Cosell Defined TV Sports Journalism Although He Shunned Former Colleagues, Longtime Broadcaster Leaves His Mark

What was Howard Cosell’s impact on the wide world of televised sports?

“It was total, it was epic, it was cosmic,” said Terry O’Neil, former executive producer at NBC Sports and now an executive with ABC News who began his broadcasting career in 1971 as an ABC Sports researcher often assigned to Cosell. “He’s the one guy who made it possible for the people who followed him to tell the truth. None of us could have made the attempt without him. Howard Cosell was the father of real journalism in televised sports.”

Cosell died Sunday in New York City at the age of 77 of a heart embolism after a long bout with cancer. In recent years, he stopped seeing many of his friends and former colleagues and had grown increasingly bitter after ABC canceled his awardwinning investigative “Sportsbeat” show in 1985, his last attempt at “telling it like it is” on network television.

Cosell often complained that he never was accorded the proper respect he deserved, according to several in the small cadre of confidantes with whom he did stay in touch. But in recent weeks, when word began to leak that his condition was deteriorating by the day, there was no question how old friends - even old rivals from other networks - felt about his exalted place in the history of the medium.

“Kicking and screaming, he dragged the industry into responsibility for what was said on the air and for telling the whole story,” said Ted Shaker, former executive producer at CBS Sports who is now head of Sports Illustrated’s television arm. “He upped the ante, he offered the journalistic high-water mark for the industry. That’s his legacy, and it was damned important.”

“In the modern era, he was just so unique,” said Dick Ebersol, the current president of NBC Sports who also began as an Olympic researcher for ABC and Cosell in the 1960s. “He got beyond what I’d call the cosmetic world of television, which said you had to look and sound a certain way.

“From the ‘60s to the ‘70s until he left in the mid-80s, it was always substance over style with Howard. He was defined by what he said, not how he looked… . The great sadness is that he was a major figure - he created sports journalism - but his bitterness cut him off from people at a time when the whole world would have been predisposed to honor him.

“He deserved his success. He worked hard for it, but he didn’t get to enjoy his success the way other people did. I’ve been sad he hasn’t been out there receiving his due. For whatever reason, he cut himself off from the world.” Ebersol said he hadn’t seen Cosell since his own 40th birthday party in July 1987, when Cosell showed up as a surprise guest and did a mock interview with him.

O’Neil, who helped edit one of Cosell’s books in the early ‘70s, also lost touch about the same time. His last meeting with the man he worked with for almost 10 years came in the late ‘80s, when O’Neil did an ESPN special picking the top 40 figures in the history of sports. Cosell was in his top five, along with the man who helped make him famous, former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali.