PHILADELPHIA _ After 77 years of life and 40 years of broadcasting, the most recognized sportscaster in history has been silenced. Howard Cosell, known for his sometimes-brutal honesty and for his booming, nasal voice, apparently succumbed to a blockage in his heart.
Cosell, who had battled cancer since 1991, died Sunday at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York City, reportedly of a heart embolism. He was 77. Silence now reigns.
Cosell once spoke those words: ``Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff. I have been called all of these. Of course, I am.''
In speaking them, he showed not only an admitted egotism but also omitted the most obvious: Cosell was uncontrollably honest and tremendously famous.
That honesty motivated Cosell to accept Muhammad Ali after he changed his name from Cassius Clay. It led him to defend John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Summer Olympics, when they raised their fists in a show of solidarity with the Black Power movement. It latched him to Curt Flood's side in Flood's challenging of major league baseball's reserve clause.
Cosell saw the world as a place of rights and wrongs, and his place in the world as its commentator. Sports was a part of his world, and, thereby, fair game for his opinionated observations. Before Cosell, sports commentators lived principally in print. Broadcasters were bland. Cosell seized the stage of television and, on the coattails of Ali and an experiment in 1970 called ``Monday Night Football,'' cruised the road to stardom.
``Howard Cosell was one of the most original people to ever appear on American television,'' said Roone Arledge, ABC news director and former sports director in Cosell's rise to stardom. ``He became a giant by the simple act of telling the truth in an industry that was not used to hearing it and considered it revolutionary.''
A giant, to be sure. Cosell appeared in two Woody Allen films, ``Broadway Danny Rose'' and, more memorably, ``Bananas,'' in which he mocked his profession and himself by doing spot reporting of a government's overthrow. One survey found that 96 percent of people asked recognized his name.
He considered a senatorial run in the mid-'70s, a plan nixed by his publicity-shy family. His wife, Emmy, put her foot down, saying she would not allow herself and her two daughters the pain of public scrutiny Cosell's run would bring. Emmy died in 1990. Cosell retired from ABC in 1992, after doing only radio since 1985. His daughters, Jill and Hilary, survive him.
So do many friends, Ali among themI enjoyed interviews with Howard the best. We ased the heavyweight champion to be stripped of ayed off each other. That's partially true.''
Theirs was a relationship unlike any other in sports histon Garrett, in the heat of a broadcast, ``That l918 in Winston-Salem, N.C., and raised in Irish Brooklyn.
And they scoffed at the blistering comments hee opposed the brutality and crookedness of the boxing racket that so bountifully rewarded him. He left boxingl claimed he fought for the regulation of boxinr later, he left ``Monday Night Football.''
om city to city the way he ripped Walter O'Malley for moving the Brooklyn Dodgers west. He called the footbaork Univesity's law school _ and a journalist bed as the boxing industry he blasted. As he leftotball'' broadcasts:
``Like President Reagamatic, and, he supposed, every moment of the broadcast dramatic by association, mirrored Murrow's.
That tone irked millions. It attracted equal numbers. A survey sho'':
