Howard Cosell

Howard Cosell, who died yesterday at 77, was at his core a shameless self-promoter, full of bombast, self-importance and self-righteousness, the kinds of qualities that routinely made him America's least-liked sportscaster in a series of TV Guide polls."

He wore silver football shoes, the right color for a mercurial runner. Was there ever a seam so small that Joe Washington couldn't sneak through it? For three years, he rallied Colts fans, feinting and dashing and dancing for yardage, a ray of hope on a team spinning in reverse. "Yeah, they were lean times," Washington, 56, said of his stint in Baltimore (1978-1980). "But I never thought I had limits. I could get in and out of places that other guys couldn't dream of. "My feet had a mind of their own."

Howard Cosell ate breakfast that morning in a big booth at The Roost at the Cross Keys Inn, sitting all by himself, which naturally caused me to declare, "Look, there's Howard Cosell, surrounded by all his friends."It was an easy line, and a mean one. Cosell was here for the Preakness. He was at his bombastic, self-inflated, sometimes self-parodic peak back then, back in the early '80s, back when he was so much larger than life that you had to needle him to give yourself some breathing room.

He wore silver football shoes, the right color for a mercurial runner. Was there ever a seam so small that Joe Washington couldn't sneak through it? For three years, he rallied Colts fans, feinting and dashing and dancing for yardage, a ray of hope on a team spinning in reverse. "Yeah, they were lean times," Washington, 56, said of his stint in Baltimore (1978-1980). "But I never thought I had limits. I could get in and out of places that other guys couldn't dream of. "My feet had a mind of their own."

The TV Repairman: CBS does the first of its 16 baseball games tomorrow (Tigers at White Sox, 1 p.m., Channel 11), promising the announcing team of Jack Buck and Tim McCarver will be better than last year.It's not often a network goes around bad-mouthing its talent, which, in this case, appears unjustified. The two easy-to-take veterans worked just fine together.Howard Cosell, in his latest diatribe, "What's Wrong With Sports," says McCarver is "unbearable" as an announcer, which, considering the source, is a ringing endorsement.

Late in the afternoon of Oct. 2, 1979, this columnist went to Baltimore-Washington International Airport for the arrival of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan; he was coming to town for a Republican fund-raiser. Reagan arrived in a yellow Lear jet, spoke to a cluster of photographers and reporters from newspapers and TV and radio stations, then slipped into a limousine.Reporters started to walk away, across a nearby parking lot, when suddenly into our ears came the most famous sports voice in America.

FROM the April 17 issue of Sports Illustrated:"CBS commentator Billy Packer has never concealed his contempt for women's basketball. During a broadcast he once speculated on the kind of wife Mississippi's Jennifer Gillom would make, and he has advanced the proposition that women's teams be done away with entirely -- that real gender equity will result only if there's a single team for which both men and women try out. Thus it was hardly surprising to...

Are you ready for George Foreman, singer? Home Box Office has hired Foreman to be host of his own entertainment special, but there seems to be some kind of conflict as to exactly what kind of show it will be.HBO wants Foreman to do comedy. Foreman wants to sing."If they're going to [get] me up there before an audience and with a microphone, then I want to sing," he said. "They're going to put the camera on and think the jokes are coming out, and I'm going to sing. I want to be a singer."Foreman went on to say he is going to try to develop what he called a "TV style" of his own. " . . . It's going to be between Howard Cosell and 'Amos 'n Andy,' " he said.

The man with the ''unsinkable ego'' is dead. For decades the distinctive voice of Howard Cosell was familiar to sports lovers across the nation and his name known in every household -- every one, that is, but mine.At the peak of his career, I was invited to a cocktail party by friends who were great football fans and, as it turned out, close pals of the big man himself. Had they known that each morning I routinely toss out the sports pages of the daily paper unread, they probably would not have included me among their guests.

In his prime, Earl Weaver could be loud, profane and abusive. And that was around his friends. To umpires, he was the manager they loved to hate. To Jim Palmer, he was Napoleon, only shorter. And tomorrow, they put him in the baseball Hall of Fame as one of the winningest managers of all time.Well, there have been lots of good managers, but only one who could come up with this exchange. Outfielder Pat Kelly wanted to lead a chapel meeting in the clubhouse, but Weaver objected. Said Kelly: "Earl, don't you want me to walk with the Lord?"

The anointing of that gray-haired, white-soul balladeer as the latest "American Idol" last week was either the choosing of the next great American pop superstar, the end of civilization as we know it, a harmless diversion from the big problems of the day, or some mixture of all of the above. Whatever. In any case, the popularity of this Fox TV show is endlessly dissected for clues about the state of American society as it embarks on the 21st century. Relax. It needn't be. Consider that Fox was breathlessly touting that the viewers for the show topped - 35 million!

A different diamond sparkled under Ripken Stadium's lights yesterday as two die-hard sports fans tied the knot on the minor-league ballpark's home plate. Melissa Tolson, 27, and Dave Bard, 30, of Odenton were married yesterday, making Tolson the first employee to be wed at the year-old ballpark. Although thunder could be heard as the wedding took place, the rain held off until the end of the ceremony. Tolson - the events planner for the IronBirds - shocked girlfriends and mothers by abandoning plans for a beach-side fete in favor of a baseball-themed wedding.

Before the lights went down for the coming attractions, a trivia blurb on the screen reported that the most filmed character in movie history is Dracula, which at the moment seems inaccurate. At the moment, it seems to be Howard Cosell. The feature film was Ali, with Will Smith as Muhammad Ali and Jon Voight as half of a Cosellathon that will be playing in theaters and television tomorrow night. The other half is John Turturro in Monday Night Mayhem, a TV movie (TNT, 9 p.m.) dramatizing the perpetual ego-wrangling behind the scenes during Cosell's time on ABC's Monday Night Football.

Ali comes at you from every direction, much as Muhammad Ali did in his prime. It's one of the most ambitious biographical films ever made in this country, and one of the most unusual, moving and exciting. Everyone who has thrilled to an Ali fight, cheered one of his proclamations or rooted for him in his struggle against disease will want to see it and wrestle with it. This is the rare Hollywood picture worth arguing about. And once the arguments die down, audiences will be left with something that transcends the high points of battles in rings and courthouses - a sense of having been in the boxing shoes and street shoes of a man who embodied the divergent energies of an age. The movie has a hardscrabble integrity and stature.

The ghost floating above the television this evening will be familiar enough: the bad hairpiece, the face of a dyspeptic Bela Lugosi and the voice like a guy behind a Brooklyn delicatessen counter reciting Leviticus. It's Howard Cosell, of course, drifting through the living room as "Monday Night Football" begins a new season, the Cosell chair in the play-by-play booth changing occupants once more, ABC-TV calling upon comedian Dennis Miller to jack up ratings for a former prime-time hit. With a few ex-jocks in between, we've gone from Howard the Humble to Dennis the Droll.

In his prime, Earl Weaver could be loud, profane and abusive. And that was around his friends. To umpires, he was the manager they loved to hate. To Jim Palmer, he was Napoleon, only shorter. And tomorrow, they put him in the baseball Hall of Fame as one of the winningest managers of all time.Well, there have been lots of good managers, but only one who could come up with this exchange. Outfielder Pat Kelly wanted to lead a chapel meeting in the clubhouse, but Weaver objected. Said Kelly: "Earl, don't you want me to walk with the Lord?"

In the 12 years since Howard Cosell left "Monday Night Football" and thus essentially left network television, it seems we heard Mr. Cosell's voice more from Billy Crystal than from Mr. Cosell himself.Yet, after Mr. Cosell died last Sunday at 77, his face was back on the tube and on the front page. This may have puzzled the teen-age sports fan in your home.Who is this man all over "SportsCenter"? the young fan asked.He was the most famous sportscaster in America, you replied.Kind of like Chris Berman or Dick Vitale?

Before the lights went down for the coming attractions, a trivia blurb on the screen reported that the most filmed character in movie history is Dracula, which at the moment seems inaccurate. At the moment, it seems to be Howard Cosell. The feature film was Ali, with Will Smith as Muhammad Ali and Jon Voight as half of a Cosellathon that will be playing in theaters and television tomorrow night. The other half is John Turturro in Monday Night Mayhem, a TV movie (TNT, 9 p.m.) dramatizing the perpetual ego-wrangling behind the scenes during Cosell's time on ABC's Monday Night Football.

The man with the ''unsinkable ego'' is dead. For decades the distinctive voice of Howard Cosell was familiar to sports lovers across the nation and his name known in every household -- every one, that is, but mine.At the peak of his career, I was invited to a cocktail party by friends who were great football fans and, as it turned out, close pals of the big man himself. Had they known that each morning I routinely toss out the sports pages of the daily paper unread, they probably would not have included me among their guests.

FROM the April 17 issue of Sports Illustrated:"CBS commentator Billy Packer has never concealed his contempt for women's basketball. During a broadcast he once speculated on the kind of wife Mississippi's Jennifer Gillom would make, and he has advanced the proposition that women's teams be done away with entirely -- that real gender equity will result only if there's a single team for which both men and women try out. Thus it was hardly surprising to...