| Community planning & zoning for groundwater protection in Michigan: A guidebook for local officials |  | Author: Lillian F Dean
Publisher: Michigan Society of Planning Officials
Category: Book
Buy Used: $12.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
ASIN: B0006F0I0Q
Publication Date: 1991
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
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Condition: Excellent condition large-sized softcover with light storage wear on cover. Spiral binding, ex-university library with usual release library marks. 1991, Michigan Dept. of Natural Resources
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 He could have been a terrific writer! March 12, 2008
Howard Cosell is a legend in the sports broadcasting business. If he wasn't a sports broadcaster, he could have easily been a terrific writer of fiction or non-fiction. It's easy to read this book if you are not a sports fan like myself. This book is about how he covered football including a chapter on MOnday Night Football. I enjoyed reading about his relationship with O.J. Simpson and how O.J. cried when he thought he lost his friendship. Cosell was like a mentor or second father figure to him. He writes about the strained relationship based on tabloid journalism. Monday Night Football is not the same without Cosell even now. His legendary stature as a sports broadcaster waves heavily on sports broadcasting today. He was one of the pioneers. Of course, there are other chapters about boxing, baseball, and football and stadium politics like when the New York Jets and New York Giants moved only few miles away to the Meadowlands in New Jersey that it was more like crossing the border into a foreign land. The book is well-written and you grow to like Cosell after awhile. You can't imagine him without his beloved wife, Emmy, or Mary Edith Abrams, who traveled with him all over the place. He couldn't imagine doing it without her.
A Sports Journalist Burns His Bridges Behind Him July 5, 2007
Howard Cosell rose to fame talking mainly about boxing and football, and the bulk of this book is devoted to documenting his disenchantment with those sports. The lack of regulations protecting the safety of boxers seems to be behind his disenchantment with that sport. As for pro football, he recounts with considerable disgust the removal of franchises from cities that have supported them, and their transfer to more lucrative sites. The Colts went to Indianapolis (under cover of night), the Jets across the river to New Jersey (in fact he called them the "New Jersey Jets"), the Rams to Anaheim, and of course the Raiders went to Los Angeles after beating the pants off the NFL in the celebrated anti-trust case.
It is this latter case which I think is the pivotal point of Cosell's hot-and-cold relationship with pro football. He is dead-set against this type of blatant profiteering from a moral standpoint. He feels that the franchises owe something to the cities which have supported them, and he has testified before Congress in support of legislation that would require franchises to show good cause before moving.
At the same time, his former training as a lawyer required that he support the legal right of the Raiders to move. The legal issue in the case involved section 4.3 of the NFL By-Laws, which required the approval of 3/4 of the owners in the league for any franchise move. The owners could block a move without giving any reason whatsoever, and Cosell understood that this was a clear violation of the anti-trust laws. Despite this clear reality, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle stubbornly dug in his heels and fought, instead of simply modifying the rule so that it would no longer violate anti-trust standards. Rozelle, one of the most over-rated characters in modern history, refused to accept Cosell's support of the Raiders' legal right to move, and it caused a rift in their personal relationship.
Another factor in Cosell's disenchantment with football is what he called the "jockocracy", meaning the use of ex-ballplayers in the telecasts. He blasts the talents of former colleagues Don Meredith and Frank Gifford, and it is these comments which became the focal point of most of the reaction to this book. That is not, however, the main thrust of the book.
I always liked Howard Cosell and appreciated his special brand of sports journalism, a phrase that was basically an oxymoron before Cosell came along. It is clear now that this book represents the start of the deterioration which he went through in his later years. He starts trashing others, a habit which grew and grew as he grew old. He decided he now liked baseball after all, after trashing it severely earlier. However, his efforts to broadcast baseball were excruciatingly awful. I have to cringe when I think of his horrible effort as part of the ABC telecast of the 1979 World Series between the Pirates and the Orioles. He was temperamentally unsuited for baseball, and this was painfully obvious to the listener. In his last years Cosell burned many bridges behind him, and he no doubt died with the love of his family intact, but perhaps not many others.
 No Mas! March 8, 2006
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Howard Cosell takes on a variety of topics in 1985's bitter memoir "I Never Played The Game" but only really warms to one: Himself.
The voice of televised sports through the 1960s and especially the 1970s, Cosell was an original who with his characteristic staccato pontificating and taste for the jugular made even humdrum contests into events. Unfortunately by the 1980s his act had grown tired. Cosell lost interest in sports, especially boxing, where he shone brightest. That boxing was a dangerous sport was nothing new, but suddenly in 1982 Cosell discovered it caused serious injury, and not only walked away from the sport but urged it be banned outright. If he no longer enjoyed it, why should anyone else?
All this is covered in "I Never Played The Game" at sententious, self-important length. Cosell has a point he beats into the ground, and it's not so much the danger of boxing but how the sport's luminaries were shocked at his brave stand and how congressmen like Jim Florio and Bill Richardson listened attentively to Cosell's words.
Earlier in the book, Cosell details walking away from his other key perch, the broadcast booth of "Monday Night Football" in even more self-serving terms. He claims the players are no longer interesting (huh?), that the league is corrupt (especially when their leadership doesn't listen to him), that too many broadcasters are of what Cosell likes to call "the jockocracy," whose ability to call the game is compromised by the fact they once played it, unlike him.
"Anyone over the age of two knows that football is basically a sport without any mysteries," he writes, and his acid contempt for the game is matched only by that for his boothmates, Don Meredith and Frank Gifford, whom he describes as uninteresting morons who rode Cosell's grand wake.
This may be the book of Cosell's I heard Al Michaels once describe as "cruelty disguised as candor." If so, it fits. Cosell wants you to know how low he regards people like NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, New York Jets owner Leon Hess, and John Madden, but instead of making his points he keeps hammering at the people, noting such details as their failed marriages as he uses this book to burn some bridges and settle scores in a way that made me feel a little like he must have watching Larry Holmes pummel poor Tex Cobb. As another boxer famously cried: "No Mas!"
The only good part of the book is a chapter on the rise of Sugar Ray Leonard, a young boxer who gave Cosell a new star to light upon after the decline of Muhummad Ali, his most famous interview subject. Cosell's commentary here is relatively bile-free, and while he still pretty much promotes himself, he also writes knowledgeably about Leonard's growth as a boxer through a series of professional matches culminating in a memorable pair of bouts with Roberto Duran.
It's a shame that Cosell's writing doesn't rise to this level elsewhere in this book. He attacks newspaper critics for not recognizing his brilliance, takes credit not only for the success of "Monday Night Football" but pro football overall, and uses the controversy surrounding his description of a black football player as "a little monkey" (which was definitely overblown and if anything revealed Cosell's essential colorblindness rather than any hidden racism) as an excuse to trot out his credentials as Mr. NAACP, the best thing to happen to black people since the Emancipation Proclamation.
Cosell was a great thing to happen to sports broadcasting, and in his prime, when he took delight in himself and his place in pop culture, he was more of a pleasure to be around than any of us who were there at the time really knew. But it wasn't his time anymore when he wrote this, and instead of taking stock gracefully, he lets his bile run free. The result is a book that diminishes Cosell more than his critics ever could.
 I Never Read the Book February 2, 2006
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
I have this thing about men with toupees. It's like they're trying to hide something. But what? Did they strangle a unicorn when they were younger? Did they repeatedly run over a poodle with their Vespa? Did they hit a parrot on the head with a ball peen hammer? I doubt it. But it makes you wonder right?
 His ego trumps his good points May 29, 2005
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Sportscaster Howard Cosell (1920-1995) was so annoying and obnoxious that millions of fans would turn off the sound on their TV sets. But away from the microphone Cosell was a capable print journalist who often wrote with great clarity and perspective. Here at his retirement Cosell writes about sports franchises relocating, problems within the NFL and boxing, sports announcers and Monday Night Football. Cosell makes several interesting points, but unfortunately his arrogance and ceaseless criticisms for his coworkers was such a turnoff that I never finished these pages. If you found Cosell as perfect as he apparently did, you'll probably enjoy this book and the author's unbounded egotism.
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