The Mouth That Roared

I came with good intentions to Howard. I can swear to that. Of course, that was many years ago, in the pioneer days of television, when a minority of households had color sets, when cable was something you subscribed to in order to reduce the number of ghosts on the screen, when the Super Bowl was so young that I could still understand the Roman numerals and when Monday Night Football was so new that Howard did not yet keep statistics on it. We were all younger then: The nation was still at war in Southeast Asia; Watergate was still a high-class residential hotel; Walter Cronkite was still Walter Cronkite. How simple those days now seem.

Howard was already Howard, but not yet Howard. I wanted to like him, and, if the truth were to be told, I was excited the first time I met him. Not that he was a journalistic hero to me; we ought to be clear on that. I had already spent five years covering racial tensions in the South and some three years in the Congo and Vietnam, and my journalistic heroes were made of stronger stuff--men like Homer Bigart, Harrison Salisbury and Ed Murrow. But Howard interested me. I was a serious sports freak, and Howard was more outspoken than the other announcers of the Sixties; he had stood up for Muhammad Ali, whom I greatly admired, at a time when most of the sports establishment, including its media annex, had turned on him. Howard in those days seemed only mildly excessive, no more out of control than a number of the interesting figures on national television, and he seemed, as well--and this was at the core of it--to be about something.

I have a clear memory of watching a Yankees game one afternoon and of the game's being delayed because of rain. Jerry Coleman, an ex-Yankee player and by then an announcer of unusual banality, was trying to kill time during the delay by interviewing Howard. "Howard," he asked, "is it true that there is racism in major-league baseball?" Coleman, who had played on lily-white New York teams when the Yankees were one of the most racist organizations in baseball, apparently did not know what he had been a part of. Howard quickly assured Jerry that, yes, there had been racism and, yes, there still was. But even more than the answer, it was the question that made me like Howard: Not only was there an edge to him but he was a clear comparison gainer in his profession. That is, he gained by comparison with his colleagues in that he was not Jerry Coleman, Curt Gowdy, Tony Kubek or Joe Garagiola. If I did not so much like Howard (and I think I rather did), I certainly disliked the people who did not like him, for I felt that the shadow of race hung over much of their antagonism.

Then we met. The occasion was a book party for Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer held at the Tavern on the Green in March 1972. By chance, two nights earlier, I had been lecturing at a small college in Concordia, Kansas, and afterward, I had gone out drinking with a few local people. Seeking a common thread to connect us, we had started talking about professional football and, inevitably, Howard. I later mentioned this to him, pointing out that professional football, because of its network coverage, had become part of the sinew of the nation. Howard did not get my point.

"They hated me, didn't they?" he said of my Concordia colleagues.

"No," I said, "not at all. They were interested in you. It was part of what we had in common. In another day, we might have talked about a politician or an actor. Now it's someone like you."

"They all hate me," he insisted.

"I don't think that's what it was," I said. But then we drifted apart in the crush of a cocktail party. It had been a perfectly pleasant meeting. A bit odd, perhaps, but perfectly pleasant.

The second time I met Howard was at Gay Talese's house, also in 1972. Howard, it turned out, was interested in finding someone to ghostwrite his autobiography. He had asked Talese, who was busy on other projects, and Talese, in turn, had generously suggested me. I was just finishing up The Best and the Brightest, I was broke and I was a sports fan. I was also wary of being anyone's ghostwriter, but the idea was, at the least, intriguing, since the ghost would get, it was said, six figures for not very much work.

The evening on which I did not become Howard's ghostwriter turned out to be a disaster. The Howard you see on the air is pretty much the Howard you get in person, with one exception--on the air, he is more controlled. There is a reason for this. Howard is immensely demanding of attention--celebrity came late to him and, unlike most athletes or stars who attain it early, he still finds it almost desperately meaningful. When he is on the air, his audience may be 20,000,000 people, and he feels reassured. But after that, no normal dinner party, no matter who attends, will ever be an adequate audience. Attention, as Arthur Miller wrote, must be paid.

The gentlest word I can use to describe Howard on that night is over-bearing. He knew everyone. He not only knew them, they were dear friends. He was thinking of going into news reporting. Ed Murrow's name was used to explain the kind of commentator he would be. He was thinking of running for political office--the U.S. Senate, perhaps. He had the inside story on everything. No one else managed to talk, and such a monopoly on conversation is not easily accomplished in a room containing three or four highly egocentric writers. Howard dominated because he had to dominate; it seemed to mean so much to him. That night, it was exhausting to be with him; more than anyone I know, he sucks the oxygen out of a room.

Near the end of the evening, I asked Howard what he thought about Jim Bouton, who had just gone to work for the ABC station in New York. I had liked Bouton's book Ball Four and hoped that the same irreverent style might work on a local news show.

Howard shook his head when I mentioned Bouton's name. "Jimmy is, I am afraid . . ." and there was a long, portentous pause. Howard's voice went to what I like to call its half-mast tone, the one he uses on the air when he announces the deaths of 80-year-old former athletes who were close friends of his. "A small property," he concluded.

I had never before heard one journalist call another a property, and at first, I was surprised. I also did not like it. "Howard, are you a property, too?" I asked.

There was a long silence. "Yes," he said, and he said it angrily, because he clearly did not like my question. "But I'm a big one."

The next day, independent of each other, Howard and I both called Talese to tell him that collaboration on a book was not a good idea.

•

In the decade that followed, something terrible happened: I turned on Howard. I want to make clear that I did not, in departing from Howard, join the Dick Young battalion. Dick Young is a sportswriter (for the New York Daily News until recently, when he jumped a contract to go to the New York Post) who has had a long and bitter feud with Howard. Young, who calls him "Howie the Shill," seemed to me to symbolize the first generation of Howard haters: those who did not like him because of his coverage of racial conflict and because--inevitably and almost flagrantly--Howard symbolized within sports the rise of the television superstar over the print superstar. Young seemed to me as unpalatable as ever--angry toward the young and toward many blacks, resentful of greater player freedom. A plague on both their egos, I thought, and remembered what a sportswriting colleague had once told me. His idea of hell for each of them was a place where Dick Young turned on the television set and found that every channel was ABC and where Howard found that the only paper was the Daily News.

I, on the other hand, belonged to the second wave of Howard detractors: those who had once been favorably inclined toward him but who now saw him in a new light, as a symbol of the excess that television had wrought upon sports, of the assault upon civility and texture that the tube, with its need for action and event, demanded. As a result of television's influence, there were now too many McEnroes, Steinbrenners, Reggies and Billys, whose excessive behavior was rewarded by ever bigger fees and commercial endorsements. The Howard who emerged in that decade as Monday Night Football became more and more successful was a monster. His insecurities, which had once made him interesting and irreverent, now made him seem heavy and ponderous. The bully in him was more evident now.

By the end of the decade, he had become the cartoon his enemies had much earlier drawn of him. Where once he had challenged the sports establishment, now he was a principal figure in it, ranking just below Pete Rozelle, our minister of sports, but certainly far above most owners, coaches and athletes. As he had grown more powerful, he had also grown more reverential; he still gave interviews and lectures critical of the importance of sports in American life; but in his basic three-hour prime-time appearance each week, Howard hyped sports with more frenzy than any-one else. Now he shilled shamelessly for his network, for its principal event, Monday Night Football, and for his boss, Roone Arledge. Now no major figure in sports, no matter how questionable his values or practices, could appear on Monday night with Howard without being referred to as a dear or close friend. Usually, it would turn out, Howard had dined with him just the night before. With the powerful, he flattered and was flattered in return.

Something, clearly, had been lost. Where in his earlier incarnation Howard had seemed to be about something--about injustice and inequity--now it seemed that injustice in sports had ended as he had achieved celebrity and that Howard, first and foremost, was about Howard.

For a time, I was perplexed by the new Howard, the Howard who hung around the powerful. "I have a lot of due bills out," he had announced on the eve of an ill-fated variety show he was to host. It was his means of letting everyone know that he could bring in the famous and the influential. Had Howard become an owners' man? After all, he had thrown slow-pitch softball to George Steinbrenner. But then, Howard was hard on the owners of other teams. Soon it dawned on me that the ones he was hard on were losers. And finally, it became clear: Howard was not an owners' man; he was a winners' man. He wanted, needed, to be with the winners, as if their success might rub off on him. Correspondingly, he did not want to be with losers, fearing, I suspected, failure by association. With the powerful and the victorious, he felt confident; with the defeated, he felt vulnerable.

Now, more and more, he seemed without restraint on the air. He had become his own historian, and he footnoted himself faithfully; every broadcast was now filled with Howard reminding us endlessly of his insights and of his predictions that had been fulfilled. (His predictions were always deftly done--a couple of positive phrases early in the show about a player's strength, a light comment or two about his weaknesses, so that Howard could go either way.) There was a theme, and it was this: (continued on page 242) The Mouth that Roared (continued from page 130) Howard was always right. Even when others in the booth made mild judgments of their own, they could not upstage Howard or scoop him with an insight. "Exactly," he would chime in, and the point was clear: Howard had had that particular insight first. If a player made a mistake, Howard could be merciless: It was one thing for a player to fail his teammates; it was a far more serious thing for him to fail Howard. In such instances, he could be relentless, his voice reminding us again and again of the error.

All this did not mean that Howard was not a good communicator. In many ways, he was communicating better than ever. Like all good communicators, he was connecting to something in his audience, and with Howard, in some dark, involuntary way, the connection was to the beast beneath the surface in his viewers. He was provoking it, agitating it, so that millions of people, in spite of themselves, tuned in. He filled, in a pernicious way, a particular psychic need. It was an ugly process.

Somewhere in those years, he had forsaken journalism. If during the Sixties the great story for a serious sports journalist was race, in the Seventies, it was more and more what television and its concurrent big money had done to sports. But Howard was part of that very issue; he had ridden to the top on the prime instrument corrupting college athletics, a television network. Instead of the probing journalist, he now became the classic modern telecelebrity. There was Howard during the 1976 American League play-offs, interviewing--if that is the word--Frank and Barbara Sinatra and passing along Roone's best wishes, saying that Roone wanted to be remembered to them. He was soon appearing on sitcoms and on roasts. (Like Don Rickles, he was good at roasts; his first instinct was to insult people, all in good fun.) He was on Bob Hope specials and even did a couple of commercials--one for a soft drink (in which, as I recall, he sang, though not very well) and another (again, I hope memory does not fail) for a C.B. radio. Some friends of mine were disappointed; they could not envision Ed Murrow singing for a soft-drink company. But I assured them that it was all right, that it was all part of the same thing--not the selling of a cola but the selling of Howard--and that he had kept, rather than broken, this particular faith. By then, I secretly longed for him to do more, perhaps the ring-around-the-collar commercial, one of my favorites, or--did I dare even hope for it?--the Roto-Rooter one. I wanted Howard to sing the Roto-Rooter song.

What did Howard in, what exposed him, finally, was baseball. It is a delicate sport; it cannot be hurried, and often the sweetest sound in a baseball game is the sound of silence. The rhythms of baseball are the rhythms of a quieter, less frenetic America, and my colleague Russell Baker believes that one reason baseball has survived so well in a television era is that its norms and rhythms cannot be changed, that it is essentially so resistant to television. Howard's weaknesses had never been so noticeable in football. The game's fundamental violence had at least partially obscured his own violence, and its speedy action (in addition to good support in the broadcast booth and excellent use of replays) had obscured some of his ignorance. Having openly mocked baseball when ABC did not have a slice of it, a lesser man than Howard might have turned down the chance to work in the broadcast booth. Instead, baseball was suddenly relegitimized. Howard turned out to be a fan after all. We were treated to loving descriptions of Howard's days at the ball park in days gone past. All it took to make baseball a modern sport was the right man in the broadcast booth. So broadcast it he did, and he was terrible, at once ignorant and overbearing (overbearing, one suspects, in direct proportion to his lack of knowledge). It was like watching the best of the 19th Century being assaulted by the worst of the 20th Century.

The baseball season builds slowly; no single game until the pennant races at summer's end is crucial, and for most fans, the game's small skills and delicate graces are reward enough. Enter Howard, who did not know what most fans know--that by the end of the season the action will find itself, that it cannot be hurried. Howard violated baseball as no announcer had ever violated a major sport. He went at it as if it were an adrenaline sport, like football. He told us during world-series games that certain teams did not look up for the game. If a poor, unfortunate infielder made an error in the first inning, Howard hammered away at us: "Was this the turning point?" he shouted. Never, a high ABC official confided to a friend of mine, had the switchboard at the network so lit up with angry calls as when Howard did his first world series. And what was worse, the ABC official admitted, these were not your ordinary crank calls from fans boozy with frustration and resentment; they were the calls of articulate, informed, desperate people. They knew something that Arledge apparently did not know: that Monday Night Football was his, an invented, gimmicky event, and if he wanted to put Howard on to hype the action, that was his business and the fault of any dissident for not turning off his set. But the world series was theirs; it was public property, it had existed before Roone, Howard and ABC were around and it was not to be tampered with. Worse, allowing Howard to broadcast it showed something all too basic to television: a lack of respect for both the intelligence of the audience and the institution being covered.

•

About two years ago, I went to a party filled with top-level media figures, and there, of all people, was Arledge, the very man who had given us Howard. He seemed pleasant, almost pixyish, and we talked amiably for a time. Then, given this rare opportunity that millions of other fans lusted after but could never achieve, I made the most of my chance. Was there any way, I asked, that he could lower the volume on Howard, temper him in some way, so that listeners would not feel so assaulted? Could Howard be made less jarring? Roone was very gracious as I made my request, and I had a feeling that he had heard variations on it over many years.

"Well," he answered, "it ought to be easy to do, but it's not. Howard does not take suggestions very well, and you know how he is--he's got that huge ego and he's very insecure, so it's hard to deal with him. Most of our problems come from his insecurity."

Roone must have passed along my suggestion in some form or another, because a few months later, Howard saw Gay Talese at a bar in Los Angeles, and Howard began to shout across the various tables, "Your friend Halberstam tried to get my job. Well, let me tell you, and you can tell him, that I am ungettable. Ungettable!"

So much for telling it like it is.

But then, I should never forget what Jimmy Cannon, one of the best sports-writers of a generation, said about Howard: "Can a man who wears a hairpiece and changes his name be trusted to tell it like it is?" What Jimmy didn't know and what I found out was that Howard also lied about his age. For a long time, he told people that he was born in Winston-Salem in 1920. Then someone looked it up. It turns out that he was born in 1918. Sorry, Howard.

There is another story that is told about Howard and Jimmy, about the time they were flying back from the West Coast a few years ago. Howard was upset over what some print people had written about him, and he had filibustered Jimmy on the subject for much of the flight. As the plane neared New York, Howard realized he had gone too far, and he tried to make amends.

"But we shouldn't be fighting, Jimmy. After all, there's only a small handful of us that really care about the important things in sports--isn't that right, just a handful of us?"

"That's right, Howard," Jimmy said, "except that there's one fewer than you think."

I have thought about Howard a lot lately, and I have decided that he is important. Perhaps not in the way he thinks ("a legend in his own mind," to use Johnny Carson's phrase about him) but in what he reveals about the culture. For Howard has become, for better or worse, a man for this season. We have not just Howard but all his lineal descendants, the young hype artists of television sports and news. They are not so much journalists as provocateurs. They do not so much report and analyze and explain as provoke and make things happen. Some of them square their shoulders, lean into the camera and tell it straight. They are, make no mistake about it, two-fisted. Some, by contrast, are cute: They giggle; they single out the most bizarre moments on the video tape, which underscore not the action of the game but their chance to be funny; and, above all, they flirt with the resident anchor woman. They become personalities, more important than events and people they cover.

Howard is the father of them all, and his success is singular. He has that mournful face in a profession that loves pretty faces; he has a tired toupee in a profession much given to blow-dried hair; and he is a terrible athlete in a profession more and more given over to ex-jocks. He made it, in truth, by creating a persona; if he could not be lovable, then he would be, above all else, unlovable. Everything was done to call attention to himself: The wrong syllable was accented; huge, cumbersome words were summoned; the cadence was made overstylized. He became the issue: What would Howard do? Whom would he assault? Would he self-destruct? Would someone finally turn on him? He became in the process what television wants more than anything else, an event. If he was provocative, then someone in the print media would write about him and there would be controversy, and where there was controversy there was even more of an event. That is what happened; and in an odd way, he was like Nixon in that his psychic needs demanded that he be more public, go further and further out on the wire, even further than his psychic strengths could really withstand. His emotional needs and the needs of his medium coincided in some terrible way. A healthier man could never have done it.

The second part of Howard's success comes from the fact that he is a brilliant talent scout. Television is about show business and show business is about stars, and Howard has always understood star quality--understood what a big property is, to use his phrase. It is the one thread that runs through his career--a brilliant instinct for picking up on those who are not just superb athletes but who are, in the larger sense, stars. These athletes must be not only consummately skilled at their profession but, in addition, equally good at the theater of sports. Howard is the promoter of athletes who have the looks and personalities to be television celebrities.

If there is an example of the journalistic imbalance that Howard's theatrics can cause, it is his and his network's bias toward Muhammad Ali and how that bias tended to obscure the greatness of Joe Frazier. Some of that was inevitable, because Ali was such remarkable theater that any good journalist was bound to cover him more than Frazier. But the degree to which Howard and ABC tilted in that case was disgraceful; it not only eclipsed Frazier's greatness for a very long time but, oddly enough, because of the emphasis on the capricious side of Ali, it also trivialized him. It took Frazier, on his own, in the ring, to do two things that Howard and his network were never able to do: first, to show how great a fighter he was; and, second, to show (almost involuntarily) how great a fighter Ali was as well. The danger with most media flashes is that their theatrics outweigh their substance; when they are gone, the image disappears. In this case, because of Frazier and almost in spite of the Howard-Ali hoopla, we are left with genuine memory.

Not surprisingly, many of the athletes Howard gave us--Ali, O.J., Joe Willie, Sugar Ray; the Great Ones, to coin a phrase--have dabbled in movies and commercials when their playing days were over. It was a connection that worked well for both sides. Howard offered them national access and they, in turn, offered him the reflected glory of their careers and their star quality. As he was identified with them, they were bigger and he was bigger. If ABC were ever to cover professional basketball, there is no doubt who Howard's athlete would be. Larry Bird would be too shy and suspicious, Julius Erving too careful and restrained and too far along in his own career. (Howard likes to come in on his athletes very early, so there will be a sense that he helped chart their success. "I have predicted greatness for this young man since I first saw him as a sophomore . . ." one can almost hear him say.) Howard's basketball player would be Magic Johnson. Howard likes anyone who is a man-child, because the man-child is particularly good on TV--at once shrewd and knowing, vulnerable and innocent. As Reggie has shown us and shown us, that makes for good television, if not for complete humanity.

•

So that leaves us with only one question: Who is Howard and why is he doing this to us? I think I found the answer recently in the pages of The New York Times. Not the sports pages, oddly enough, but the science pages. The answer was in an article by a writer named Maya Pines, and I doubt that she had ever met Howard. She had written an unusually illuminating piece about the inroads psychoanalysts are making with narcissists, or, to use her words, "the joyless men and women who cannot love anyone but spend their lives desperately seeking admiration to counteract their feelings of inner emptiness."

It was an article that was studied carefully in my house, because it was more than a little applicable to the writer of this piece and to many of his friends who are also in the media--in particular, to some who work in television. Then, when I started writing about Howard, I went back and reread the article and was stunned. The Times listed a number of signs of narcissistic disorder: a grandiose sense of self-importance or uniqueness; recurrent fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love; a craving for constant attention and admiration; oscillation between extreme overidealization and devaluation of others; lack of empathy--the inability to recognize how others feel; feelings of rage, humiliation, inferiority, shame, emptiness or an indifference to criticism or defeat.

Well, I think we have our man, and I think we have, as well, part of the secret of his success, which is his need, his passion, to be important. Thus, Howard is a man of the most singular purpose; what he does is not so much a job as it is something far more profound--a state of mind, his essential health. It makes clear the role that the rest of us have played and must play in the future. We are, all of us--30,000,000 or 40,000,000 on occasion--members of his encounter group. Although technically we are not paid for our participation, although we give more than we receive, there are other rewards--spiritual ones. We make the lives of our fellow citizens a little easier: We take the heat off the stewardess who is slow to serve him a drink or the press-box attendant who does not pay him quite enough homage or the lowly ABC crew member who makes a mistake with the sound equipment. We do our part. He is working things out with us, and with any luck, he will come out of it a better man and we will come out of it a better audience. Exactly.

"Never had the network switchboard so lit up with angry calls as when Howard did his first world series."