The Wound and the Bow

I know that Howard Cosell was childishly self-absorbed and petulant (“It’s hard to describe the rage and frustration you feel, both personally and professionally, when you are vilified in a manner that would make Richard Nixon look like a beloved humanitarian. You can’t imagine what it does to a person until you’ve experienced it yourself, especially when you know that the criticism is essentially unfair”); that he would obsess upon, say, the Des Moines Register’s critique of his performance; that too soon after he achieved prominence the beautiful balance between righteous anger and comic self-importance got lost and he was left only with anger and self-importance; that he once said that he, along with Walter Cronkite and Johnny Carson, was one of the three great men in the history of American television; that he mercilessly teased his fellow Monday Night Football announcers Frank Gifford and Don Meredith but pouted whenever they teased him; that he was certain he should have been a network anchor and/or a U.S. senator; that the very thing he thought needed deflating—the “importance of sports”—he was crucially responsible for inflating; that after hitching a ride on boxing and football for decades he then turned around and dismissed them when he no longer needed them (“The NFL has become a stagnant bore”; “I’m disgusted with the brutality of boxing”); that, in an attempt to assert his (nonexistent) expertise, he would frequently excoriate any rookie who had the temerity to commit an egregious error on Monday Night Football (dig the Cosellian diction); that he was a shameless name-dropper of people he barely knew; that he once said about a black football player, “That little monkey gets loose,” then, regarding the brouhaha that ensued, said, “They’re conducting a literary pogrom against me”; that the New York Times sports columnist Red Smith once said, “I have tried hard to like Howard Cosell, and I have failed”; that the legendary sportswriter Jimmy Cannon said about him, “This is a guy who changed his name [from Cohen to Cosell], put on a toupee, and tried to convince the world he tells it like it is”; that David Halberstam said that Cosell bullied anyone who disagreed with him; that he frequently boasted about Monday Night Football, “We’re bigger than the game”; that he once told a Senate subcommittee, “I’m a unique personality who has had more impact upon sports broadcasting in America than any person who has yet lived”; that he once wrote, “Who the hell made Monday Night Football unlike any other sports program on the air? If you want the plain truth, I did”; that at the height of...