Howard Cosell

October 12, 1977. Game 2 of the World Series, Yankee Stadium. Somewhere over the South Bronx, an ABC aerial camera drifted a few blocks from the ballpark and found a fire burning in the surrounding neighborhood. Keith Jackson noted the size of the blaze. Howard Cosell, sitting next to him, said something about President Carter's visit to the area a week earlier and the fire department's endless workload in the borough.

He didn't say "the Bronx is burning." Not that night, not in that exact sentence -- and yet three decades later, that's the phrase everyone remembers him saying (and the one you'll find quoted, wrongly, in half the retrospectives ever written about that series). It's as good a way as any to introduce Howard Cosell: a broadcaster so loud, so opinionated, and so central to the sports television of his era that people eventually just started giving him credit for lines he never spoke.

A Lawyer Who Talked His Way Into Radio

Cosell was born Howard William Cohen on March 25, 1918, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (a strange starting point for a man who'd become the single most New York voice in American sports), and grew up in Brooklyn. He went to New York University and then NYU's law school, and for the better part of a decade he practiced entertainment and labor law in Manhattan -- representing athletes, among them Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson, and doing volunteer legal work for New York City's Little League program. Somewhere in there he changed his last name to Cosell, closer to his family's original surname before an immigration official had shortened it to Cohen a generation earlier.

The Little League connections turned out to matter more than any of his casework. In 1953, Cosell sold ABC Radio on a program where Little Leaguers got to interview major-league players. He hosted it part-time for a few years, kept lawyering on the side, and then in 1956 walked away from the bar entirely to broadcast full time. He was 38 years old and had never called a game of anything professionally. It didn't slow him down for long.

Boxing, Ali, and "Telling It Like It Is"

Cosell built his first national reputation covering boxing, and specifically covering Muhammad Ali. He interviewed Ali constantly through the 1960s, called him by the name he'd chosen for himself at a time when plenty of other broadcasters were still saying "Cassius Clay," and became one of the most visible media defenders of Ali's right to refuse the Vietnam War draft after boxing stripped him of his heavyweight title in 1967. It's the relationship that made both of their reputations bigger -- Ali needed a serious broadcaster willing to take him seriously, and Cosell needed a fighter big enough to match his own sense of self-importance. They found each other.

Out of all this came the catchphrase Cosell attached to himself for the rest of his career: he told it like it was, whether people wanted to hear it or not. Polls from the 1970s regularly found him rated as both the most popular sportscaster in the country and the most disliked one -- sometimes in the same survey (which is a hell of a trick if you can pull it off, and Cosell pulled it off for two straight decades). That was never a contradiction to Cosell. It was the whole point.

Monday Night, Every Week

ABC launched Monday Night Football on September 21, 1970, Browns 31, Jets 21, with Keith Jackson calling play-by-play and Cosell and Don Meredith working the color commentary. A year later Frank Gifford replaced Jackson, and the booth that people actually remember -- Cosell, Gifford, and "Dandy" Don Meredith -- settled into place for most of the decade. Cosell was the one who argued, lectured, and occasionally seemed to be broadcasting a different, more serious program than the football game happening in front of him. Meredith was there to deflate him. Gifford held the whole thing together. It worked because none of the three men were pretending to like each other equally, and the audience could tell.

Cosell stayed with the show for 13 seasons. He also turns out to be responsible for one of the more famous moments in American broadcast history that has nothing to do with football: on December 8, 1980, during a Dolphins-Patriots game with three seconds left on the clock, Cosell interrupted the broadcast to tell the country that John Lennon had been shot and killed outside his apartment in New York. For a huge number of Americans (people who weren't watching the news, weren't near a radio, just happened to have the game on), that was how they found out. Cosell hated pro football by the end -- he called it "a stagnant bore" on his way out the door -- but there was nobody better suited to being the voice that broke into the game with news the game suddenly didn't matter.

His final MNF season came with its own controversy. On September 5, 1983, watching Washington's Alvin Garrett shake loose for a first down against Dallas, Cosell said something on air that was widely reported as "that little monkey gets loose, doesn't he?" -- though even the exact wording got disputed within days, with ABC's own publicity office claiming Cosell had actually said Garrett "moves like a monkey" and Cosell himself denying he'd used the phrase "little monkey" at all. Whatever the precise words, the remark drew immediate, national criticism as racially charged. Garrett himself said afterward he didn't take it as an insult, but the moment became part of the story of why Cosell left the following offseason -- along with a genuine exhaustion with the sport and the travel that came with covering it every week for over a decade.

Two Yankees World Series, and a Quote He Probably Never Said

Cosell wasn't a Yankees broadcaster the way Mel Allen or Red Barber were -- he never held a booth job with the club. His baseball work came through ABC, first as a Monday Night Baseball color commentator starting in 1976, then across four World Series broadcasts: 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1983. Two of those four happened to involve the Yankees.

The first was the 1977 World Series, the one everyone remembers, alongside Keith Jackson and Tom Seaver in the ABC booth. Reggie Jackson's three-homer night in Game 6 gave Cosell his cleanest, most quotable moment of that series -- as Keith Jackson started to call the third one "High--," Cosell cut in over him: "Oh, what a blow!" That's a real, on-the-record call. The other Cosell line from that same World Series isn't.

Game 2, played at Yankee Stadium on October 12, 1977, is where the legend comes from. ABC's helicopter camera panned away from the field to a fire burning a few blocks from the ballpark in the South Bronx. Jackson commented first on how big the blaze looked. Cosell followed with something about President Carter's visit to the neighborhood the week before (Carter had toured the rubble of Charlotte Street on October 5, a real and well-documented trip) and, in a later half-inning, a remark about how often the fire department had to answer calls in the Bronx. What he didn't do, according to every close review of the actual broadcast tape, is say the sentence "Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning."

That exact line became famous anyway. Jonathan Mahler used it as the title of his 2005 book about New York City in 1977, and ESPN's 2007 miniseries adaptation carried the same title into millions of living rooms, cementing the quote in the public record as something Cosell actually said live on the air. He didn't -- or at least, nobody's ever produced tape proving he did. It's a strange kind of legacy for a broadcaster whose entire brand was telling people exactly what he saw: the most famous thing he's remembered for saying is a line somebody else wrote for a book title years later.

The Yankees' second brush with Cosell in a World Series booth came four years later, in the 1981 World Series, when the Yankees lost to the Dodgers in six games with Cosell again part of ABC's broadcast team alongside Jackson, Al Michaels, and Jim Palmer. It's a footnote next to 1977, but it's a real one -- Cosell called Yankees baseball on the national stage twice, four years apart, on opposite ends of a championship and a defeat.

The Loudest Man in the Room, Even After He Left It

Cosell's final years at ABC were rougher than the ones that made him famous. His 1985 memoir, "I Never Played the Game," took shots at his own broadcast partners -- Gifford and Meredith both came in for criticism -- and the fallout got him pulled from that year's World Series assignment before the book had even fully hit shelves. ABC eventually canceled his newsmagazine "SportsBeat," and his role at the network faded out over the following years. He never called another football game after 1983.

He died on April 23, 1995, in New York City, at 77, from a heart embolism, four years after surgery for cancer. The tributes that followed mostly settled on the same idea: nobody had ever sounded quite like him, and television sports has been chasing some version of his act -- the opinionated analyst who isn't afraid to say what everyone's thinking -- ever since. He still isn't in the Pro Football Hall of Fame's broadcast wing -- a small, ongoing injustice, given how much of that Hall's signature broadcast he built with his own voice.

The fire he supposedly narrated with the perfect line is still the thing most people bring up first. He probably would've hated that. Cosell built a career insisting he told people exactly what he saw. The most famous words attached to his name are the ones he never said.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Howard Cosell really say 'the Bronx is burning' during the 1977 World Series?

Almost certainly not in those exact words. During Game 2 of the 1977 World Series on October 12, 1977, an ABC aerial camera showed a fire burning near Yankee Stadium, and Cosell made on-air comments referencing President Carter's recent visit to the South Bronx and the fire department's heavy workload in the borough -- but reviews of the actual broadcast tape haven't turned up him saying the sentence "the Bronx is burning." The phrase became attached to him through Jonathan Mahler's 2005 book "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning" and ESPN's 2007 miniseries of the same title, both of which popularized the line as if it were a direct quote.

What is Howard Cosell's connection to the Yankees?

Cosell never worked in the Yankees' broadcast booth the way Mel Allen, Red Barber, John Sterling, or Michael Kay did. His Yankees connection came through ABC's national broadcasts: he called the 1977 World Series, including Reggie Jackson's three-homer Game 6 and the Game 2 fire broadcast, and he was part of ABC's team again for the 1981 World Series, when the Yankees lost to the Dodgers in six games.

Why did Howard Cosell leave Monday Night Football?

Cosell left after the 1983 season, his 13th on the broadcast, citing exhaustion with pro football -- he called the sport "a stagnant bore" -- and personal fatigue with the travel. His final season also included a widely criticized on-air remark on September 5, 1983, in which he was reported to have called Washington receiver Alvin Garrett "that little monkey" -- exact wording disputed at the time -- which added to the pressure surrounding his exit even though Garrett himself said he wasn't offended.

Is Howard Cosell in the Pro Football Hall of Fame?

Not in its broadcast wing. The Hall's Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award has gone to Cosell's own Monday Night Football colleagues -- Don Meredith, Frank Gifford, and producer Roone Arledge among them -- but never to Cosell himself, a gap that broadcasting historians and former colleagues like Al Michaels have called overdue for correction.