It's More Than A Turducken- Boom!

Perception is a strange thing. It’s all we have to go on. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi said, “Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” This brings me to John Madden and my place in two worlds. Madden retired from doing color commentary for the NFL last spring. This is the first time since 1979 that he isn’t in a broadcast booth on Sundays during football season. There are people writing about him who were born after that. All they know is the caricature of himself that he settled into in the mid-nineties and his video games. They know nothing of him as a coach. My memories of him start with him being a coach. He and Tom Landry are the coaches that I remember most from the seventies. I was very young, but Landry stood out because of his fedora and Madden stood out because he was a fat guy with manic energy on the sidelines. Madden took football too seriously, stressing himself into an ulcer. He was smart enough to see the game was killing him so he retired after the 1977 season. I was only six but he’s tattooed on my brain. He became an NFL analyst in 1979 and completely changed how games are called. He brought a technicality to the game that’s ubiquitous now, but back then nobody did. He didn’t treat the audience like they were clueless. Almost everything I know about watching football analytically I learned from Madden. He was the first guy to not only differentiate between zone and man-to-man defense, but to get into the different zone defenses and where the holes were in them. He was the first guy to explain how play-action works. And I could always tell that he was having a blast doing it. He was coaching without the stress. Strangely, no one copied him. Maybe because there wasn’t a way to do it without being blatant about it. He lent his name to a video game in the late eighties, earned $98,870,696,877,565,645,765,867,000 and started mailing in his commentary. Unfortunately, the youngest kids who first fell in love with his video games are turning thirty and they’re the voice of popular culture. It’s like only knowing U2 from Achtung Baby on, or only knowing Steve Martin from his stupid family movies. You missed all the good stuff.