Xoutpost.com - this is Howard Cosell

OT good read in today's NYT:

As 'Monday Night' Moves, an Old Voice Weighs In
By RICHARD SANDOMIR

Published: April 25, 2005

Hello again, everyone, this is Howard Cosell, speaking of "Monday Night Football" - and its horrifying transfer from ABC, the network that I verily built with the red-haired yoda, Roone Arledge, to ESPN, that citadel of sports voracity.

I have appeared before you in this space three times in recent years despite my corporeal demise 10 years ago Saturday. First, I assessed the hiring of the logorrheic scamp Dennis Miller for the Cosellian seat of arcane intelligence. Subsequently I rated the performances of Jon Voight and John Turturro, who were privileged to portray me in the films "Ali" and "Monday Night Mayhem."

Advertisement

Finally, last fall, I tendered my posthumous resignation to ABC after it illicitly instituted, as I wrote, with "singular imprudence," a five-second delay on "Monday Night Football" to satisfy those so fearful of stray indecencies that they would deny the full exercise of free speech in real time.

Now, I return, undaunted by the cessation of life, unafraid to speak, unbowed by the cupidity of the National Football League, in the matter of "Monday Night."

Obtuse, inane, lunkheaded, presbyopic, vacuous and misanthropic - there is no question that transporting "Monday Night" to ESPN is all of these.

It is inconceivable to this humble reporter - who made "Monday Night," not Dandy Don or the Giffer; who revolutionized mundane highlight narration, once the domain of local TV hacks, into an art that my rock 'n' roll friends the Bay City Rollers so admired; and who once, due to a virulent flu, retched upon the Danderoo's boots - that the Cosell football canon would ever be deeded to cable.

Those who were present at the creation of "Monday Night Football" know the tale: how the great Arledge secured the deal with Alvin (Pete) Rozelle, the boy commissioner who headed the duly adjudicated illegal monopoly that was (and is) the N.F.L. And how Roone, the prescient and flame-haired one, decided that I, who had dragged boxing out of the dark ages, who had defended Muhammad Ali, and who had stood by Curt Flood's side in his crusade against baseball mammon, deserved a larger stage suited to the depth and breadth of my broadcast talents.

If you watched, from my first game from Cleveland Municipal Stadium on Sept. 21, 1970 - the star of stars that evening was my dear friend, Joe Willie Namath - to my last in 1984, you knew that you and yours had been changed forever.

And you knew, for it became etched upon your television DNA, that "Monday Night Football" was on ABC. You remember my canary yellow ABC Sports blazer, the one that I took from the broadcast booth to my guest appearances on "The Odd Couple." You remember how I tutored the Giffer and Dandy Don. You recall my mentoring of the Juice, of Fran Tarkenton, of Alex Karras, about whom my friend George Plimpton wrote with such perspicacity.

You recall, more than anything else, me.

It all eventuated at ABC.

I am cognizant of what has befallen ABC Sports. I would not recognize it, puny and nearly powerless, where once it had been the network sports colossus. I fear that I would not be recognized in the corridors that were once my spheres of verbal dominance - while someone named Dick Vitale would.

Yet even as the Olympics have long since vanished from ABC, as this once titanic division seems shrunken to the size of a gardener's shack behind the ESPN mansion, I could never envision "Monday Night Football" in the clutches of a network that employed Rush Limbaugh to comment on football under the defective assumption that he would manufacture Cosell-quality controversy.

Never had there been such low-grade fertilizer. What those who consider me the fossilized remains of the pre-"Dream Job" Epoch cannot grasp is that my grandeur - so evident to young and old, rich and poor, black and white - never emanated from being disputatious for mere effect. I was simply telling it like it was.

You need only ask the diminutive one, Jim McKay.

Those who were edified by my book, "I Never Played the Game," will remember how I tired of "Monday Night Football" and wrote ill-tempered things about my colleagues Alfalfa Michaels and the Giffer. Apologies will not be rendered here as a futile exercise in wayward, puerile nostalgia.

But as an exercise in protecting what I created through my understanding of the television medium - who else could have divided the country so perfectly into camps that simultaneously voted me the best-loved and most-hated announcer? - I am directing my legal team to bar ESPN from using my iconic image and signal verbosity to promote "Monday Night Football" in any form from 2006 to 2013.

I cannot, however, prevent Chris Berman from utilizing his pale impersonation of me.

This is Howard Cosell