Related Content
•
CoSIDA.com/CoSIDA360 Magazine Archive
Note: This story appeared in the Fall 2020 November edition of CoSIDA 360 Magazine. To view the full magazine, click here.
Beano Cook
An original CoSIDA member to be featured in a memoir released this November.
by John D. Lukacs – Author @johndlukacs
Carroll “Beano” Cook was an American sports media icon, an original character known for his wit and his one-liners, his eccentric, polarizing personality, his encyclopedic knowledge of sports history, his enduring love of college football (as well as his everlasting hatred of baseball) and, of course, his distinctive voice. It sounded, the writer Tom Callahan famously said, “like a plumbing fixture gargling Drano.”
Though he is also probably best known for his role as a curmudgeonly college football commentator on ABC and ESPN from the early 1980s through the 2000s, Cook, who joined CoSIDA as a charter member in 1957, considered himself first and foremost a “PR man.” Cook passed away in 2012 at the age of 81, but members will soon have a unique opportunity to hear the unforgettable voice of one of the organization’s founders again; it narrates Cook’s posthumously published autobiography, “Haven’t They Suffered Enough?”
The title is arguably Cook’s most famous and oft-repeated line, which he uttered in 1981 in response to the announcement that commissioner Bowie Kuhn would be presenting the returning Iran hostages with lifetime MLB passes. The highly entertaining memoir is equal parts weekly release, op-ed piece, history lesson and comedy routine, an all-access pass to an incredible life well-lived. Employing the same colorful style as a storyteller he exhibited on the air, Cook regales readers with recollections from his childhood in the 1930s and 1940s and countless other stories collected over the course of his extraordinary, sixty year professional career in sports, publicity and network television.
That career started at Cook’s alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as the school’s maverick sports publicist from 1956 to 1966. Cook, at the time the second youngest sports information director in the country, was a pioneer in the field of athletic public relations who devised imaginative publicity stunts, ran gambling pools in the football pressbox, arranged entertainment for sportswriters and published the prices of produce and the location of police speed traps in his releases. Thanks in part to his zany antics, as well as his zeal in promoting Pitt’s athletes and teams, he became a national media favorite while simultaneously antagonizing not just NCAA administrators, referees and opponents, but often times his own athletic directors, too. In 1960, the colorful Cook was the subject of a feature story in
Sports Illustrated. Veteran New York sportswriter Dan Parker anointed Cook “the greatest publicity man since Barnum — and, on second thought, Bailey, too.”
From 1966 to 1974, Cook worked as NCAA press director for ABC Sports. He held the same position at CBS Sports from 1977 to 1982. Sandwiched in between, Cook served stints as a sportswriter for the
St. Petersburg Times, as a publicist for the Miami Dolphins, and spent one full year with the domestic Peace Corps, Volunteers in Service to America. “I moved around more often and had more jobs than the Fugitive did,” Cook recalled, referencing the hit 1960s TV show.
Such an unconventional life requires a unconventional storytelling approach, which Cook takes with standalone chapters on subjects special to him such as sports betting and college football. The latter serves as a love letter from the lifelong bachelor to the game. As one of the defining voices in the sport’s history, he lists his all-time greatest teams, plays, players, coaches, fight songs and traditions, and tells hilarious, head-shaking tales about the legendary personalities and contests that make it America’s national passion.
There are the games. Cook covered epic contests such as the 1967 USC-UCLA game, the 1973 Sugar Bowl, and the 1993 Florida State-Notre Dame “Game of the Century.” He is credited for convincing his boss, ABC Sports executive Roone Arledge, to move the 1969 Texas-Arkansas game, scheduled for October, to December, resulting in the ratings extravaganza known as the “Big Shootout.”
And then there are the names. Throughout the course of his career, he rubbed shoulders with famous athletes, writers, TV personalities and politicians such as Red Smith, Robert F. Kennedy, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, Mary Tyler Moore, Howard Cosell, Muhammad Ali, Dan Jenkins, Dr. Jonas Salk, Richard Nixon, Bill Russell, Pete Rozelle, Phyllis George, Don Shula, Joe Paterno, Jack Whitaker, James Michener and many others.
To Cook, however, the most important memories were the ones created during his decade as a college SID. He recalls the rhyming poetry of Fred Casotti’s releases at Colorado, the brilliant prose Harold Keith composed at Oklahoma, the outstanding food and the five-star amenities in the pressbox at Michigan State, nicknamed the “Stabley Hilton” in honor of Fred Stabley, Sr., and the time Duke’s Ted Mann brokered a peace treaty with law enforcement and the ACC’s Director of Officials, Footsie Knight, that kept Cook from being arrested for disorderly conduct after heckling an official during the 1959 Pitt-Duke basketball game.
Cook provides a nostaglic look back at a bygone era before the Internet and social media existed, when an SID’s job was largely devoted to lobbying writers, padding expense accounts, the relentless pursuit of “space” and the antiquated mission of advancing road games to secure publicity, like a carnival barker, in order to sell game tickets. It was the highlight of the job for Cook.
“Between all the expensed eating and drinking, I did quite a bit of sightseeing, everything from touring historic sites to taking in Broadway shows. I used the trips to advance my love life, too,” Cook explained. “I have no idea who conceived the idea of a publicity director advancing a game for an entire week, but I think our professional organization, CoSIDA, should have built a monument in his honor.”
The real celebrities in his life were the fellow media relations professionals he called friends. The pages of the book are littered with familiar names like Donn Bernstein, Don Bryant, Charlie Callahan, Norm Carlson, Val Pinchbeck, Jim Tarman, Budd Thalman, Roger Valdiserri, Nick Vista and many other members of CoSIDA’s Hall of Fame.
“When I left Pitt I missed the conventions, the cameraderie, and commiserating about the coaches and the hacks,” Cook writes. “That’s why I maintained many of my friendships with SIDs from my era, as well as got to know those of later generations. You leave the publicity profession, but it doesn’t leave you.”
NOTE: “Haven’t They Suffered Enough? Uncensored, Unfiltered Memories of an Unbelievable Career in Sports, PR and Television” by Beano Cook and John D. Lukacs will be available exclusively from Amazon.com on November 28.
Talk about these stories on the
CoSIDA Slack Community.