Sportscasting: The Grandiose Inquisitor

"Face it," says ABC Sportscaster Howard Cosell. "Sport is the toy de partment of life." Tf so, Cosell is its jumping jack, punch-me clown and big bad wolf.

A former trial lawyer, Cosell is more inquisitor than interviewer. He needles.

He wheedles. He stares ferretlike down his long nose, droning in a voice that sounds like a cross between a buzz saw and Bronx sneer. "Did you take a dive in the Clay fight?" he demands of Son ny Listen. Or as Muhammad Ali launches into his pitch for Muslimism, Cosell cuts in sharply: "Awright, we've been through that."

Applying Principles. Wordy, brash, grandiose, Cosell has a natural gift for annoying, but at least his approach is in finitely more lively than the usual golly-gee-you're-terrific sport interview on TV. Explains Cosell: "I'm an electronic first. I've gotten where I've gotten in the world of sport just by applying the prin ciples of journalism." He does get his share of scoops; he was the first, for ex ample, to report Wilt Chamberlain's move from the Philadelphia 76ers to the Los Angeles Lakers. But it is more his capacity for outrage than reporting that makes Cosell so hard to turn off.

On the ABC Evening News recently, he observed that people go to the Indianapolis 500 to see not a sport but "a blood event embodying the two principal characteristics of our time: swiftness and violence." In another report, he berated San Franciscans for back ing a bond issue to build a new sports stadium instead of channeling the money into public housing and job opportunities. On the day of Robert Kennedy's death, he refused to report the baseball scores on his nightly New York newscast. He explained: "When people view outlet, escape and entertainment as the be-all and end-all of human ex istence, then I have to wonder how sick this society really is."

Provocative Pirouettes. Such grandstand plays draw expectable cheers and catcalls from the audience. The Cleve land Plain Dealer referred to Cosell as a "white Muslim," while one sportswriter called him a "screaming, pirouetting jackass." Maury Allen of the New York Post says he is "probably the most dramatic, most interesting, most provocative guy in our business."

Before he -got into broadcasting, Cosell was a Phi Beta Kappa editor of the Law Review at New York Uni versity, then a successful specialist in corporate and labor law. On the side, he helped organize Little League baseball in the New York area. In 1953, ABC asked him to form a panel of Little Leaguers for a radio quiz show on sports. Two years later, he gave up his legal work to try a few test shots of his own on ten weekend sports reports. Today, with 31 scheduled broadcasts each week on radio and TV, he earns $175,000 a year.