His Book Is Part Spice, Part Spite

When Roone Arledge was presiding, high, wide and handsome, over ABC network sports, Jim Spence was widely perceived in the media as his hatchet man.

Well, now, he’s buried the hatchet. In Roone.

While he’s at it, he takes a swipe at a few other scalps, too, most notably Howard Cosell’s.

President Reagan called them “kiss-and-tell” books. They have become a phenomenon of our age.

They probably originated with sports books. Jim Brosnan, a pitcher for Cincinnati, pioneered the genre with a diary-like tome, “The Long Season” which opened the door of the baseball clubhouse to the fan and let him see his heroes, warts and all. As an expose, it was not really in the class with Donald Regan’s--or Jim Spence’s--but it showed there was an appetite, and a market, for behind-the-scenes stuff.

Before that, historians usually had to wait a decade or two and a formal biography to find out what had been going on before their very eyes.

Prior to Brosnan, sports books ran heavily to “And then I hit a triple down the left-field line,” or “Out of the corner of my eye I saw Randy was open.”

We didn’t find out till 20 years after he’d died that Babe Ruth drank, or that Ty Cobb was homicidal off the field, too.

Now, you know that kind of stuff as soon as the presses run. Now, if the New York Yankee outfield climbs up on a Washington hotel roof to ogle young ladies undressing, we find out about it--via a Jim Bouton book--almost as soon as they climb down.

There was a natural progression from that to the “Mommie Dearest” type of Hollywood biog. And then we moved backstairs at the White House. Nobody in the country knew Warren Harding had an illegitimate child except Warren and the mother. In fact, hardly anyone in the country knew that Franklin Roosevelt was crippled.

That era has closed and Spence’s book, “Up Close And Personal” (Atheneum) gives a running account of the infighting at television networks while the players are still around to say “Who me?”

Like all such books, Spence’s is part spice, part spite.

Roone Arledge was the closest thing to the Invisible Man you could find when he was running ABC sports. When he chose to, he could make Howard Hughes look gregarious. Even Bing Crosby was moved to observe wryly on TV once “Roone Arledge--good man. Hard to find.”

Jim Spence identifies him, accurately enough, as “the most significant figure in the history of television sports in America.” Roone knew what the public wanted--live sports. They couldn’t get enough of it. It was the last bastion of spontaneity on the tube, the only fresh fruit on the network. Everything else came out of a can.

Roone had an unerring instinct for what played on the TV screen--stars not things. With Roone, the play wasn’t the thing, the players were. He made “Monday Night Football” an American tribal rite. He took the Olympic Games out of the category of a quadrennial track meet or toboggan run and made them into a powderless war.

Roone took care of the big picture, Spence, the details. And, Spence complains, Arledge generated all this heat without going near the kitchen.

“His human qualities did not match his professional achievements,” writes Spence.

He accuses Arledge of creating a Garbo-like mystique about himself, of making a lifelong career out of unavailability. Some of it was insensitivity, some of it was hostility, all of it was calculated, claims Spence. Arledge, in his book, comes off as more Captain Bligh than Captain Video, a man who considered his crew expendable and himself infallible.

His managerial philosophy was to hire two people for the same job and let them fight it out, an executive technique as old as William Randolph Hearst or maybe even William of Orange. Spence makes Arledge as aloof to the bloodshed as a guy watching a cockfight. His solution for any problem, says Spence, was to do nothing till it went away--even if it took two or three trusted employees with it.

Arledge was a jock chaser who liked to fill his booths with inarticulate halfbacks, broad-shouldered platform divers and other political footballers because he liked to socialize with them afterward while he systematically demoted or dealt off such seasoned professionals as Chris Schenkel.

Still, Arledge’s most celebrated creation was that strange phenomenon, Howard Cosell.

No unlikelier figure ever bestrode the narrow straits of sports. Stooped, angular, possessed of an accent part Bronx and part Canarsie, and a mind like a steel trap, Howard Cosell fascinated America--as Arledge knew he would.

He had made somewhat of a reputation as Muhammad Ali’s buddy and the two of them toured the world like a network Frick and Frack or a pair of burlesque comics. No one ever figured out whether Howard Cosell made “Monday Night Football” or “Monday Night Football” made Howard Cosell, but the result for years was magic. America never knew whether it disliked or admired Howard Cosell but, either way, it watched.

Howard Cosell, Jim Spence writes, was a victim of his own celebrity and his own insecurity. He began to see enemies in lampposts and vindictiveness overtook judgment, Spence writes. “Instead of enjoying his success, he let it devour him. With Cosell . . . all of us knew we were dealing with a man whose problems and insecurities had overwhelmed him.”

The facts of the matter were, one of the things that eventually overwhelmed Cosell was a spiteful little memoir he wrote in which he took to task nearly everyone who had ever worked closely with him.

One wonders if it is endemic at ABC or merely an occupational hazard in a profession where so many who are owed so little are paid so much.

Spence gives us a fascinating look behind the logo at the heady world of limos, Lear jets, and luxury suites. But its coat of arms should be the backbite rampant on a field of double-crosses and dollar signs.

Maybe he should have titled it “The Agony of Victory or the Thrill of Defeat.”