Haven't They Suffered Enough?: An Unbelievable Career in Sports, PR and Television

Beano Cook was an American sports media icon, an original character known for his wit and his one-liners, his eccentric personality, his encyclopedic knowledge of college football history, and his distinctive voice, which the writer Tom Callahan said sounded like “a plumbing fixture gargling Drano.” That voice, which captivated countless college football fans for decades, narrates Cook’s posthumously published biography, “Haven’t They Suffered Enough?”

Written with friend and author John D. Lukacs, the book is equal parts op-ed piece, history lesson and stand-up comedy routine. Employing the same colorful style as a storyteller he exhibited on the air as a college football commentator for ABC Sports and ESPN, Cook holds court, regaling readers with stories and recollections from his childhood through his extraordinary sixty-year professional career in sports, public relations and network television.

That career started at Cook’s alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as the school’s maverick athletics publicist from 1956 to 1966. It was at Pitt that Cook was anointed, by New York sportswriter Dan Parker, “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 and held a similar position at CBS Sports from 1977 to 1982. Cook also served stints as a sportswriter for the St. Petersburg Times, as a publicist for the Mutual Broadcasting System, and spent one year out of sports as a social worker with the domestic Peace Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, aka. VISTA.

The book serves as an all-access pass to the world of college athletics and the golden era of network television sports, with Cook taking the reader into broadcast booths, production trucks, pressboxes, and long-gone watering holes. Such an unconventional life requires a unconventional storytelling approach, which Cook takes with special, standalone chapters on subjects such as sports betting, plus one moving section that serves as a love letter from the lifelong bachelor to the true love of his life, the game of college football. As one of the defining voices in the history of the sport, he ranks his all-time greatest teams, plays, players, coaches, fight songs and traditions, and recounts never-before-told stories about the personalities and contests that made college football America’s national passion.