I didn’t enjoy John Madden’s work as much as everyone else apparently did, but he did have an amazing and interesting career.
Many of you are too young to remember Madden as the Oakland Raiders’ coach.
[His career numbers are supposed to be here, in a graphic, via profootballreference.com, but WordPress hopelessly garbled them.]
Anyway, Madden was 71 games over .500, and won seven division titles in 10 years. Granted, he inherited a good team, but still. Here’s what’s interesting: He was widely seen at the time as Al Davis’ lackey, or puppet, and the assumption was that Davis was really coaching, or quasi-coaching, the team (think Jerry Jones-Wade Phillips with the current Cowboys, except Davis was thought of as more meddling in the football stuff and, of course, the Raiders were more successful). That assumption had to be at least overstated and at most a load of crap, but, still, it was out there, even though nobody mentions it today.
Moreover, Madden came off as a hulking, humorless, angry guy who could not be more different from the jovial, goofy uncle he’s perceived to be today. It’s hard to think of a more complete image makeover for any American public figure. You wonder how aware of that he was, and how consciously he made it happen.
What’s more impressive, if he consciously made it happen or if he didn’t?
The other thing is, here’s a 73 year-old, old-school-ish guy who’s retiring with a comfortable place in the history of three fields: football, television and, uh…. video games?
Like him or not, you’ve got to take your hat off to that.
