Revolutionary in his work on ABC’s boxing, “Wide World of Sports,” and “Monday Night Football” telecasts, Howard Cosell was outspoken and opinionated, often insightful but annoyingly verbose. The overtly intelligent Cosell was never reverential toward the athletes he covered, but his shrill speaking style, incessant preaching, and overbearing manner were irritants that eventually got under the skin of his employers and co-workers, and much of his audience. He made no secret of his distate for baseball (he found it boring), and when he joined “Monday Night Baseball” in 1976 his lack of deep baseball knowledge was the subject of much criticism. When he retired from network television, he wrote a sports column for the New York Daily News through the late 1980s.
