John Madden made a moment of football

It is possible that he would have liked it too. Enthusiasm made Madden legendary. Madden, who died on December 28 at the age of 85, spoke of football as if it were the world’s greatest sport he truly believed it to be. He played it, coached it, taught it, and then in the high middle age, he evangelized for it every Sunday as perhaps the greatest television analyst to ever do it.

He didn’t want to do it at first, television. But in a short time, his voice – happy thunder – became synonymous with sports. Madden’s dizzying intonation in the tundra of Lambeau or the center star of Texas Stadium – best known with Pat Summerall and later Al Michaels – became an American ritual. Was Thanksgiving really a Thanksgiving day without hearing Madden’s rhapsodic maddenism (“Boom!”) From the TV room?

He was a football connoisseur – he was appointed head coach of the Oakland Raiders at the age of 32, he won the Super Bowl in 1976, and he didn’t have a losing year for an entire decade. On television, he never spoke down to his audience. Football is a complex sport, often described in rigid wartime language, but Madden bombarded it and made it sound fun in the backyard using new Telestrator technology to draw diagrams as if he were sketching them in the sand.

He always sold gently – the gameplay, the moods, the coaches, the stars and especially the lesser known guys on the line because he had been one of them. Madden loved hirsute centers, wrinkles, and Roly-poly-nose jackets, and every Sunday she made names for them, too. He started picking an All-Madden Team full of guys like him, tough men playing with broken thumbs and eating screws for breakfast.

He was both a critical phenomenon and a ruthless populist. Madden spoke on TV as if he were sitting next to you at an airport bar, unless if you knew anything about Madden, you knew he would never be at the airport. He always took the train and then the bespoke bus – the choice was due to claustrophobia and a bad period during the flight with the Raiders.

His preference for traveling to the country was described as eccentricity, but in practice it connected Madden to the country with whom he spoke weekly. There were NFL concentrations in America, but also many places in between, and Madden understood those places as well, as Madden Cruiser stopped at most of them. Television may be a reservoir of lies, but he arrived from a gentler, more real area.

The miracle of his career is its long tail – his rise with the Raiders, the department and all those ads for everyone (no one has torn through the paper walls better). He ingeniously ventured into video games where his NFL game of the same name would train new generations in the sport.

It is said many times in the coming weeks, but Madden was revolutionary several times. There are people who remember him on TV and know little about the years in Oakland; There are players playing Madden who have never heard of him on television. Football is now the dominant sports media product in the country, and Madden both rode the wave and created his own. His moves – from CBS to Fox, Monday Night on ABC, Sunday Night with NBC, and of course Madden for the video game – built empires that continue.

He was one-off. People have tried, but no one has come to approach his popularity and sheer fame. Football talk has become more analytical: less 3 yards and a cloud of dust, more 4 and 6, and here’s the data on why. The sport needs his energy and his friendly, oversized presence: The mere fact that Madden invited the game made it a moment. Football has never been bigger, but without John Madden it feels a little smaller.

Write to Jason Gay at [email protected]