Madden: A Biography

—

To Victoria, the actress. You know why this book is for you.

To my late parents, Harold and Ursula Burwell. My father taught me to love sports, and Mom taught me to appreciate the art of the English language. Both their passions led to this book. I miss them both.

—

And in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a man coaches a football team and wins…and wins…and suddenly he is not a coach at all. He is a Prussian drillmaster. He is Attila sweeping through Chalot. He is John Henry with a hammer in his hand, beating the rest of football to a pulp through brute strength, extra-sensory perception, and a diet of honey and wheat germ.

Author Jerry Izenberg, from a 1968 Sport magazine profile of Vince Lombardi (career coaching record: 96–34–6)

Don’t get me wrong, if he had to, John would get after your ass. But he didn’t care about any of that dumb shit like how long your hair was, how you dressed, stuff like that. John was cool. All he cared about was, do your job and do it right.

Former Oakland Raiders safety George Atkinson on John Madden (career coaching record: 103–32–7)

Contents

Foreword by Pat Summerall

Prologue

PART ONE

1. Chasing the American Dream

2. Daly City Roots

3. From Fraternity Row to Cannery Row

PART TWO

4. The Making of a Coach

5. Tracing the Seeds of Fear

6. Game Changer

7. The Players’ Coach

8. Three Simple Rules

9. The Raiders’ Mystique

10. The Controversial Pass Deflection

11. Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride

12. We’re Gonna Win It All this Year...

13. The Road to Salvation

14. The Super Bowl and Saying Good-Bye

PART THREE

15. Discovering Television

16. The Making of a TV Star

17. To You It’s a Show, but to Me It’s a Goddamned Game...

18. The Hall Finally Calls

19. The End is Near

Epilogue: This is My Game

Acknowledgments

Selected Sources

About the Author

Photo Gallery

Foreword by Pat Summerall

Why did it work? Because we listened to each other.

Whenever I think of my incredible partnership with John Madden, the first word that comes to mind is respect.

I’m not sure how football historians will ultimately look back on us, but if some consider us the best football broadcasting team ever, I take that as a great honor.

When we first got together on that makeshift broadcast platform high above old Tampa Stadium way back on November 25, 1979, I had no idea how long we would last or how wonderfully our personal and professional friendship would blossom. I never imagined that our presence in a stadium would one day signify the Big Game in the National Football League. All I knew was that I respected John and believed he respected me, too. I think part of it was because I had been a player before I became a broadcaster. John knew that I understood the game from the inside out. And I respected him because of the coach he had been and for his incredible knowledge of and passion for the game.

It didn’t take long to discover that his knowledge and passion were contagious. It helped create a broadcasting partnership with me, producer Bob Stenner, and director Sandy Grossman that would last over two network stints at CBS and FOX. We looked at game film together like a coaching staff does. We prepared like coaches, which is how we knew why a player missed a block or made a great play. I remember John had us interview everyone on both teams before one Super Bowl broadcast. Seriously, we interviewed the entire teams, from the star quarterbacks to the last guys on special teams. Because of our preparation for the broadcast, we were never caught off guard by anything that happened during our three hours on TV. We were ready for any situation, and that’s part of why America enjoyed watching and listening to John.

But the real essence of our broadcasting relationship was even simpler. Why did it work? Because we listened to each other.

In the following pages, I hope you too will listen and learn, because the John Madden you are about to discover is nothing at all like the person you think you know. I probably got to know him as closely as anyone. I know about his kids and his grandkids. I know about his wife, Virginia. He knows all about my family, too. And I can honestly say that the John Madden I know is totally different in person from the one you see on the air.

You might be surprised at just how different. He likes you to think he’s this big ol’ goofball, this lumbering guy who waves his hands a lot and gets excited when he talks and is completely immersed in football. Well, that surely is part of the John Madden I know. Regardless of how we started the evening—perhaps ordering dinner or sitting at a poker table—the conversation would always involve football. Before long, John would be moving salt and pepper shakers around to diagram a play.

But the John Madden I know is also a diverse and very intelligent man who loves reading everything he can get his hands on. He loves talking about politics, world affairs, and movies, and he has a strong opinion on just about everything.

When people ask me if there is one highlight from our time working together that stands out, I honestly can’t choose just one. Why? Because to me, working with John Madden and being his friend has been 22 years of highlights.

—Pat Summerall

Prologue

A Witness to America

September 8, 2010

The hotel lobby is quiet—too quiet, really. The big man sits unnoticed in the middle of the room, slouched in an overstuffed antique leather chair, quietly nursing a fresh cup of coffee. The bill of his blue cap obscures his famous face, which has entertained and enlightened generations of NFL fans and has excitedly sold us everything from beer to foot ointments with charming everyman sensibilities.

An old man in the far corner of this elegant hotel lobby did not bother to raise his eyes from his newspaper when John Madden came ambling into the room a few minutes ago wearing a disheveled khaki shirt and untied sneakers. And the twentysomethings in tuxedos who, no doubt, spent half the night upstairs in the bachelor’s suite playing his eponymous video game seem oblivious to his presence as they assemble on the winding staircase for wedding photographs.

Perhaps they do not notice because the John Madden we think we know is so completely out of context in this place. The Madden we think we know—the Madison Avenue caricature of our recent memories—is a man who is always flailing his arms, bursting through our TV screen to sell us mufflers or cell phones, and peppering the air with a high-pitched burst of run-on football exuberance: SoEmmittSmithgetstheballandBOOM!! AndNateNewtongetshisBIG-O-BUTT goingandWHAP!!

The John Madden we think we know does not belong here. It is easier to imagine him at Tastee Freez or a diner or a truck stop somewhere on the highways of America, laughing and joking over grits and gravy in a Norman Rockwell–like tableau.

So who is the real John Madden? He is still a lot of that guy, but he is a little of this other guy, too. He has picked this place as a meeting spot. It is the charming Rose Hotel, located on a chic stretch of real estate in downtown Pleasanton, California. So why did he choose to meet here on a perfect autumn afternoon in the midst of antique tables, overstuffed French leather chairs, and so much cultured, raised-pinky, genteel ambience?

Well, mainly because he owns the place. It is part of the real-estate empire he has built with his two sons. If it makes you feel any better, he also owns a Holiday Inn and a Courtyard Marriott.

So who is the real John Madden?

John Madden is totally different in person from what you see on the air, says one close friend. A very private person, in many ways a lonely person with no habits other than football. A person who [is] very much a loner.

John’s complicated, says another longtime friend. You’ll find out soon enough that there’s a lot more to him than that caricature you see on TV.

One writer once eloquently called him a witness to America…the land, the people, the lifestyles, the thoughts, and the emotions that make up a society. Another described him as a thinker whose thoughts do not compress easily. And there’s this colorful take from one former AFC player who often felt the wrath of the coach’s marching orders when facing Madden’s notorious Oakland Raiders teams: Fuck him. Fuck them. I still hate the Raiders.

Madden is also funny and engaging. He is tough and profane and slightly defensive and a whole lot smarter than you think. He is a charming celebrity who enjoys the company of strangers and also a fiercely private man who has a debilitating fear of flying. John Madden is arguably one of the two or three most unique men in the history of American professional football. Legendary coach. The greatest TV football color commentator ever and maybe the greatest sports commentator ever. And now, in his third professional incarnation, he is a marketing force and pop-culture icon. How many people can lay claim to having influenced generations of NFL fans in three separate but equally legendary careers?

Madden’s story does not begin with him as a football coach, but you will see that his coaching career is the defining chapter of his life. You might need to be reminded of that now, because no one under the age of 45 can attest firsthand to the genius of Madden as a coach. Generation X only knows him as a video-game icon and Madison Avenue pitchman, and one must be older than 30 to have witnessed and fully appreciated the majority of his career as a sports-broadcasting giant.

But Madden is first and foremost a coach. He began his coaching career chomping nervously on a towel wrapped around his neck, berating officials with expletive-laced rants from the sideline. He was 33 years old, the youngest head coach in pro football, working for Al Davis’ Oakland Raiders. He broke the mold of the traditional football coach not with an iron hand and a clenched jaw or an intractable regiment. Instead, he did it with a wink and a smile, charming his band of outrageous renegades.

It was the late 1960s, and pro football was different then. It was more primeval, less show business. It was Old Testament football, where players didn’t wait for a commissioner to pass judgments on anyone who dared to break the written or unwritten rules of the game. They issued punishments in mean, violent, and unrepentant ways that made it clear justice would be served.

If the players were different then, so were the coaches. They were larger-than-life authoritarians like Vince Lombardi. NFL players lived a my way or the highway existence and had to answer to the stringent authority of coaches who had many rules—shirts and ties, curfews, and lots of other requirements that had nothing to do with winning games or collecting championships.

Men like Lombardi were the last bastions of conservatism in an ever-changing world. They drew their unwavering lines in the sand and forced every athlete to submit to their crew-cut, buttoned-down methods, even if it was clear that society’s buttoned-down attitudes were on the way out.

Then along came John Madden, the antithesis of the conservative coaching ethos. He didn’t believe in a lot of rules. He didn’t care much about how a player dressed, what he did away from the field, how long his hair was, how late he stayed out at night, or any of the other things most head coaches of his time obsessed over.

He operated with the simplest rules that anyone in football—hell, anyone in all of American sports—had ever heard: Be on time, pay attention, and play like hell when I tell you to.

His was a locker room full of reprobates and rascals who were partaking fully in the rich epicenter of American radicalism that was spawning all over the San Francisco Bay Area. Madden chose to lead—not harness, handle, or manage—these grown men in a way no one had dared to do before.

I think he was [the first player’s coach], said Howie Long, the Hall of Fame defensive end who played for the Raiders just after Madden retired. When I walked into that locker room, there were a lot of guys that John brought up and coached, and I can tell you, it sure as hell wasn’t Villanova anymore. You couldn’t find those guys at ’Nova. That was a tribute to John. He didn’t care who you were, what you looked like, how you dressed or behaved. But the guys he had always showed up on Sundays, regardless of what they did on Wednesdays or Thursdays…and sometimes Fridays and Saturdays, too. They came and played, and that was all John ever cared about.

His professional accomplishments are legendary. His career record of 103–32–7 gives him the best regular-season winning percentage of any coach in NFL history (.750). He appeared in the postseason in eight of his 10 years as a head coach, won at least one playoff game seven times, and reached seven conference title games.

Then he suddenly left the sideline and improbably grew larger still. Millions of football fans have come to know John as a media icon who redefined not only NFL broadcasting but sports broadcasting across the board, said Long. "John’s presence at a game came to signify that the game had great meaning to both the viewing audience and, more importantly, to the players who were participating in the game. But then a new generation of younger football fans were exposed to the NFL because of John’s video game. I can’t tell you how many late nights I spent waiting for one of my three boys to get home at 1:00 am because the newest Madden game was being released at midnight."

So who is the real John Madden?

On the table, there’s a cup of coffee next to a pile of scattered newspapers. The sports page says Joe Torre is resigning as manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers at age 70. The 74-year-old Madden looks at the headline and laughs.

Last week Joe was hanging out with Al [Davis] at practice, and Al asked me to come and spend some time with them, and that’s when Joe told us…that he was going to resign, Madden says, chuckling. "I was thinking, Oh boy, how am I going to keep this a secret? Geez, as much as I like to talk. But I didn’t think it was going to happen so soon."

Madden was only 42 when he got out of coaching, so I ask him if he could imagine coaching when he was 70 years old. Oh, hell no, he laughs. Never. But if the money was as good then as it is now—if somebody wanted to pay me $4 or $5 million a year to be their head coach—yeah, I could have hung around until my fifties. But that’s it. No way I could have made it to 70 like Joe. No way.

The closest he gets to coaching now is the vicarious thrill provided by his two sons, Joe and Michael, who coach high school freshman football on Thursday nights, and the flag football games with Madden’s grandsons on Saturday mornings.

On this particular Saturday, Madden has just come from watching his sons coach his grandsons. He still gets excited when he watches these games—probably too excited—but he’s working on it. On Saturdays, he parks his big Ford pickup truck in the parking lot as close as he can get to the field. He won’t get out of the truck and stand on the sideline because he knows that, even in retirement, he’s still John Madden, and a random Madden sighting, even at an eight-year-old’s flag football game, can draw a crowd and create a distraction.

On Thursday nights, though, he can find a spot in the stands at the high school field. He pulls his hat down tight, jacket collar snapped up, doing his best to blend into the background.

So who is the real John Madden?

Listen carefully, because maybe he really is exactly who you think he is.

A while ago, I’m up in the stands and my son Joe was upstairs in the coaching box, Madden says.

His voice is starting to percolate up toward that familiar high pitch. His arms are swirling like giant windmills, and he begins to resemble the man you remember from those Miller Lite beer commercials.

As the game is moving along, I’m looking as [my son’s team] goes into a slot [formation] and no one’s covering the [opponent in the] slot, Madden says. "Well, now I’m getting all fired up. The coach in me is coming out. I’m thinking, Oh man! If they just run the outside guy…."

As he talks, you can almost see the Xs and Os coming alive inside the old coach’s head. I almost expect him to walk over to a giant flat-screen TV and start scribbling something on the Telestrator.

OkayyouwannaMOVEthisguyRIGHTHERE…and then BAMit’sa TOUCHDOWN!!

So the coach did what he always does in moments like this. He got all fired up. I got up out of my seat and started to climb the bleachers to go tell Joe what I saw, Madden says.

But then he drops his head in mock shame.

I swear to God, I got halfway there before I realized what I was doing, he says, his voice booming.

And then the coach remembered what time it really was.

Half past retirement.

You big damned jerk, he recalls saying to himself. Just go sit down!

PART ONE

1. Chasing the American Dream

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

It was a part of the great mythology of 19th-century America, spurred by the echoes of Horace Greeley’s romantic, nationalistic rhapsody. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country. The bedrock concept of our great Western expansion was the quixotic promise that settlers were headed to the land of milk and honey on the plains and prairies. Greeley, the influential voice of Manifest Destiny from his perch as editor of the New York Tribune, believed a better life was out there for any hearty soul willing to exchange the poverty and rising unemployment in the industrial East for the agrarian life in the untamed American West.

Yet the cold reality confronting the first trickle of settlers who made their way into the heartland and beyond on covered wagons in the mid-1800s was that they were simply exchanging one hard road for another.

As tales of fertile farmlands and coal-rich hills just beyond the Mississippi River spread across the East Coast, a clan from the rugged Pennsylvania mining town of Wiconisco joined the westward flight. By the time John Madden’s paternal great-grandfather, John F. Madden, arrived in Hardin County, Iowa, with his wife and two children in or about 1860, coal mining had expanded from the barren hills of southeastern Iowa to all portions of the territory. Like every other Midwestern state, Iowa was swept up in the craze of building railroads and expanding farther west as rapidly as possible. Wagon trains were being replaced by coal- and wood-burning locomotive trains that belched large gray plumes of ash and cinder. In 1836 Iowa’s population was 10,531; by 1870 it had grown to nearly 1.2 million.

The Maddens were not fancy people. As best as can be traced, their roots as hardworking miners and farmers date back to the 18th century in Pennsylvania. They were never a part of the original American aristocracy. There was nothing highfalutin about them. They were poor folk with dirt under their fingernails. But they believed in the American Dream and chased it halfway across the continent, even if the so-called dream led them to grimy mining camps and parasitic company towns in the upper Iowa Valley outside of Clay and Eldora, where they dug coal, limestone, and clay out of the hard earth.

The Madden family’s roots are no surprise to John Robinson. He is no social scientist. He’s simply a retired football coach, and a damned good one. He won collegiate national championships at USC and NFL playoff games with the Los Angeles Rams. He also is one of John Madden’s oldest childhood friends, and he has a theory about the everyman sensibilities that have long made Madden so popular with the masses. He believes they stem directly from those generations-deep, working-class family roots.

I love great restaurants, he loves dives, Robinson says as he sits high above the football field at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium. "I rode on his bus going across the country twice with him, and I swear, every day he picked the absolute worst restaurants in the world for us to eat at. Bad Mexican joints. Greasy-spoon diners. Grimy rib shacks. You know what I mean? All those places with red checkered tablecloths and jars for water glasses. I used to get mad [at] him and ask, ‘Shit, can we ever go somewhere nice?’

But those are John’s kind of places because he genuinely likes people, ordinary people. And I think a lot of that is probably because John’s dad was a mechanic. John’s always been naturally attracted to the working stiff, the ordinary Joe. So I guarantee you if John would walk into this press box right now and had some free time on his hands, he’s more likely to go over in a corner and talk to the electrician or the guy emptying the trash cans for an hour than sit around and talk to the play-by-play guy. He would just sit down and bullshit with that guy and be just as happy as ever.

More than 100 years after his ancestors made that first westward journey across the American plains, John Earl Madden routinely rolled across the same terrain in much higher style. As a broadcaster who had endured panic attacks while flying on airplanes, Madden hit the road and became a modern-day John Steinbeck in his own personal Rocinante, the tricked-out Greyhound bus named the Madden Cruiser. How many times did he make this cross-continental odyssey? One hundred? Two hundred? Six hundred? Is it possible that on many of his travels his bus followed the same path as his ancestors’ strenuous pilgrimage in search of their American Dream?

In the wee hours of the morning on September 28, 1990, the 54-year-old Madden was in the back bedroom of the Cruiser. He was headed from his home outside of Oakland, California, to New York City to broadcast a football game. Over the first two days of the trip, Madden had indeed stopped in some of those salt-of-the-earth eateries that Robinson grumbled about—too many nameless truck stops, diners, dives, and convenience stores to mention. But all the while, the famous coach/broadcaster/huckster/video-game entrepreneur was mingling with America, doing what he has typically done on every one of these trips over the years: signing autographs at the gas station, shaking hands while woofing down his breakfast in the diner, and slicing off a piece of homemade rhubarb pie that someone brought him in the parking lot as he stood beside his famous bus.

He had eaten dinner at Grandpa’s Steakhouse in Kearney, Nebraska, early in the evening. But now on the final day of this three-day cross-country trek, the bus would bring him within 40 miles of Clay and Eldora. With Madden asleep in the back, the Cruiser breezed right past the I-80/I-35 interchange near Des Moines without its passenger making even a simple acknowledgement of the moment. I remember that we stopped for gas just outside Des Moines in the middle of the night, says Sports Illustrated football writer Peter King, who had hitched a ride with Madden to write an article about the journey. But I don’t remember John ever mentioning a thing about his family being originally from Iowa. In fact, he had already fallen asleep by then, and I don’t think he even woke up to look out the window when we stopped in Des Moines.

The landscape looked a lot different than it did the first time a member of the Madden clan set foot in Iowa in 1860. Long ribbons of asphalt and concrete extended in front of the Cruiser’s glowing headlights. The sweeping prairies had been replaced by highway cloverleafs and suburban sprawl, which quickly give way to acres of fertile farmland the farther