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

Before Emmy left the safe haven of suburbia to join the WACs, she had known one Jew in her life. And Cosell, when he first spied her at a Brooklyn Army base, thought she looked like June Allyson, the quintessential blonde WASP movie virgin. Emmy thought she had never encountered a man with such "brashness and drive," except perhaps for her own headstrong father. They raised Hilary and her older sister, Jill, in an open, humanist home, one devoid of organized religion. The girls occasionally went to different churches or temple with friends, and today Jill is a baptized Christian, while Hilary characterizes herself as "a raving Zionist." She was recently married and, following a 4½-year career as a producer at NBC Sports, is writing a book. Jill, divorced, has four children, the grandchildren.

Cosell's own sense of Jewishness was revived by the horrors of the Munich Olympic massacre. He was, at the time, so obviously beside himself that Arledge kept him off camera and let Jim McKay handle the reporting. Subsequently, Cosell's identity with Israel has heightened, and at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Howard Cosell Center for Physical Education is currently being built in honor of his support of the school. At a luncheon announcing this project, Cosell said, "I know how deeply Jewish I am now, even though I married a Gentile girl who has been my life."

All of the foregoing personal advisory is, of course, academic when it comes to people's perception of Cosell as a Jew. or to borrow from Alfred Kazin, "the New York Jew." Or "the New York kike," as Hilary bluntly says she knows many Americans view her father. Certainly, this isn't to infer that all who dislike Cosell are, ipso facto, anti-Semitic. Pointedly, some of his sharpest critics have been Jewish, most recently David Halberstam and, inevitably, Young, who's now with the New York Post. Someone at Young's paper once wrote that he "stalks Cosell as Inspector Javert did Jean Valjean."

Significantly, like Cosell himself, many Jews in TV are reluctant to link the antipathy many viewers feel toward him to religious prejudice. Many Gentiles, on the other hand, think the connection demonstrably clear, which suggests the obvious: that while Jews may fear anti-Semitism, non-Jews know best the extent of its existence. Typical is Beano Cook, ABC's college football analyst. "There's just no question," says Cook. "You can't avoid the fact that a lot of the anti-Howard stuff is anti-Semitic. All I ever hear is, 'The Jews run television.' And he's such a visible target. People who don't like me on television say I'm irreverent. I know damn well if my name were Goldstein, they wouldn't say I was irreverent, they'd say I was another wise-ass Jew, like that Howard Cosell."

Clearly, Cosell's identification with Ali turned an element of America against him, escalating his regular Jew-bastard mail into nigger-loving/Jew-bastard mail. Not surprisingly, no group seems to regard him with as much affection as blacks do. On one memorable occasion, a couple of years ago in Kansas City, as Cosell's limousine cruised through a black neighborhood on the way to his hotel, it drew past a street fight. Cosell bade the driver to stop, alighted into the midst of the melee and, like a modern deus ex machina, instantly brought the hostilities to a close with his mere presence. He then admonished the participants, distributed autographs, returned to the car and proceeded on his way.

Of course, to many viewers Cosell isn't symbolic or representative of anything. He's simply a know-it-all. The law of television sport is that only former jocks, men who hit .238 years ago, are allowed to render opinion. The civilians in the booth, their brains in their adenoids, aren't supposed to harbor thought. Cosell has become controversial not so much because he might be wrong in what he says, or even in how he says it, but because, deep inside, so many viewers believe that he hasn't earned the right to speak up.

In a way, it's not so much that Cosell has stepped on toes in the broadcast booth, but that he has usurped the territory formerly owned by the sports fans themselves. The whole point of being a sports fan is to have an opinion, and argue with other sports fans. But here came an announcer who had never split a seam in his life, and here he was spewing opinions and making statements. Sports fans couldn't argue among themselves at the bar anymore. Instead, they had to argue with Howard Cosell. Or worse than that, the alternative: They had to agree with Howard Cosell.

Chet Simmons, commissioner of the USFL and former head of NBC Sports and ESPN, admits that he "fervently wished" the USFL could have prevailed on Cosell to work the league's ABC games. "You see," says Simmons, "most of the time Howard says what the fan wants to say—only he hasn't got the guts to say it himself."

There is, then, a certain amount of schizophrenia inherent in the way much of the population regards Cosell. No wonder the famous TV Guide poll of five years ago found him, indisputably, the most liked and disliked announcer in sports. The mere mention of his name, particularly when it is spit out in imitation of the man himself—HOW-WUD KO-SSSELL—has become a code word, like Dolly Parton or Herbert Hoover. In the classic way of a phenomenon, the image by now has far outdistanced the professional, not to mention the person.

For all the contention that attends him, Cosell prefers to cling to one elementary conclusion. "There's no mystery," says Cosell. "It is only attacks by a certain coterie of print people that make me controversial. I never attain that status with thoughtful people."