Post by TheShadow on Jul 30, 2006 10:19:04 GMT -5
insidebayarea.com/
Legend excited about imminent Hall induction
By Bill Soliday, STAFF WRITER
IT MAY BE hard to fathom, but at one time John Madden might not have felt like the football guy the world seems to love.
Thirty years ago on the evening of Jan. 4, 1976, the Oakland Raiders were returning from a 16-10 championship-game loss to the hated Steelers in Pittsburgh. There were perhaps a thousand fans crowding the lobby of the Oakland Airport to greet the team.
Long faces were everywhere. It had been the third time in four years the Raiders had been eliminated by the team known as the Steel Curtain.
Slipping through the throng, the Raiders coach was walking next to a reporter. Madden glanced up at fans crowded together on the balcony, then offered a recommendation.
"Uh, I don't think I'd stand too close to me if I were you," he told the reporter.
At the time, Madden could be excused if he felt he was closer to a bullet than the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
"Oh yeah, I remember," he said 30 years later. "But we had great fans. When you lose a playoff game, it's so tough because of the finality of it."
Madden chuckled. Those fans, he said, weren't vicious. Just serious.
Serious about a team that had yet to win a Super Bowl. That would come a year later. Until it finally happened Madden, as well as his team, were on the spot. Bridesmaids, never the bride.
Madden, the garrulous coach with the red hair and the emotional and fiery personality to match, the local guy from Daly City, the "squire of Pleasanton," as the first of his ghost writers, Walt Hecox, branded him, was supposedly too conservative, may have been a winner but couldn't win the big one.
Until he did. That was in 1977. A beer commercial, two decades in the announcer's booth, a video game with his name on it, a video production company and a litany of good will and family civic largess later, he is a legend, not just in Pleasanton or Canton.
John Madden is now the man everybody would like to stand next to.
He is everyman who made good and made everybody else feel good while he was doing it. He's finally going to a spot reserved for football's best and brightest. Saturday in Canton, Ohio, the legend on the steps of the Hall of Fame receiving long overdue acclaim. There, his bronze bust will reside.
Not even the bad old days of being on the spot waiting to win the big one can diminish that.
"The highs were so many more than the lows when I was coaching," he said.
Crying game
Madden says he's not sure how high his emotions will rise on his big day.
"I think it's going to hit the hell out of me," he said with a laugh. "I've felt excited, I've felt passionate. Nervous was never one of them."
Then, six weeks ago, he was watching the NFL Network on TV. The induction of Dan Marino and Steve Young was being replayed.
"I thought 'oh shoot, in a month I am going to be up there doing this,'" Madden said, acknowledging a knocking of his knees. "(At) a party Art Shell and Willie Brown (former Madden players who are already in the Hall of Fame and now are head and assistant coaches with the team) were kidding me about it. They always have a bet on who cries when they are speaking at the thing.
"Well, I admit I am going to. Who'd bet against it? That's a battle I know I can't win. When you know you can't win a battle, you may as well admit it, go along with it and enjoy it."
Madden has a backup plan.
"Jackie Slater (another Raiders assistant coach and Hall of Famer) told me he didn't break down," Madden said. "He had allergies. So I don't know. I may have allergy problems back there in Ohio."
The country knows Madden. He's not just a pitch man for beer, a likable color commentator or the face on a computer game. When he coached, nobody won as regularly.
His coaching career was short, just 10 years. But that decade was epoch. His record remains the best in NFL history — 103-32-7, a winning percentage of .759. There were seven AFC Western Division titles and a Super Bowl win following the 1976 season.
Given that record, why did it take 27 years for Madden to reach Canton? Madden shrugs and insists he's not sure. He says he's been approached by people who said they thought he was already in the Hall.
"I was a finalist 27 years ago," he said. "At that time, people said they didn't know if I was going to come back (and coach) or not. They didn't want to put me in the Hall of Fame, then have me come back and coach again."
He retired from coaching in 1979 due to illness. He was sick of airplane travel.
He played his college ball at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo and was an assistant coach there when the Mustangs' plane went down in 1960, killing 22 of 46 passengers, 16 of them players.
Madden wasn't on board. He had stayed behind to coach a JV game at Hancock College. But 10 years flying in the NFL was all he could take.
Trains, bus the way to go
To make it through Raiders flights, he would sit in misery in the front seat of first class on the team charter, often with a towel draped over his head, a futile effort to make it all go away. Trains and his personal bus, the "Madden Cruiser," worked better for him.
He hasn't been on a plane since the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 1979.
"It was the third time I had a panic attack," he said. "The flight attendant closed the door and that feeling came over me. I said, 'If I get through this, I'll never get on another airplane as long as I live.' I got to Houston, got off the plane, took a train home and haven't been on a plane since."
His coaching record is second to none, but his work as an announcer also has been studded with success. He has won an unprecedented 15 Emmy Awards for Outstanding Sports Analyst/Personality. He was, after Howard Cosell, Mr. Monday Night Football.
Madden may be one person the world has come to know and love, almost like a neighbor. But it isn't just because of the TV recognition. When he retired, he said some of the nicest letters he received came from Pittsburgh and Kansas City, where he had been soundly booed.
His announcing legacy is such that Madden has struggled with his own feelings. He told this paper five years ago he did not want to be inducted because of his media work — as a pro football "contributor."
"I don't even know what that is," he said. "Do they get a special wing?"
He said as far as he was concerned, he would go in as a coach or not at all. As it worked out, he is going in as a coach.
"It wasn't a big thing, I just didn't want to get things separated," he said. "I just felt I fit in the category of coach or player."
His patience paid off
Madden said he never threw up his hands in frustration at not being inducted.
"I said to myself, 'you can't control it.' There is nothing you can do about it, so just don't think about it. Don't get excited every year. If it is going to happen, it will and if it doesn't, it won't. You live with that. You just hang in there."
For the last 10 years, Madden wasn't even on the list of finalists. However, retired San Francisco Chronicle football writer Ira Miller, a Hall of Fame selector and a media wing Hall member himself, went to bat for Madden in the selection meeting last February in Detroit. Another Bay Area-based selector, Frank Cooney, had been fighting a losing battle on Madden's behalf for years.
"After a while they stop listening," Cooney said. "They needed to hear a new voice. Ira picked up the ball. He gets the credit."
Madden says the fact that coaching was his vehicle for entry is huge.
"Everything that has gone on in my life has been because of coaching," he said. "Even in all the broadcasting years, I've always considered myself a coach who broadcasts, not a broadcaster who used to be a coach."
Madden may have best summed up his feelings headed for Canton.
"If a guy my size can float, I am floating," he said.
Madden's former players rank among those happiest to see it finally happen. Hall of Fame receiver Fred Biletnikoff says it goes beyond the team's dominance. He says Madden was a unique coach — more a people person than a manipulator.
"He legitimately cared about people," he said. "He knew how to handle people. They weren't just football players, they were human beings, too. He was able to get something out of every player (because) he understood what every guy was like. That was a big asset that we all appreciated. He took time to know each one of us, knew all our little idiosyncrasies."
The MVP of Madden's Super Bowl winning team, Biletnikoff concedes that as a player, he was no walk in the park.
"I really wasn't," he said. "There were times I gave John a lot of hard problems. Thank God I had somebody like John to coach me because he really handled me well through tough times and through my little tirades. And I apologize for them, John. I know it wasn't easy."
Next Saturday, those allergies will probably hit John Madden, who says his life has been one big blessing.
"I've never worked a day in my life," he said. "I just had fun. I've been in recess all my life. I'll tell you, life doesn't get any better than this."
Consider: In east Dublin, several miles from his Pleasanton residence, there is a new street called Madden Way.
"That was Mike's doing," Madden said, referring to one of his two sons. "Mike and Guy Houston, (former) mayor of Dublin, were involved in the Kaleidoscope program, an after-school thing for kids in Dublin. It was part of that, a donation, naming streets.
"Virginia (Madden's wife) and I went looking for it and couldn't find it. But I see that on Madden Way, a home sold for like $1.3 million. Gee, it must be a pretty fancy street."
Graced with the name of a man who may not be fancy himself but who next week joins some pretty fancy company.