat from New York...
...In the first volume of his autobiography, imaginatively entitled Cosell, the author asseverates that Mara "cloaks himself in the piety of Saint Patrick's and behaves as if his ownership derives from the Vatican...
...The kid poured it his heart to me...
...A. Lawrence Chickering Christopher DeMuth Leslie Lenkowsky Peter J. Rusthoven Benjamin Stein R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...He is an American marvel...
...In addition to providing great entertainment, we plan to be informative and perhaps, even enlightening...
...Of course, I am...
...I have been called all of these...
...The march of progress may already have defeated you...
...His unease takes on paranoid proportions when he refuses to rule out the possibility that Mara has thrown in with the Pope...
...It's frightening," he told a reporter...
...I'm not going to talk noney to you...
...But if you knew the amount that 'm going to make out here Super Bowl veek, just for three appearances—well, t's wrong...
...One show featured a guest appearance by Senator Edward M. Kennedy...
...It's sickenng...
...In the advance promotion for Saturday Night Live, Cosell once again demonstrated his unflagging devotion to the uplift...
...And make no mistake about it, his forthcoming evacuation from New York City in favor of the swamplands of East Rutherford, New Jersey, is a defiance of the public interest...
...Wellington Mara is not the sport world's only threat to virtue...
...If interested, send ideas for suggested article and a sample of your writing to Adam Meyerson, The Alternative, P.O...
...The fundamental truth about sports, The Tortured Genius of Howard Cosell Cosell informs us, is that it is not to be taken too seriously...
...In responding to its stentorian messages, Howard has become the moral monitor of the sporting community, the Jean-Paul Sartre of organized athletics...
...Consider the case of Wellington Mara...
...Nonetheless, even Toyland becomes a grim place for Cosell's panting conscience...
...Colonel Red Blaik, lo was supposed to be a martinet, an de, opened up like a sieve...
...He is so sincere in doing this that his defiance of the public interest assumes a holy aura...
...I find it a heinous thing," he says, "that athletes could go without rudimentary training from the gridiron into an industry and at once make seventy-five to a hundred thousand dollars a year...
...He is often -misunderstood, even when comprehensible...
...I don't feel," e told a writer for the American Medical .ssociation's magazine, Today's Health, that any man of intellect, concerned bout society—its sociology, its econom:s, its politics, its law, its war, his hildren, his wife—can really be ab)rbed in what happens on a gridiron or a iamond or a basketball court and take it iat seriously...
...Fearing that he might lose money if his team continued to play in the deteriorating environs of Yankee Stadium, he is moving the ballclub to a new facility in New Jersey...
...Politics, of course...
...But Howard Cosell has not attained his fame through the sweaty self-promotion characteristic of ham-fisted politicians, nor the red-eyed ranting of tent-show evangelists, nor the exhibitionism that inspires the Golden State's would-be assassins...
...What kind of man is Cosell...
...his own telecasts on Monday Night Football offer nothing of that sort, but instead offer an unpalatable blend of buffoonery, second-guessing, and secular sermonizing...
...It's not the separation of the lunar module from the capsule...
...I don't understand this phenomenon...
...An examination of Cosell's public utterances poses the intelligent reader with some difficulty in interpretation, but rewards the assiduous with sheer joy...
...Two weeks later Cosell solemnly intoned, "Let us not forget that 13 years ago today John Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas...
...Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, ignorant, and so forth...
...Look at Mantle...
...Howard Co-sell has risen to his lofty eminence by dutifully responding to God's latest blessing to mankind: the Cosell conscience...
...That's a matter of privacy...
...Ridiculous...
...Liven up your next meeting with one of the following: Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...Joe Namath...
...Cosell the inter-ewer would have us believe that he has tard more confessions than the Cure Ars...
...Excess wealth figures as another radix malorum in Cosell's casuistry...
...he exclaimed Sports Illustrated writer Myron Cope...
...Care for a Good Old-Fashioned Harangue...
...What activity remains for a man of this character and talent...
...The orchestra struck up a soft rendition of "Camelot.'" The camera cut to a splicing of old film clips of JFK, hair tousled and barefoot by the sandy sea's edge, at play with daughter Caroline, at work signing reform legislation...
...Nobody's worth it...
...Then the scene returned to Cosell, seated with his guest, the martyred leader's sister, Mrs...
...Cosell's syllogistic somersaults are reminiscent of Hegel, the week he experimented with LSD...
...He felt ?ansed...
...More than that, it symbolizes the cheap expediency of many owners in professional sports and emphasizes the hollow hypocrisy ofmany sports operators as they continue u propagate the idea...
...He had answered The Call...
...Cosell is giving serious consideration to the matter, because, as he writes in Like It Is, "I am not at all sure that there is anything left for Wanted: Essays The Alternative pays handsomely for sprightly and informative articles on public policy, written in plain English, by undergraduate and graduate students in economics and business...
...and the country for the dogs...
...Through the ears he recalls the many temptations torard other endeavors for a man of his extansive mental capacity...
...In an uncharacteristic moment of candor in Co-sell (his second volume, Like It Is, was published in 1974 by Playboy Press), Co-sell writes: "Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, persecuting, distasteful, verbose, a show-off...
...Henceforth the full force of his rather repugnant voice would be devoted to rasping the truth about sports...
...Club owners use their power to intiril date the media and thwart the truth, 12 ments Cosell...
...about serving the public"—lovely prose pregnant with ponderosities...
...Sports is the toy department of life," he observes...
...Call or write: The Shore Line Company Post Office Box 553 Bloomington, IN 47401 (812) 334-2761 Le Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 23...
...Crazy...
...Thus scolded, poor Wellington Man must live with his shame...
...He ias personally experienced the trauma of television's insensitive overspending...
...says on one occasion that organized hletics is mere amusement, and on other that it is "real life...
...Cosell for the Senate...
...I blame the industry...
...My opponent would be the Conservative-Republic James Buckley, whose chief claim to fame is his anonymity...
...Cosell looks upon himself as the 'astime's suffering servant...
...I think I could win easily," Cosell predicts, "if I could get the nomination of the Democratic Party, and there's the rub...
...Cosell is a sensitive man, nay a sort of tortured genius...
...Senator Buckley, pack your bags and prepare for retirement...
...It's not a coronation...
...And gallan Howard strikes another blow for the pub lic interest, though leaving his public ii some confusion as to his understanding o those battered terms, "sports," "th, public interest," and "real life...
...Cosell forsook his legal practice and appeared with hat in hand at the American Broadcasting Company...
...He did a half-hour show with me, and felt like he had had a cathartic...
...that sport is a work separate and apart from real life, a Cam elot where everyone is concerned onl...
...B contrast, Cosell maintains that his ow integrity is preserved because he is en ployed by the American Broadcastin Company—not by any ballclub owne, But if another assertion by Cosell is to b believed, the ballclubs are in no positio to coerce the networks...
...Calling the industr "corrupt from top to bottom," he told a, audience at a convention of the Associ ated Press Managing Editors Associa tion, "You're out of touch with reality It's time you tell it like it is...
...For all his high-minded raillery against e "enemies of truth" in sports cover-:e, Cosell is obviously confused as to his iteria for "truth" in sports reporting...
...Care to have a speaker that sets the blood boiling and the mind's wheels turning...
...He invents undefined, metaphysical "truth about orts" to which he insists his colleagues 1st conform or else renounce theirclaim to honesty in reporting...
...Cosell knows whereof he speaks...
...The Ninety-fifth Congress will find Senator Cosell among kindred spirits—as a soulmate to McGovern- and Abzug, as Humphrey's equal in garrulity, as Albert's competitor for primacy in coherence...
...Cosell be lieves that the press on the whole is dis honest about sports...
...Not to say that Cosell has laDred under this yoke without fervor...
...But"—he added with res;nation—"it's been my lot to be cast in 3orts...
...Baron Von Kannon Dale Vree If your campus, club, business, social, or civic group could use a good speaker, we can find one appropriate for you...
...He immarizes his achievements, eschewing nth modesty and vulgar coherence: "If trer there has been a trailblazer, if ever a roadcaster sought to bring sports out of te juvenile, the banal—this, you see, is y mission...
...To hear Cosell tell it, athletes are oved by his presence to bare their )uls...
...And to give more exposure to this fascinating personality, Cosell launched a widely touted variety program for ABC, Saturday Night Live...
...Until 1956, Howard Cosell was a successful Wall Street shyster, but then he felt a mysterious breath at his neck...
Vol. 9 • March 1976 • No. 6
