The Complex Legacy of Howard Cosell and Knicks Title Talk

**Craig Carton** (0:00)
Frank and Monroe on the fan. Frank, what's going on today, Cookie?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
What's up, guys? Hey, I have a bone to pick with the both of you guys.

**Craig Carton** (0:08)
Okay.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
But, Craig, I'm going to start with you. Like, John Madden, okay.
But I'm surprised, as a Knicks fan, you didn't say Marv Albert.

**Craig Carton** (0:18)
Well, obviously Marv Albert.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:20)
As your other announcer. Well, you had Howard Cosell in there.

**Chris McMonigle** (0:24)
I mean... I think we were talking football off of...

**Craig Carton** (0:26)
Yeah, more football. Look, Marv Albert, of course, was the voice of and the face, really, of the NBA for two decades. So, yes, if Marv Albert was doing a game, whether it was Mike Fratello or whomever he might be doing a game with, it had a different gravitas to it. Like, there's a lot of announcers. Big Mac made a good point. There's a lot of announcers where that guy's voice immediately makes the game seem bigger than it might be. Joe Buck doing a football game, it could have been, you know, Browns against the Panthers, but it sounds like a big game, right? But as great as Joe Buck is, and I love Joe Buck as an announcer, Joe Buck was never, you know, Howard Cosell.
I'm sure if you're...

**Chris McMonigle** (1:11)
I think it's just a different time period, too. I mean, you know.

**Craig Carton** (1:14)
If you're old enough to obviously remember guys like Marty Glickman, you know, guys like that were different also. Bob Wolf, guys like that were just different. Now they got to call a lot of the biggest games of all time, so we also associate them with the biggest games ever played, but like if I said to you...

**Chris McMonigle** (1:29)
And you didn't watch a lot of other games.

**Craig Carton** (1:30)
Right. We didn't have a benefit of...

**Chris McMonigle** (1:32)
All you did was, for the most part, all you did was watch the big games. Well, or your game. Right, or your game.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:38)
That's it. Yes.

**Craig Carton** (1:39)
Which is why Marv Albert, being the Nick announcer prior to going to NBC, and also this predates you, being the sports anchor on local channel four for a Live at Five and then of course the 11 o'clock news, he carried a different weight.

**Chris McMonigle** (1:53)
Yeah, but football wise, you watched your team's game and then you had Monday night. Right? That was it. Did you have a second game on Sunday?

**Craig Carton** (1:59)
Yeah, there was always two games growing up. You had both the Jets and the Giants.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:01)
It was Jets and Giants. Giants, Jets. Yeah. And then...

**Chris McMonigle** (2:04)
There was two games and then you had...

**Craig Carton** (2:05)
And by the way, so I'll give you an example.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:06)
Monday night football. Monday night football was big.

**Craig Carton** (2:08)
In the late 70s, as a kid, we used to beg our parents on Monday night to stay up not to watch Monday night football. And it's going to seem really weird, right?
The beg-a-thon was, can you let us stay up to watch Howard Cosell's half-time highlights? So which you've probably never seen.

**Chris McMonigle** (2:29)
So I mean, maybe, but no.

**Craig Carton** (2:31)
So Monday night football, it was obviously Howard Cosell, Don Meredith and Frank Gifford, okay?
And at half-time, Howard Cosell, and he apparently, as the legend goes, without a script, he would do the live highlights of all the games from Sunday. Like the one score that changed the game, whatever it might be. Howard Cosell. And that was his thing. And it was so, look, there was no ESPN at the time. There's no internet, no digital anything at the time. We were too young to be up for the 11 o'clock news, and 11 o'clock, you usually just got Jets of Giants highlights. You wouldn't get the Cowboys game, the charge game, any of that. But at half-time of Monday night football, Howard Cosell did like a two-minute video montage of all the highlights.
We wanted to stay up for that, more so than, I don't want to miss the second quarter of the game. And that's hard for people of your generation or younger to get that because it's on your phone.

**Chris McMonigle** (3:29)
Right now, I can watch every highlight of every game play.

**Craig Carton** (3:31)
And it was, can I just stay up to watch Howard Cosell's highlights, please, mom, please, dad? They're like, what about the game? I don't care what the game was in the highlights. Like, let that sink in. That's how big Howard Cosell was.