It is hard to explain to someone who didn't live through it just how much people hated Howard Cosell. We are talking about a guy who was so polarizing that bars in the 1970s actually held contests where the grand prize was the "honor" of throwing a brick through a television set while his face was on the screen. Seriously.
When Howard Cosell and Monday Night Football first teamed up in 1970, the world of sports broadcasting was, honestly, pretty boring. It was mostly "homer" announcers who acted like every player was a saint and every game was a masterpiece. Cosell changed that. He didn't just report the game; he interrogated it. He brought this nasal, Brooklyn-born lawyer energy to the booth that made every Monday night feel like a high-stakes trial. You couldn't ignore him.
The Most Hated (and Loved) Trio in History
The original magic of Monday Night Football wasn't just about the football. It was the chemistry—or sometimes the lack of it—between Cosell, "Dandy" Don Meredith, and later, Frank Gifford.
Roone Arledge, the visionary head of ABC Sports, knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted a show, not just a game. He paired the bombastic, "tell it like it is" Cosell with Meredith, the folksy, singing former Dallas Cowboys quarterback. It was the ultimate "odd couple" dynamic. Meredith would crack jokes and sing "Turn out the lights, the party’s over" when a game got out of hand, while Cosell would use five-syllable words to describe a simple tackle.
Frank Gifford eventually joined as the "straight man" to keep the peace, but the tension was real. Gifford once admitted he hated some of the "razzle-dazzle" camera work and the constant bickering, but the ratings didn't lie. By 1971, the show was a national phenomenon.
Why Cosell was different
He wasn't an athlete. He was a lawyer who happened to find a microphone. He called out what he called the "jockocracy"—the idea that only former players were qualified to talk about sports. Cosell didn't care about making friends in the locker room. He defended Muhammad Ali when the world turned its back on him. He reported on the Munich Olympics massacre with a gravity that most sportscasters couldn't touch.
But he was also deeply insecure.
Despite his "Humble Howard" nickname (which was pure sarcasm from the fans), he read every piece of hate mail. He was obsessed with his own impact. He once famously said, "I've been called arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a show-off. And, of course, I am."
The Breaking Point: Why He Finally Quit
Nothing lasts forever, especially when it's built on friction. By the early 1980s, the relationship between Howard Cosell and Monday Night Football was starting to crumble. Cosell was getting bored. He started calling pro football a "stagnant bore."
The real beginning of the end happened on September 5, 1983.
During a game between the Washington Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys, Cosell referred to wide receiver Alvin Garrett as a "little monkey." It was a comment that ignited a massive racial controversy. Cosell defended himself, saying he used the term affectionately and had even called his own grandkids (and white players like Mike Adamle) "little monkeys." While Garrett himself didn't seem to hold a grudge, the public backlash was immense.
But that wasn't the only reason he left.
- The Violence: He grew disgusted by the brutality of sports. After covering a particularly bloody heavyweight fight between Larry Holmes and Randall "Tex" Cobb in 1982, he vowed never to call boxing again.
- The Travel: Both he and his wife, Emmy, were tired of the constant "road show" life of MNF.
- The Ego: He felt the network was leaning too hard on "jocks" and not enough on serious journalism.
He officially walked away from the MNF booth after the 1983 season. He didn't go quietly. In his 1985 book I Never Played the Game, he ripped into his former colleagues, specifically Gifford and Meredith, calling the whole production a "comic book" operation. ABC responded by canceling his Sportsbeat show. The bridge wasn't just burned; it was nuked.
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The Moment America Stopped for John Lennon
If you want to understand how influential this man was, you have to look at December 8, 1980.
Most people think of sports as an escape from the real world. But that night, the real world crashed into the game. In the middle of a tie game between the Patriots and the Dolphins, word reached the booth that John Lennon had been shot and killed in New York.
It was Howard Cosell who broke the news to America.
"An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival."
It was a chilling moment that proved Monday Night Football was the town square of America. If it happened on Monday night, Howard told you about it.
The Lasting Legacy of Howard Cosell and Monday Night Football
Basically, every sports broadcast you watch today is a descendant of what Cosell did.
Before him, announcers were essentially shills for the league. Today, we expect analysts to be critical. We expect a "three-man booth" with different personalities. We expect the game to be "the show." He proved that you could be the most disliked man on TV and still be the one everyone had to watch.
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He wasn't perfect. He was often wrong, frequently annoying, and his ego was large enough to have its own zip code. But he was authentic. He didn't use a teleprompter for his famous halftime highlights—he just did them live, off the top of his head, with a cadence that no one has ever been able to copy perfectly.
What we can learn from the Cosell era:
- Conflict sells. You don't need everyone in the booth to be best friends. You need them to be interesting.
- Preparation is everything. Even though he acted like he was just "telling it like it is," Cosell was a workaholic who studied the law and the game with equal intensity.
- Don't be afraid to be the villain. If everyone likes you, you're probably not saying anything worth hearing.
If you're looking to dive deeper into this era of TV history, I highly recommend finding old clips of the halftime highlights from the mid-70s. Watching Cosell narrate a two-minute clip of a muddy game in Pittsburgh is like watching a masterclass in rhythm and vocabulary. It's a reminder of a time when sports felt a little more dangerous and a lot more human.
To really understand the impact, look for the 2002 TV movie Monday Night Mayhem. John Turturro plays Cosell, and while it's a dramatization, it captures that frantic, ego-driven energy that made Monday nights mandatory viewing for an entire generation. Check out the original broadcast archives if you can find them—there’s nothing quite like the real thing.