Sportscaster Howard Cosell drank ``before, during and after telecasts'' and once threw up on Don Meredith's cowboy boots during ``Monday Night Football,'' a former ABC Sports executive says in a forthcoming book. In ``Up Close & Personal: The Inside Story of Network Television Sports,'' Jim Spence also calls Cosell ``one of the unhappiest human beings on this planet.'' Spence, who worked at ABC for 26 years, was senior vice president of ABC Sports from 1978 until he left the network in 1986. He is now president of a sports production and marketing company. His book, co-written with Dave Diles, will be in bookstores next month. Spence describes Cosell as an insecure, overbearing man who became impossible to work with late in his career. ``He had made millions of dollars, traveled the world, been applauded and honored time and time again. Yet, today, I think he is one of the unhappiest human beings on this planet,'' he wrote. Cosell, 70, could not be reached for comment Wednesday. A woman answering the phone at his home said he was visiting his wife at a New York hospital, where she is recovering from surgery. According to Spence, Cosell's drinking sometimes became a ``major problem.'' During a ``Monday Night Football'' telecast from Philadelphia in 1970, he said, Cosell ``got so drunk he couldn't pronounce the name of the city he was in without slurring.'' Cosell left the booth after throwing up on Meredith, one of his broadcasting partners. At the request of ABC Sports chief Roone Arledge, Spence said, an ABC spokesman told reporters that Cosell became ill after one drink because of a reaction to flu medication he was taking. Spence said Cosell ``again got out of control'' during ABC's telecast of the 1984 American League playoffs when he kept kept interrupting colleague Al Michaels. Spence said he got a call the next day from Michael's agent, who said ``Al had told him that Cosell was drinking heavily and was impossibly argumentative, and that Al could no longer tolerate it.'' Cosell's relationship with Michaels and other ABC sportscasters reached a low point after he criticized them in his 1985 book, ``I Never Played the Game.'' ``We were all sick and tired of his bad-mouthing of everybody and everything,'' Spence wrote. Cosell left the network in 1985. In January, he started a nationally-syndicated TV show that recently went off the air.
