PARTNERS IN LEGEND

When you swim, the water acts as both benefit and curse. The water provides the resistance that slows and stalls you from reaching the speed you’d love to achieve. But the water is the thing you push against to get anywhere. The curse of resistance is actually the benefit of propulsion.

I thought about that when I heard the sad news of Mohamad Ali’s passing and thought about the legendary partnership between the greatest athlete of the 20^th Century and the greatest announcer of the same era, Howard Cosell.

Their verbal sparring was legendary, to the point of being uncomfortable.  When I was just a little kid and witnessed their heated conversations on TV I thought they were really mad at each other. I thought this big, hulking monster was savaging this obnoxious, verbose yellow-blazered maniac.

It was only later that I learned how those performances were necessary resistance that actually propelled the legend of both men forward.

In order to make his act work; in order for this 1960’s black athlete to be taken seriously as the smartest, most charismatic and larger-than-life figure the world had ever seen, he needed a white foil to take it all out on.

And Cosell was there, along for the ride in its entirely, to be the resistance Ali needed to get to the other side. To become THE GREATEST, Ali needed, perhaps the greatest second banana in history.

Further, the sportscaster only burnished his legacy be being inexorably linked to the most recognizable and famous person on the planet for more than two decades. After all, in the 60’s and 70’s, if Ali walked into a room with Bob Hope, John Lennon, Richard Nixon, Lucille Ball, Joe Namath, Pele, Mick Jagger, Wilt Chamberlin and the Pope – everyone would stop talking, turn around and say, “hey, there’s The Champ!”

Indeed. There would still be a Mohamad Ali without Cosell, but I’m not sure there would have been, “The Greatest.” And, Howard Cosell would still have been a great and revered broadcaster, but not the single greatest in history.

If there is a heaven, both of these giants are together again: the most charismatic superstar and the most articulate broadcaster those of us left of earth have ever seen and heard.