Lowell Cohn - Gloves Off: 40 Years of Unfiltered Sports Writing

For Robert Cohn, my brother
19412018

FOREWORD
BY STEVE YOUNG

L OWELL COHN WAS TOUGH, absolutely brutal sometimes. He was like the power-washer blasting the barnacles off the boata steel-wool scouring pad extricating any and all blemishes from the pan, no matter how ingrained they might be.

Simply put, you did not want to be the subject of one of Lowells columns, but you always read them. In some ways, I felt like Lowell never worried about his next column. If I were worried about my next column, I wouldnt write this! He didnt do fluff. He was as unvarnished and unapologetic as weve ever seen in the Bay Area, and the fans benefited from that raw, unclouded approach. And we did, too.

As tough as he was, I am thankful for Lowell Cohn. He made me better; he made the team and our entire organization better. Im not sure all my teammates would agree, but his voice was necessary to keep us on track. It was medicine that was good for you. It didnt taste good, but it was good for you in the end.

It took me awhile to understand where Lowell was coming from, but once I did, I realized we were interested in the same things. Football is a human lab, and if you want to change behavior, you have to figure out what drives behavior. Thats what Lowell was pursuing and so was I.

He wasnt interested in the Xs and Os as much as he was interested in the human drama that surrounded him. He wanted to deconstruct why you were losing, but he didnt want to hear dropped passes or missed throws. He wanted to get underneath it. He didnt want to just hang around the edges of a conversation or a subject. He wanted to get to the soft, unexposed places to try to get to why it was happening. It made him unique and a must-read.

For a half decade, Joe Montana and I found ourselves right in the middle of Lowells coverage, which was very uncomfortable. The quarterback controversy provided the human drama that Lowell relished. He was absolutely relentless as he tried to crack the case.

It taught me early on that when youre in a tough job, Lowell made it tougher. When youre dealing with all the challenging issues day to day, the last thing you needed was something that wasnt going to help you ease through it. Lowell was never going to help you ease through it. He would make sure you got every inch of it.

But in the end, we were better because of Lowell. Theres always a need for a voice like that. Its important. Nothing is worse than internal marketing; it is death to great organizations. Its when were telling each other that were all great and everything is fine. That didnt happen with Lowell. As a truth-seeker, he wouldnt allow it. His nonmarketing voice was ever-present and ensured that we were never just an echo chamber. It absolutely made a difference.

And the truth is, I loved to try to prove him wrong when he was tough. If he had an opinion about your abilities because thats what he was digging atwhat you cant doI was going to show him he was wrong.

I remember Bill Walsh told him one day, I dont know where this kid, Steve, is. No one knows where he is. And Lowell took that as a theme hes just crazy and runs around. Well, thats not true. I am someone whos focused on doing the job. I dont want to just run around and be crazy. I knew he was wrong and I set out to prove it.

And as tough as he could be, I always enjoyed the interaction. Lowell is a philosopher. He has a unique take on the human condition and it led to many wholesome discussions between us that I always appreciated. I can honestly say that we have never had an uninteresting conversation.

His impact on Bay Area sports is significant. He was the kind of guy who could change the trajectory of a situation, of a season, of a career. What Lowell said mattered, whether you liked it or not. It was always a lot easier when he was writing about someone else, but you always paid attention.

FOREWORD
BY BRIAN MURPHY

T he great news is, my friend Lowell Cohn wrote a book. The bad news is, all it does is make me want more writing from Lowell. Reading Lowell again makes me want to drive over to his house, maybe with that Cakebread Chardonnay he brought to Bill Walshs house, open the bottle, and negotiate again how we can get Lowell Cohns writing back into our lives on a daily basis.

Lowell retired a couple of years ago, after one of the most impactful sportswriting careers in Bay Area history. Lowell was different from all of us. He was better. He didnt do California passive-aggressive. I dont know why we native West Coasters are so passive-aggressive. Anytime Im around Lowell and observe his direct way of speaking, direct line of questioning, and direct style of writing, I admire how much better it is than the rest of ours.

I was super lucky to call Lowell a colleague from 1995 to 1999 when we were both at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. I never had a colleague like Lowell before. You could go to dinner with Lowell and talk about Floyd Patterson, Kafka, and Woody Allen. Not necessarily in that order. Sometimes in that order, though.

Id read Lowell and be in awe. Why didnt I write as cleanly as he did? Why were my sentences so much longer and more cluttered than Lowells? How did Lowell observe that motivation in that coachs behavior, when all I did was transcribe the quote?

Lowell is a thinker. That PhD didnt fall off a tree, even though he got it at Stanford, where there are lots of trees. But youd never meet a less-stuffy guy with a literature doctorate than Lowell Cohn. Thats what makes Lowells writing so great. Take a big brain thats read all the great books, add in an innate passion for sports, combine it with a keen eye on human behavior, and then dip it all in a big vat of Brooklyn getouttaheah humor. You dont get combo platters like that.

This memoir is loaded with funny stuff. Hilarious stories about Al Davis and Frank Robinson and Will Clark and the Brooklyn playgrounds of his youth. Thats another thing about Lowell. How long he gifted us with his writing. The stories span from how he learned to be tough from the Sals on a Brooklyn playground in the 1950s to living in a world where breaking the story of Walshs leukemia diagnosis happened in a modern media split second.

And the stories are the best. Lowell may have been so savage in some of his blunt observations that he tells us he was known as that asshole by many of his peers, but that also means that when Lowell tells us an emotional story, the impact is that much greater. With Lowell, the toughness of his prose buys him the kind of credibility that allows for a wallop of feeling when he lets you inside, like he does when he tells you the story about his dad taking him to a baseball game when he was a kid.

I grew up reading Sports Illustrated and fell in love with the long-form poetry of Frank Deford and Gary Smith. I thought I was supposed to try to make everything an epic poem. And then I read Lowell and realized you earn so much more with the reader by stripping it down. Lowell eschews flowery language. I once asked him why he was so in love with boxing. He told me, because its basic. And basic is the best drama. Thats his writing. If illustrating basic themes of the human experience was a good enough road map for a guy like Shakespeare, it was good enough for a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who saw all those themes on display when watching Friday Night Fights.

I should probably get going, so you can read the memoir. Youll see what I mean. Youll read how he is open-minded, even apologizing to a guy he thinks is a lowlife, like Billy Martin. Or how he doesnt buy the politically correct line of turning Colin Kaepernick into Muhammad Ali. Or how he gleans the deepest of meanings from the most basic of interactions. Im thinking about his story of Billy Beane and Brian Sabean and their offices. Or how an afternoon with