Howard William Cosell

 Howard William Cosell, born Howard William Cohen (March 25, 1918 – April 23, 1995)

Cosell was a sports journalist who was widely known for his blustery, cocksure personality. Cosell said of himself, "Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff. There's no question that I'm all of those things." In its obituary for Cosell, The New York Times described Cosell's effect on American sports coverage: "He entered sports broadcasting in the mid-1950s, when the predominant style was unabashed adulation, [and] offered a brassy counterpoint that was first ridiculed, then copied until it became the dominant note of sports broadcasting." In 1993, TV Guide named Howard Cosell The All-Time Best Sportscaster in its issue celebrating 40 years of television. A year later, in 1994, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame. He was also the 1995 recipient of the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. After his wife of 46 years, Mary Edith Abrams Cosell (known as "Emmy") died from a massive heart attack in 1990, Cosell largely withdrew from the public eye and his health began failing. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1991 and had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in his chest. He also had several minor strokes, and was diagnosed with heart and kidney disease and Parkinson's. Cosell died at Hospital for Joint Diseases in Manhattan on April 23, 1995, aged 77, of a cardiac embolism. He is buried at Westhampton Cemetery in Westhampton, NY.