'HUMBLE HOWARD' COSELLHow is it possible that 16 years have passed without a definitive biography of Howard Cosell?

Mark Ribowsky has made it worth the wait. "Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports" is an exhilarating look back at a man and a time that are inextricably entwined with each other.

It may seem Cosell-like hyperbole when Ribowsky writes, "There can be no overestimating how unique and even unprecedented Cosell's fame was by the middle 1970s. He had done no less than make himself a one-man industry by turning scabrousness into an endearment," but that must have been the way we felt about Cosell, because even when we cursed him we kept on watching. Even Woody Allen was a fan, giving Cosell guest spots in three of his movies -- playing himself, of course.

Arrogant, tempestuous and brilliant, Cosell dragged sports journalism kicking and screaming into an era when electronic media replaced print. Born in 1918 and raised in Brooklyn, Cosell found his niche in 1956 with a radio show, "Speaking of Sports." After waiting so long for his break, Cosell pursued stardom with a vengeance, bringing the big guns of a scathing, contrarian wit and bludgeoning pomposity to bear on sports' sacred cows. He made enemies with his aggressive interviewing style, but, as Ribowsky points out, a hard kernel of integrity in his bluster.

Cosell was the most vocal member of the sports media in supporting Muhammad Ali in his legal battle with the U.S. government over the draft, and Curt Flood, who sued the baseball establishment in an attempt to become a free agent. For several years, the public practically saw Ali and Cosell as an act; Ali actually told Cosell to call him a racially offensive name in public so that "They'll think we hate one another."

The irony to Cosell's life is that he yearned for the more serious journalistic work that would surely have stifled his individuality. He lost ABC's "Wide World of Sports" job to the far less abrasive Jim McKay, and never got over his bitterness when his longtime supporter at ABC, Roone Arledge, passed him over for the coverage of the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Star Tribune, Star Tribune
HOWARD COSELL By Mark Ribowsky

Cosell was so truculent -- to use one of his favorite adjectives -- that when ABC arranged a farewell dinner for him in 1986, he informed the network head, "I don't want to be honored. If you want to talk about my departure, talk to my lawyer."

"His coda," Ribowsky writes, correctly, I think, "more than anything else, is his singularity -- a long lost quality in the postmodern culture that has wiped men like him off the slate." Howard Cosell made his own mold, and then broke it.

Allen Barra's next book, "Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays: The Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden Age," is forthcoming from Crown.