John Madden Leaves the Field

Football commentator John Madden has recently announced that he is retiring. His last broadcast was the Superbowl game in February, 2009. Madden, 73, filled the role of "color man," and colorful is the most fitting word to describe him and what he did.

Before he went to TV, Madden was a football coach. He was an award-winning college football player who earned a B.S. and M.A. in Education and then began coaching. Al Davis hired him as a linebacker coach with the Oakland Raiders in 1967, and he subsequently became the Raiders' head coach in 1967. At age 33, he was then the youngest head coach in professional football. After many close calls and near misses, Madden's Raiders finally won a Super Bowl title in January, 1977. Once the Super Bowl title was achieved, John Madden retired from coaching. He did football commentary for CBS, Fox, and ABC, then moved to NBC in 2005. On April 16, 2009, John Madden announced his retirement, saying simply, "It's time."

John Madden is an educated man with a profound knowledge of football, but he made his mark as a color commentator by stating the obvious in a discursive style. He loved football because it was a down-to-earth game. People get dirty playing football, and in John Madden's mind, you can tell good players by how dirty they get. He was not impressed by flash. Work ethic was what counted. He used to pick an "All-Madden Team" every year, and the guys who made the All-Madden team were mainly linemen and defensive players of all kinds. Madden enthused about the players who made the blocks that allowed the quarterbacks, running backs, and receivers to make the big plays.

He had a great love for good tackles. "Boom!" he would say when a 275-pound defensive player ran full-tilt into a 190-pound running back and laid him out flat. "Boom!" was John Madden's trademark word, and it expressed his absolute joy in good, solid defensive play. In John Madden's book, "dirty players" were the guys who got the job done, and that was the aspect of football that he loved the most and was best at describing.

Thanks to EA Sports, John Madden also became a video game icon. I suspect that more people know him from the video game world than because he is a member of the Football Hall of Fame. For those who knew him as a coach and a color commentator, an era is coming to an end. When Madden left ABC, it took two men (Cris Collingsworth and Troy Aikman) to replace him. The fact is, you can't really replace John Madden, so he will certainly be missed.