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...
...It's not a coronation...
...says on one occasion that organized hletics is mere amusement, and on other that it is "real life...
...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...
...It's frightening," he told a reporter...
...I don't understand this phenomenon...
...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...
...He ias personally experienced the trauma of television's insensitive overspending...
...Cosell be lieves that the press on the whole is dis honest about sports...
...Cosell forsook his legal practice and appeared with hat in hand at the American Broadcasting Company...
...It's not the separation of the lunar module from the capsule...
...A voice kept urging him, "Tell it like it is, Howie...
...I think I could win easily," Cosell predicts, "if I could get the nomination of the Democratic Party, and there's the rub...
...He is an American marvel...
...Club owners use their power to intiril date the media and thwart the truth, 12 ments Cosell...
...I'm not going to talk noney to you...
...He serves no master other than the truth...
...The kid poured it his heart to me...
...that sport is a work separate and apart from real life, a Cam elot where everyone is concerned onl...
...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...
...Care for a Good Old-Fashioned Harangue...
...Wellington Mara is not the sport world's only threat to virtue...
...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...
...The fundamental truth about sports, The Tortured Genius of Howard Cosell Cosell informs us, is that it is not to be taken too seriously...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Such crassitude in a medium that should be purely for entertainment is more than Cosell's aesthetic and moral sensibilities can bear...
...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...
...I think he will be laid bare for what he is: A man deeply rooted in the philosophy of medieval times...
...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...
...In addition to providing great entertainment, we plan to be informative and perhaps, even enlightening...
...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...
...He had answered The Call...
...To hear Cosell tell it, athletes are oved by his presence to bare their )uls...
...Mara, the owner of the New York Giants, actually seems to be in business for the money...
...An examination of Cosell's public utterances poses the intelligent reader with some difficulty in interpretation, but rewards the assiduous with sheer joy...
...Make your next meeting a memorable occasion...
...He felt ?ansed...
...and Cosell makes no secret of his availability for high public office...
...After an inauspicious beginning that led insensitive sponsors to announce she program's imminent cancellation, the entertainment began in earnest...
...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 has his sights trained on a United States Senate seat from New York...
...What activity remains for a man of this character and talent...
...I have been called all of these...
...Liven up your next meeting with one of the following: Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...In the advance promotion for Saturday Night Live, Cosell once again demonstrated his unflagging devotion to the uplift...
...Nobody's worth it...
...is obscene almost...
...Cosell looks upon himself as the 'astime's suffering servant...
...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...
...Politics, of course...
...Cosell can neither contain his fury nor inhibit his comments within the strait jacket of rationality...
...His unease takes on paranoid proportions when he refuses to rule out the possibility that Mara has thrown in with the Pope...
...about serving the public"—lovely prose pregnant with ponderosities...
...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...
...Two weeks later Cosell solemnly intoned, "Let us not forget that 13 years ago today John Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas...
...Nonetheless, even Toyland becomes a grim place for Cosell's panting conscience...
...Howard Co-sell has risen to his lofty eminence by dutifully responding to God's latest blessing to mankind: the Cosell conscience...
...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...
...Joe Namath...
...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...
...Of course, I am...
...A. Lawrence Chickering Christopher DeMuth Leslie Lenkowsky Peter J. Rusthoven Benjamin Stein R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Cosell is a sensitive man, nay a sort of tortured genius...
...Colonel Red Blaik, lo was supposed to be a martinet, an de, opened up like a sieve...
...Thus scolded, poor Wellington Man must live with his shame...
...Care to have a speaker that sets the blood boiling and the mind's wheels turning...
...Crazy...
...How can there be trut when the owners hire announcers to d the games for the people back home...
...I don't know of any other avenue of endeavor where that's possible...
...Ridiculous...
...I don't blame the men for taking the jobs and making the money...
...One show featured a guest appearance by Senator Edward M. Kennedy...
...Cosell for the Senate...
...Senator Buckley, pack your bags and prepare for retirement...
...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...
...Cosell's syllogistic somersaults are reminiscent of Hegel, the week he experimented with LSD...
...If interested, send ideas for suggested article and a sample of your writing to Adam Meyerson, The Alternative, P.O...
...He fancies himself as the fons et -go of a sportsman's solace, a kind of a ,iritual comfort-station...
...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...
...Television, Cosell contends, "is the economic unde, 22 The Alternative:, An American Spectator March 197 pinning of baseball...
...My opponent would be the Conservative-Republic James Buckley, whose chief claim to fame is his anonymity...
...R. Sargent Shriver...
...The march of progress may already have defeated you...
...I blame the industry...
...Sports is the toy department of life," he observes...
...Surely Co-sell doesn't equate a straightforward effort to describe with accuracy the events of a contest as the "truth about sports...
...Then the scene returned to Cosell, seated with his guest, the martyred leader's sister, Mrs...
...Look at Mantle...
...He invents undefined, metaphysical "truth about orts" to which he insists his colleagues 1st conform or else renounce theirclaim to honesty in reporting...
...He is so sincere in doing this that his defiance of the public interest assumes a holy aura...
...Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, ignorant, and so forth...
...And to give more exposure to this fascinating personality, Cosell launched a widely touted variety program for ABC, Saturday Night Live...
...Not to say that Cosell has laDred under this yoke without fervor...
...What kind of man is Cosell...
...he exclaimed Sports Illustrated writer Myron Cope...
...But"—he added with res;nation—"it's been my lot to be cast in 3orts...
...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...
...In responding to its stentorian messages, Howard has become the moral monitor of the sporting community, the Jean-Paul Sartre of organized athletics...
...But if you knew the amount that 'm going to make out here Super Bowl veek, just for three appearances—well, t's wrong...
...It is estimated that ;osell's employers impose on him an inome of $300,000 to $400,000 annually...
...The latte term tends to ring through the Gospel ac cording to Howard much likes Amens Hallelujahs ring through cow town re vivals...
...Through the ears he recalls the many temptations torard other endeavors for a man of his extansive mental capacity...
...He did a half-hour show with me, and felt like he had had a cathartic...
...Henceforth the full force of his rather repugnant voice would be devoted to rasping the truth about sports...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...and the country for the dogs...
...Cosell knows whereof he speaks...
...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...
...Consider the case of Wellington Mara...
...Add to that list of qualifications failure as a variety show host...
...He is often -misunderstood, even when comprehensible...
...Until 1956, Howard Cosell was a successful Wall Street shyster, but then he felt a mysterious breath at his neck...
...It's sickenng...
...That's a matter of privacy...
Vol. 9 • March 1976 • No. 6
