I was trying today to explain to my son just who Howard Cosell was, and I mentioned the time that he was covering a football game on Monday Night Football (I think.) The game was a complete snoozer, and somewhere during the fourth quarter Cosell said, “Well, there’s nothing going on down there on the field. I might as well report on the sunset.” They cut to a shot of the sky, and what followed was incredible–a beautiful, almost florid play by play commentary on the sun as it passed through the clouds and towards the horizon. I doubt that anyone would have the guts to do this sort of thing today, even if they were able to get away with it.
I know I’m not dreaming this, but I haven’t found a copy of the broadcast on the net. Does anyone else remember it or have a link?
Cosell announced when I was pretty young…I don’t know when he retired, but I remember him before I turned 10. My dad couldn’t *stand *him. That tainted my view…I tended to like/dislike according to Dad’s tastes. Not always, but quite often.
Now that I’m adult with his own tastes and inclinations, I can view Howard on his own merits, and I have to say, I find him pretty annoying.
I don’t remember him describing a sunset. Cosell also described the death of 91 year old George Halas as “inevitable”.
I liked Cosell in the beginning of his MNF career as something different, not afraid to say if a running back like Leroy Kelly was not a factor when he gained only 44 years. But success went to his head in a big way and his low self-esteem was masked by an over-bearing ego.
He really turned in the corporate whore: would denigrate baseball in the early 1970s but when ABC got the contract in 1976: pow-he was a baseball fan. To be fair Cosell did approve of baseball teams such as the Yankees staying in cities while football teams like the Giants moved to the suburbs. He also thought they were trying to increase scoring.
It’s not listed in wiki but baseball announcer Mel Allen “While his partner, Harry Jones, attempted to talk baseball during a stultifying broadcast from Minnesota one night, Allen turned instead to poetry, reciting from memory the first thirty-seven lines of Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha”” (source: Bill James “The Baseball Book 1990”.
Fourth quarter on MNF and he described the sunset? Where were they playing, Alaska? But yeah, Cosell was annoying. I recall hearing abt Lennon’s death from him as well. I was working evening shift and had just gotten home and turn on the game for the score. Such sad news from such an annoying source.
Yeah, this bit makes this story start to smell fishy.
It would have had to have been a West Coast city (and probably a northerly one, as the sunset time gets later, the further north you go, during the summer months). And, it would have had to have been very early in the season (as the sun sets earlier and earlier through the fall).
So, we’d be talking about San Francisco or Oakland – Seattle is further north, but played in a dome while Cosell was doing MNF (though, I suppose, they might have simply had a camera outside).
In early September (i.e., the beginning of the NFL season), the sun sets in San Francisco around 7:30pm PDT. But, back when Cosell was broadcasting, MNF started at 6pm Pacific. As an NFL game takes about 3 hours to play, sunset would have been happening around halftime of such a game.
It’s possible, as I noted, that it was in Seattle, with an exterior camera…but even so, the sun sets in Seattle in early September around 7:45pm. That still won’t translate to the fourth quarter.
It’s also possible that it was a preseason game. ISTR that MNF occasionally did preseason games back then (much as they do now). The sun sets in San Francisco around 8:15pm in early August, so I suppose that it’s possible.
Perhaps it happened during an ABC baseball broadcast that was being played on the West Coast. He and Keith Jackson did prime-time MLB games (tho my memories of that are only of the recreations in his HBO biopic).
To me it sounds very much like something Cosell could/would do. I miss the guy. He brought a little something extra to sporting events…a cultural literacy that the “jockocrity” he was known to complain about couldn’t match. I also enjoyed Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football.
It might not have been Monday Night Football, but I definitely remember it as a football game.
The subject came up while my son and I were talking about When We Were Kings. He made a comment that the old guys talking seemed lame to him; he was referring to Cosell and George Plimpton. I explained that Plimpton was from the previous generation, but that he had gone in the ring with boxers to get a story. Along with the sunset story, I remember Cosell as having made boxing in the '70 a lot more fun to follow.
I remember watching Cosell yakking about something or other while standing outdoors on a rainy, windy day. He was holding an umbrella with one hand and his mic with the other, but then the wind picked up … and his toupee started flapping in the breeze. He tried to hold it down with his umbrella hand, and kept talking (what a pro!), but he wasn’t doing so well at juggling the two jobs. Then a hand reached in from off-camera and grabbed the umbrella, which left Howard with a free hand to hold down his toupee. As I recall, he didn’t miss a beat, just kept talking through the difficulty.
I vaguely recall that he may have done some college stuff with Keith Jackson… high profile games like USC v UCLA, Ohio State v Michigan etc. Maybe this?
That was the Kentucky Derby, late 1970s or early 80s, not long before he retired. I remember seeing that, too. Storms were rolling through Louisville just before the race, and he was doing the commentary.
Cool catch (seriously) but ------- around here we usually refer to really old threads someone restarts like this as “zombies” and expect a couple snarky remarks about “beating a dead horse” or the like for reviving it.
I always liked Howard on MNF, but think it was the teaming up of him, Frank Gifford and “Dandy” Don Meredith that made it work for me. I remember that there was a poll taken while he was doing MNF with one question asking who your favorite sports broadcaster was and another question was who is your least favorite. Howard was number one on both lists.
