Post by TheShadow on Apr 20, 2009 19:53:55 GMT -5
online.wsj.com/
By LEONARD CASSUTO
John Madden doesn't get enough credit. He's getting plenty of love, of course, on the occasion of his retirement from football broadcasting after 30 years, but the celebration of the 73-year-old's career still underestimates his influence. Fox Sports President Ed Goren describes Mr. Madden as "the No. 1 sports analyst on television," but that doesn't go far enough. Nor do his 16 Emmy Awards tell the entire story of his extraordinary impact.
Mr. Madden is a transformational figure in the history of entertainment. He changed the way that we watch television and the way we think about sports.
From an unlikely perch in the broadcast booth, Mr. Madden has been serving as America's teacher. Using complex diagrams and -- dare I say it? -- intellectual explanations, Mr. Madden gave the average fan credit for wanting to know more than just who caught the ball. His memorable turns of phrase ("boom!") have given whimsical cover to the real work he's done making his students -- anyone who watches sports -- better, more alert, more knowledgeable viewers. If Howard Cosell showed that televised sports offered more than just a game to watch, John Madden honored their significance with his in-depth approach to announcing.
Mr. Madden played football in college, but a 1958 knee injury ended his professional playing career before it began. He turned to coaching as a young man, quickly working his way through the college and pro ranks to become the head coach of the Oakland Raiders at the age of just 32. He spent a successful decade in that position, taking the team to two Super Bowls and winning one, before retiring in 1978. A year later he became one of the first former coaches to work on the national level as a television analyst.
Mr. Madden proceeded to reinvent the job of football broadcaster, beginning at a crucial time when television was surpassing radio as the dominant medium in sports broadcasting. His preparation -- attending team practices during the week before the game, studying game film, and so on -- were all new and quickly became standard. Remarked Pat Summerall, his longtime broadcast partner at CBS and Fox, "You knew how prepared he was."
Football is both unusually technical and unusually violent. Mr. Madden entertained his viewers because he embraced both elements. His onscreen persona combined the hyperenthusiastic fan with the hyperanalytical coach. Mr. Madden the excited fan reveled in the hard hitting in the football trenches, and each year he named an "All-Madden Team" of players who were most likely to get dirt on their jerseys.
But it was Mr. Madden as cerebral coach who made his most lasting mark. What did the key block look like that sprung the runner for a touchdown run? Where was the seam in the zone defense that allowed the receiver to catch the pass? Mr. Madden was a fount of deep and complex instruction, using state-of-the-art computer graphics, scribbling circles and arrows into a freeze frame, to illustrate his lengthy explanations.
This kind of analysis had been thought too complicated for the average fan, but Mr. Madden showed that fans not only tolerated that level of depth, but actively wanted it. His example quickly spread across televised sports during the 1980s.
Mike Fratello, the NBA's first "Czar of the Telestrator," simply borrowed Mr. Madden's diagramming techniques and applied them to basketball, where they remain a staple of coach-centric analysis. Baseball announcing on television once relied almost solely on chatter about the batter's hometown of little old Altoona, Pa., and other such remarks. After Mr. Madden, baseball announcers embraced the technical and statistical aspects of the play on the field. Tim McCarver was the first to employ in-depth explanations of fielder positioning, pitch sequences, and other strategies. Now all serious baseball announcers do those things.
They do them because Mr. Madden raised the intelligence level of sports announcing. A whole generation of TV viewers has grown up on the most rigorously analytical play-by-play announcing in the long history of sports. It's not too much to believe that for once, television is making them smarter.
Mr. Madden was both cute and quaint. Every Thanksgiving he and Mr. Summerall would share a turducken -- a gargantuan assemblage of a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey -- with the winning team that day. Well-known for his refusal to fly, he would travel to games in a fully outfitted luxury bus dubbed "The Madden Cruiser." Mr. Madden will be deservedly remembered for such outsize gestures.
But he should be remembered longer for the way that he changed the American view of sports. The entire ESPN SportsCenter approach, for instance, a combination of light humor and deep analysis, owes everything to Mr. Madden's example.
The most enthusiastic fans say that sports are compelling because they imitate life -- which they certainly do in some ways. But at a time when political conversation, to name one crucial form of public communication, is getting steadily dumbed down, John Madden's retirement should remind us that we can do better. His demanding and fruitful style represents a way that life can and should imitate sports. How often does that happen?
Mr. Cassuto teaches English at Fordham University. His most recent book is "Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories" (Columbia University Press, 2008).