I remember when the Vietnam crisis was going, you'd go on television and say, 'If you don't believe Muhammad Ali is champion, then get in the ring with him.' I want to say that helped me during my exile.' " "I'm glad I got to know you," Ali told Cosell on ABC's " Wide World of Sports" in 1979. government after he refused to serve in the military to fight in Vietnam, citing his principles as a Muslim. Ribowsky, author of "Don't Look Back: Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball," does the work to show how important it was to Ali that Cosell, a former labor lawyer, did the background work to offer a legal analysis that Ali's lawyers could - and did - use to prevail in his years-long fight with the U.S. Late in this definitive rendering of Cosell, packed both with great detail and Cosell-evoking sentence-stoppers (pleonasm, gasconade, threnody), Mark Ribowsky quotes the writer Lewis Grizzard from 1991: "I can still hear him." This was true then, long after Cosell's heyday in the '70s, and it remains true now for many who grew up mimicking, "This is How-ard Co-sell reporting live from ringside!" I can still hear him, too.Ĭosell will forever be known for both the putdowns and serious give-and-take of his electric, unpredictable interviews with Muhammad Ali. No man shaped contemporary sports journalism more than Howard Cosell, an exasperating and often razor-sharp presence behind the mike whose boxing calls might have been the best ever ("Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!") and whose "Monday Night Football" banter with "Dandy Don" Meredith set the tone for ESPN before the sports network existed. By Mark Ribowsky (Norton 477 pages $29.95)
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