Muhammad Ali’s radio mate Howard Cosell abandoned boxing calls after savage bout
As triumphant underdog, in 1964 Cassius Clay snatched the microphone from broadcaster Howard Cosell, born 100 years ago.
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AS triumphant underdog, the then Cassius Clay snatched the microphone from broadcaster Howard Cosell and yelled, “I am the greatest. I have upset the world.”
Cosell, a former lawyer turned sports commentator, calmly instructed the new world heavyweight boxing champion to “Let go of the mic.”
That exchange, on February 26, 1964, after Clay had defeated Sonny Liston, set the tone for a professional and personal friendship that endured until Cosell’s death in 1995, helping both to boost their public profiles.
Cosell was born 100 years ago tomorrow, on March 25, 1918, at Winston-Salem in New York, to Isadore and Nellie Cohen. His father, an accountant for a clothing store chain, later moved the family to Brooklyn. While studying at New York University he changed his name from Cohen to Cosell, the family’s original Polish name.
After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in English at New York University, he studied at the university School of Law, where he edited the law review. He was a major in US Army Transportation Corps during World War II, and in 1944 married Mary “Emmy” Abrams, who died in 1990. After the war Cosell opened a law office in Manhattan, where his clients included several actors from his time working on summer stock productions during college, and athletes such as baseballer Willie Mays, which led to Cosell representing New York Little League.
In 1953 an ABC program manager asked him to host a Saturday morning radio show that featured Little Leaguers asking questions of major leaguers. Cosell described the popular twice-a-week series as a “combination of Juvenile Jury and Meet the Press”.
“I give the youngsters leading questions,” he said, “Like, ‘Coach, you once called your team a load of garbage. Now what did you mean by that?’ ”
Cosell did the show for three years without pay, then abandoned what had become an unsatisfying legal career for full-time broadcasting in 1956. When he approached
ABC Radio president Robert Pauley with a proposal for a weekly show, Pauley said the network could not afford to develop untried talent, but Cosell could go on air if he found a sponsor. Cosell returned with sponsorship from a relative’s shirt company to launch Speaking of Sports, but alienated colleagues when he told them: “Let’s face it, this is the toy department of life.”
Boasting a “tell it like it is” approach, Cosell teamed with the ex ——Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher “Big Numba Thirteen” Ralph Branca on pre- and post-game radio shows about the New York Mets on WABC from 1962.
Cosell became the first broadcaster to use Clay’s new name of Muhammad Ali, when the boxer joined the Nation of Islam, and in 1967 defended Ali’s right to refuse to fight in Vietnam for religious reasons. When the New York State Boxing Commission withdrew Ali’s championship, Cosell argued: “What the government did to this man was inhuman and illegal under the Fifth and 14th Amendments. Nobody says a damned word about professional football players who dodged the draft. But Muhammad was different; he was black and he was boastful.”
In 1968 as part of the ABC’s Olympic coverage at the Mexico City Summer Games, he again outraged audiences for his sympathetic interview with sprinter Tommie Smith, sent home by the US Olympic Committee after making a “black power” clenched fist gesture on the victory stand.
Cosell became a household name when ABC executive Roone Arledge hired him in 1969 as an analyst on Monday Night Football, then trailing other networks in TV ratings. Arledge teamed Cosell with former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith and insisted both broadcasters would be independent of the National Football League.
Ali later helped Cosell’s ratings as a boxing commentator during an appearance on ABC Wide World Of Sports with Joe Frazier in February 1974. As Ali gave a blow-by-blow commentary of a recent fight between himself and Frazier, Ali’s arrogance provoked Frazier. As the two wrestled around the studio floor, rather than try to break them up Cosell provided a detailed account of the brawl, broken up by entourages of each fighter.
After watching a brutal bout in Houston in December 1982, when Larry Holmes could have killed Tex Cobb, Cosell announced that he would do no more boxing commentary.
A decade earlier Cosell had testified before the US Senate, asking that fighters be protected from injury and exploitation. In Houston, from the fifth round to the 15th in the Holmes-Cobb fight, Cosell saw the sport reduced to savagery licensed for profit.
At the microphone, for 30 minutes he cried out for someone to stop the fight: “Doesn’t he know,” Cosell demanded of the referee, “that he is constructing an advertisement for the abolition of boxing?”
He left Monday Night Football in 1983, at the end of a four-year, $6 million contract, saying that pro football had become “a stagnant bore”.
Originally published as Muhammad Ali’s radio mate Howard Cosell abandoned boxing calls after savage bout
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