'i've Won. I've Beat Them'

"Is he a former All-American athlete, my dear?" asked Cosell. She shook her head. "Is he a guttural illiterate?" Again she shook her head. "I'm sorry," said Cosell, offering his deep commiseration, "then there is no home for your friend in this business."

Finally, Cosell came late to a young man's game, bringing maturity and perspective, a game plan, if you will. He was in his mid-30s, with a successful New York City law practice, when he decided to take a shot at broadcasting. But make no mistake: He perfectly understood what hurdles lay in his path and how he must surmount them. He created Howard Cosell right from the first. Red Barber recalls Cosell's telling him how he understood it was too late for him to have a play-by-play career, to be in the traditional glamour spot. No, he would have to carve out a whole new dominion. Ray Robinson, the executive editor of Seventeen, then ran a small men's magazine called Real. Cosell had dabbled as a sportswriter as early as high school—his column was titled, of all things, Speaking of Sports—and he badgered Robinson into letting him write a column in Real to help make ends meet while Cosell tried to break into radio. It was called Cosell's Clubhouse, and it featured a drawing of Cosell emerging from a doghouse. In the sketch, Robinson recalls, Cosell resembled "an aardvark."

Robinson accompanied Cosell south for spring training in 1955. "I was his Gunga Din for a while," Robinson recalls. "He was schlepping this heavy equipment all over Florida." Keep in mind that this was the dark ages of electronics. Tape recorders were veritable trunks; Cosell's original weighed something like 30 pounds. But he would lug it from camp to camp, picking up as many as 60 or 70 interviews a day.

In a typical moment of pride Cosell will declare, "I changed the face of television sports." That's a vast overstatement, because nothing approaching him has followed him. Invariably overlooked, however, is the fact that Cosell did change the face of radio sportscasting. In many ways he's a more natural radio than television performer. As he points out, his voice on radio is all the more authoritative and dramatic for not having to compete with visual images. Cosell will concede that only news commentator Paul Harvey possesses a more effective radio presence than his own.

When Cosell first staggered into locker rooms weighted down by his gear, radio sports was still a studio enterprise. Only after him came the transistors and an army of young imitators attached to microphones, invading newspaper territory, thrusting their mikes into athletes' faces. They so irritated the astonished old print journalists that reporters such as Dick Young, a sports columnist for the New York Daily News at the time, used to spew out vulgarities whenever the microphones appeared, thereby rendering useless the radio man's tape of the interview.

By the late '60s, Cosell had achieved prominence on both radio and television. "The '60s were really my birth," he says, "the time of the anti-hero. The '60s were just right for me." It hadn't been easy, but then, neither was Cosell surprised by his success. Robinson remembers a conversation during that spring training of '55, when Cosell was an absolute unknown, when even what he was doing was unknown. "I'm going to be the top sports guy in television," he summarily announced to Robinson.

"How?"

"Easy," replied Cosell. "The rest of them are all asses."

This will answer your question: Has success changed Howard Cosell?

The first thing you must understand about Cosell and what possesses him is that he is innately conservative. Politics aside, he is to the right of Queen Victoria, or Vicky, as he would call her over the air. He was the commander of his American Legion post after World War II. Israel was just getting off the ground then, and one night the subject of emigrating there came up. Howard is Jewish; Emmy, who isn't, thought it might make an exciting challenge for a young family to settle in Israel. Incredulous, Howard said, "Why would I do that? I'm American." His allegedly subversive campaigns—supporting Muhammad Ali's right to the heavyweight title while Ali was resisting the draft being the most significant—all devolve from his belief in basic American rights, such as due process and freedom of speech.