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

To this day, ask Cosell why he never left sports, for all that he disparages them, puts them down as inconsequential, and second he says, "I stayed in sports because I realized I had become very special, and I had the gnawing sense that I was achieving something. I'm proud of the impact I've had on the American people." But that response follows this one: "Number one, there was the money for my family."

Emmy says, "Howard will go to his grave thinking that he never accomplished all that much. He's satisfied only that he provided well for his family."

ABC made that possible a decade ago, when it signed him to his first network contract. Cosell speaks of the network in dear, almost precious tones, regularly referring to it as "my company" or even "we," as if it were some quaint little family business turning out widgets somewhere. For all his independence, he's strictly a company man.

While Cosell never fails to credit Arledge for his part in his success, his greatest devotion is to Goldenson. Cosell often refers to Goldenson as "a man who has been like a father to me." By contrast, Cosell has "very ambivalent" feelings about Arledge. He charges that Arledge reneged on a commitment to name Cosell co-anchor of the ABC Evening News and host of 20/20 when Arledge added the presidency of the network's news operation to his sports portfolio four years ago. "You must understand that Roone is incredibly celebrity conscious and would like to have been the person I am," says Cosell. Arledge, for his part, must be very ambivalent about Cosell. He sends back word that he no longer has the time to discuss Mr. Cosell.

When Scherick brought Arledge to ABC in 1960, it was a distant third on network row. Until then, sports television was in the main a rather tidy little Manhattan club. It was essentially WASP-Irish—CBS or NBC bringing us the Yankees in another Subway Series every fall, an NFL built around the Giants and boxing that emanated mostly from Madison Square Garden. As for the rest of the country, well, it had Notre Dame, didn't it?

"And then," Scherick says, "here comes this rather unattractive Jewish lawyer from Brooklyn" knocking at the clubhouse door.

Scherick was soon told, "Eye to eye: Under no conditions was I to hire Cosell." Then as now, the question was begged: How much of the anti-Cosell feeling is grounded in his being Jewish? On that subject, even Cosell is for once unsure. "My father's been very naive about it," says Hilary. Certainly, though, he's no stranger to anti-Semitism. "I was called a sheeny, everything," he says. Then, with a glow, he recalls the highlight of his athletic career—getting the winning hit in a stickball game between the Eastern Parkway Jews and the local Irish Catholics.

Curiously, while Cosell is the grandson of a rabbi, he wasn't raised in a religious family, and the abiding heritage from his grandfather is not the Talmud but gin rummy, which the old gentleman taught him. Cosell wasn't even Bar Mitzvahed, although his family was aggrieved when he chose Emmy, a shiksa, as his wife, just as her Philadelphia Presbyterian father was distressed by her choice of Howard. "But I became the most important thing in his life," says Cosell, completing this tale of his father-in-law.

"That's absurd, Howard," snaps Emmy, straightaway putting an end to that untruth and showing, in the process, why she has been able to stay married to him for 39 years.

"It's very simple," says Hilary. "My father can't function without my mother. Of course, in contrast to him, everybody has made her out to be a madonna, which just isn't true. She's a very tough lady—very bright, but with a cynical, sarcastic streak."