ONCE upon a time, Howard Cosell roamed television draped in the canary-colored blazer of ABC Sports, smoking a cigar the length of a sequoia, covering his baldness with a toupee the size of a featherweight boxer and speaking of sports in a way no one ever had. He was loud, audacious, obnoxious, perspicacious, brilliant, narcissistic, provocative and haughty. He would doubtlessly agree with those descriptions - and add more if only to prove that he was, as he was wont to enunciate slowly, "HOW-id Cyo-SELL."

His was the dominant voice of sports broadcasting for 20 years in America starting in the mid-1960s - defending the rights of black athletes like Muhammad Ali; calling boxing with a staccato delivery and know-it-all panache; playing the prolix agitator to Don Meredith's white-hatted good ol' boy on "Monday Night Football;" and producing some of the best sports journalism of his day. His pomposity also rose with his certitude.

Woody Allen was so drawn to Cosell's style that he hired him to appear in his 1971 film "Bananas" as a broadcaster interviewing a Latin American dictator who had just been gunned down, a comic take on the way Cosell himself interviewed boxers. Cosell did not mind self-parody but refused Allen's offer to play a pervert in "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex." He drew the line then, but not a few years later when he was persuaded that he alone was capable of reviving the moribund variety show format with his own ABC series, "Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell." The venture was so ill conceived (singing a duet with Barbara Walters was the nadir or the highlight of the show) that it was quickly canceled, enabling NBC's fledgling late-night comedy program, "Saturday Night," to add "Live" to its name.

Today, Cosell is either forgotten or regarded as a relic of the era before ESPN seized control of televised sports. A few years ago, I was interviewing a different type of television sports star, Bob Costas, before a college audience. When we began to discuss Cosell, the students appeared flummoxed. Howard Cosell? "Do you want to explain him or should I?" Costas asked. You simply had to experience Cosell back in the three-network universe, when ABC Sports was king. No one who watched Cosell could forget him.

Skillful resuscitation

How could a human spectacle as unique as Cosell, with his adenoidal Brooklyn voice, polysyllabic vocabulary and vulpine presence, be forgotten? Here was a man who brought glory and high ratings to ABC, yet 16 years since his death, he resides largely in the memory banks of fans older than 40. They can still hear his ringing voice shouting, "Down goes Frazier!" as the previously indomitable Joe Frazier was being knocked to the canvas by George Foreman in his pre-griller days.

In "Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports," Mark Ribowsky, the author of several books on both sports and entertainment, skillfully resuscitates a man who felt his achievements were beneath his intellectual gifts. He aspired to anchor the evening news or be a United States senator.

That the post-Cosell generation has hazy memories of him, or no memories at all, "borders on tragic," Ribowsky writes, as he argues for Cosell's significance in American life. Certainly, Cosell was admired and abhorred in equal measure. He attracted death threats and needed bodyguards to ensure his safety.

Equal bitterness

An intellectual snob, Cosell wanted to separate himself from everything he believed was wrong about sports, like the noodle-spined sportscasters who wouldn't disturb the status quo; the athletes-turned-commentators whom he sneeringly referred to as the "jockocracy"; and the sportswriters whose dislike for him was returned with equal bitterness. When his nemesis, the bilious Dick Young of The Daily News, died in 1987, Cosell said, "This is the happiest day of my life."

Ribowsky, who seems to have read just about everything on Cosell, is a deft narrator of the life of Humble Howard, taking his readers from the skinny kid in Brooklyn who yearned to spend more time with an absent father to the sportscaster who helped make an event out of "Monday Night Football" by being so very different from anyone else who had ever called a game. Cosell did not get his first job in sports, a radio gig as a commentator on the Little League World Series, until 1953, when he was 35, and didn't help inaugurate "Monday Night Football" until 1970, when he was 52. In his later years, as he grew bored with sports, his drinking became excessive and his animosities mounted. At the end, he was living in virtual isolation in his Manhattan apartment, his services no longer wanted, his beloved wife, Emmy, gone.

All this Ribowsky describes vividly with a critical eye and an awareness of his subject's hypocrisies. He understands that nothing about Cosell was more fascinating than his codependent relationship with Ali, a marriage of opposites and opportunists who saw gain in bonding with each other. "Cosell's impulses during the 1970s," Ribowsky writes about his subject's eccentricities and unpleasantness, "were governed by his pathological inability to let slide others' contrary opinions, or even their innocent mistakes, as if by flogging them he had dibs on being the ultimate judge of human behavior."

Ribowsky relies too much on Cosell's own books, especially to recount his youth, and he apparently hasn't interviewed any of the relatives. On the other hand, he has conducted nearly 20 interviews with Cosell's contemporaries, and the results are bracing, tough and funny (the book would have been better with 40 more). For example, Jerry Izenberg, a columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, said of Cosell: "He would sometimes lose his way, then he would think of himself as bigger than the great issues. It was like the anti-Semitism. If you didn't like him, you were anti-Semitic."

Overstated importance

Cosell came to sports less as a fan than as a sophisticated gadfly. He had a law degree, and arrived just when his knowledge and intelligence were crucial to understanding the growing power of leagues, antitrust issues, the civil rights movement and athletic celebrity culture. Nonetheless, Ribowsky sometimes overstates Cosell's importance. He did not transform sports as much as he bent the traditional roles of interviewer, game commentator and opinionated analyst to his peculiar skills and personality. He did not dwarf sports events, especially the many Ali bouts he called, but he added something that could not be ignored, even if it made his detractors want to shoot out the television screen. When Ribowsky oversells his case for Cosell, he sounds as if he has ingested his subject's gall.

"He lives again in these pages, the vital center of American cultural history, a man almost eponymous with post-'50s sports and its media confluence," Ribowsky writes. "The not insignificant conclusion is that he was as great as he said he was."