Name: Al Michaels Doesn't Hold Back On Howard Cosell | David Letterman
Uploaded: 2025-08-07T15:10:56.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Al Michaels Doesn't Hold Back On Howard Cosell | David Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Al Michaels Doesn't Hold Back On Howard Cosell | David Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-07. Transcript available.

Welcome to the show, Al.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
You know, when we first came to CBS,
they had that powerhouse NFC conference games every Sunday.
Right.
John Madden and, of course, everybody, Pat Summerall.
And it was an institution.
It was a fixture.
And then Fox comes along and stuns the broadcasting world
with this enormous bid, and we lose football.
Yeah.
Now, we're screwed.
We want football back.
Yeah.
Well, I heard there was a late-night guy
that got all of the money for the rights.
Oh, come on, please.
And CBS just couldn't come up to a billion five.
They offered $75,000.
Worth every damn penny, though.
But now, seriously, what exactly happened here?
Why isn't football on CBS?
Why is it on Fox?
People don't want it.
They'll watch it on Fox.
They don't want it on Fox.
They want it on CBS.
Well, thank God Rupert Murdoch at Fox
didn't come after Monday Night Football.
Was there a chance that you guys could have lost that?
I'd have been on the Harlequin Mysteries on Sunday.
I'd be looking for Schaefer's job.
By the way, where's Biff?
Because we need a stage manager on Monday night.
So don't be worried.
Hey, hey, hey.
No, you don't know.
Forget it, Biff.
Whatever you're making, I'll triple it, buddy.
Stay right there.
I'm only kidding.
You know what?
I'm kidding, don't you?
I'm kidding.
25 years now.
And you've been on the show nine years.
Ninth year for me.
And for me, my first memories of that program were Howard Cosell.
Howard kind of made that show a franchise, didn't he?
Howard was on that show, I think, for 15 or 16 years.
I never worked football with Howard, but I worked a lot of baseball with him.
I was thinking about him the other night.
I ever tell you the story about Howard in Kansas City in 1981?
When we're doing a baseball game, he and I go to dinner.
And Howard, of course, always had to move around in a long, stretched limousine.
And it's late at night, and we get into a neighborhood that you don't want to
be in after about 10 o'clock.
But there we are.
We're stopped at a light, and there are a group of kids, and there's a big
fight going on.
Two of them are battling.
And all of a sudden, Howard gets out of the limousine.
And I'm figuring I'm dead.
This is the end.
And Howard gets out, and he says,
Okay, okay.
Now, listen up.
It's quite apparent to this seasoned observer that the young Southport does not
possess a jab requisite for the continuation of this fray.
And furthermore, his opponent is a man of inferior and diminishing skills.
This confrontation is summarily halted post-haste.
Wow!
And now I'm sitting there in the car, and the driver's dying.
And I'm dying.
And the kids just, you know, it's like somebody dropped in from Morris.
And they stopped.
They knew, of course.
And that was it.
He got back in the car, and away we went.
But they knew, of course, it was Howard, the legendary sportscaster.
Well, they did.
And, of course, you know, it's amazing what eight vodkas will do for one's
courage.
So this is how that got started that night.
And that was a slow night, too.
So now, so are you suggesting that when Howard was,
in the booth working, doing the telecasts, that he might have been, might have
had a cocktail?
I'm more than suggesting it.
What was the night?
I remember reading about this years and years ago.
It was a cold night someplace, and Howard had to leave at halftime.
I think it was a Philadelphia Eagles game.
Right.
In Philadelphia.
Oh, God.
Here we go with that again.
Paul, let's hear the hoot there, buddy.
What was the city?
Philadelphia.
There you go.
It was halftime.
Howard gets the flu and has to leave.
Right.
Now, was that the real deal on that?
He attributed, afterwards, he attributed it to a virulent virus or something
like that.
He couldn't even get the word out of it.
Virulent, I think is the word.
Whatever it was.
But, David, that was, I mean, that went on for years and years and years.
Howard would have a taste up in the booth.
Well, yeah, occasionally.
Have you seen Howard recently?
No, no.
He's, of course, retired.
He, you know, could have been the older statesman of this business.
You know, a lot of people didn't care for Howard.
I thought inside of all of that was a smart, decent guy.
Well, definitely a very smart guy.
There's no question about that.
Wow.
Wow.
Very smart.
What do you make of the, I mean, good heavens.
We got no baseball.
We got no hockey.
What the hell is going on here?
It's, you know, it's the money thing.
It's as simple as there's a lot of money and there's one pie and the players
want to eat the bigger part of the pie.
And then the owners want their part of the pie.
All right.
But in addition to that, now, when I was a kid, the game you tried to play
after school and on weekends was baseball.
If you could find four or five of your buddies or nine of your buddies,
whatever, you would go play baseball.
Fundamentally, that's altered now, isn't it?
Isn't the game that kids play basketball?
Well, in the city, it's basketball.
And I still think a lot of kids play baseball.
A lot of kids play soccer, but soccer hasn't taken off.
More and more kids are playing hockey.
It's amazing.
Hockey, it's a fantastic sport.
It used to be just a northern tier sport.
I don't know.
I just, I don't get it anymore.
With hockey?
Well, you just say hockey or Philadelphia.
Hockey's such a wonderful word, isn't it?
That's some show.
But you know what?
What I'm trying, what I'm getting at is, is baseball making a mistake on one
end of it when they have troubles on the other end of it that may hurt it from
now on.
Well, I think baseball will, baseball will be temporarily hurt by this.
There's no question about it.
And in fact, you know, we'd be doing the World Series on ABC beginning a week
from Saturday had it been.
But no World Series.
And people don't seem to miss it.
Maybe not.
Well, they don't seem to miss it.
And that's a little scary.
Right.
But they'll be back.
And once they start it over again and people get interested in it, baseball
will come back.
The game is too slow.
They play too many games a season.
They should cut it back to like 150, 145 and get it down to around 2 hours and
10 minutes.
There you go.
People will be back in the park.
This is a man who used to listen to every Reds game in history.
Well, that's, you know, that's when it was a game for heaven's sake.
Yeah, you betcha.
Okay.
So until tomorrow night from Riverfront Stadium, this is the old left-hander
rounding third and heading for home.
Good night, everybody.
Worldwide Pants.