The Press Box - John Madden’s Legacy With Jason Gay

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

Bryan is joined by The Wall Street Journal's Jason Gay to remember legendary football coach, sportscaster, and businessman John Madden. They reflect on the games Madden called, how he influenced television, and discuss all that he added to the sport of football.  Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Jason Gay Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dave Chang is an avid student and fan of sports, music, art, film, and of course, food. With a rotating cast of guests, they have conversations that cover everything from the creative process to his guest's guiltiest pleasures. Follow the Dave Chang Show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. This is the press box, Brian Curtis and producer Erica Servantes here. We are closing out 2021 by thinking about John Madden, Super Bowl winning coach broadcaster, pitchman to seemingly. everything and finally a video games are who died Tuesday at the age of 85 here to help us remember all the booms, the whaps, and the doyx is our pal Jason Gay, sports columnist of the Wall Street Journal. How are you, Jason? I'm fine, thanks, Brian. Happy New Year to you. I guess we're not

there yet, but getting there. We're right on the edge. I wanted to start our free-flowing remembrance of John Madden here. Yeah. For people that know, and especially maybe people that don't, What was it like to watch a game that John Madden called? I mean, it just sort of felt like a sense of the moment. There was this, you know, feeling that if John Badden, especially when it was, you know, Madden and Summerall and later on Madden and Michaels were calling your team's game, that meant something.

It just kind of gave a largeness to whatever contest it was. And, you know, football is in many ways, never been bigger than it is now. But back then, it just commanded a certain kind of mind share because it was, you know, most of it was over the air, of course. And, you know, almost all the discussion about it was over the air. And somebody like John Madden loomed large in a way that nobody does today. I mean, now the world is just, you know, not to say there aren't stars and star telecasters, the Tony Romos of the world and things like that. But he just was the king of the dinosaurs, so to speak, and he really was somebody who, when he rolled into town

with that cruiser, it signified that your team had arrived or this game was incredibly important. There's a couple of things I think that conspire to make him feel that way, apart from his obvious quality and obvious greatness as a broadcaster, which we can get into in a minute. As you point out, there is no Sunday ticket in the 80s. So you're going to get you kind of enter this lottery every week where you get your team's home game and you get something else and then you get Monday night football. So if you happen to draw the Madden lottery number that week, if your team was good enough. Yeah. That felt like just such a big deal.

It sure did. And the other thing that corresponds with, and you know this well as a cowboy fan, but his rise corresponds with an era of significant NFC dominance. And he was inextricably tied to the NFC. He was the guy who was calling all those Niner games. He was calling all those cowboy games. You know, as somebody growing up in New England, this is before the Patriots became what we know to be the Patriots. Now, that ship was not passing through too often.

John Madden was somebody who, you know, occupied other elements of the world, other places, and you probably got to hear quite a bit of it. I felt like he lived in Dallas and Pat Summer will actually. did live in Dallas, and I felt like they just sort of parked the bus for like six weeks in a row in the early 90s. It certainly felt that way. As somebody who watched football and consumed, but I just felt I knew more about Danny White than I knew about anybody at my hometown team. But I felt that was part of his bigness. It was the NFC, this period where they're winning the Super Bowl every single year, but also the teams that are winning are in New York City,

Washington, D.C., Dallas, San Francisco, right? John Madden was not going to Buffalo all that much. He said he wouldn't go to Jacksonville, places like that. Like he was in these huge cities with big old famous football teams that were winning championships with big stars. Really an Avengers era, you know, to use the modern motifs of what football was then. This was something where, you know, again, you had these iconic teams that were being built in San Francisco, Washington, Dallas.

you had the 85 Bears, another NFC team. They didn't win a lot of championships, but arguably the most famous Super Bowl champion in the last 40 years, right? I mean, wouldn't you say? Absolutely, absolutely. And his kind of team, right? Absolutely. The spiritual sequel to the 70s Raiders.

Everything that he loved about football in one package, whether it was Mike Ditka or Jim McMahon or Fridge Parrott. or Walt or Payton. I mean, I feel like I could off the top of my head do all his, you know, testimonies for all these players. This was a Madden all team unto itself as a Super Bowl champion. Oh, yeah, the whole roster. There's a line in the piece you wrote for the journal about Madden that I thought was good,

and I thought really sort of helps us capture his aesthetic a little bit, like what he liked about football in addition to just good football. Madden loved her suit centers, rumpily ends, and roly-poly nose tackled. And on any given Sunday, he'd make household names out of them too. You know, it's like I always think of that era. He's very 80s, but I always think of it as a kind of 70s sensibility of pro football. It's Roy Blunt and about three bricks shy of a load. It's Dan Jenkins and semi tough.

It's this way of like you're looking at football in this very unjaded way and appreciating the physiques at the risk of sounding like Borat for a second, appreciating the size differences between people, the funny names and nicknames they have. It's this very, it's not innocent. The back of the neck fat rolls. Yeah, exactly. Vapers coming off of the backheads while they're sitting down on the bench.

He had a kind of a writer's eye, I think, for the game in a funny way. Because he noticed those kinds of details. And you're absolutely right. He was somebody who I think very much. change the way that people looked at the lines of the game, right? You know, StarCraft was already fully in effect in the NFL. We had Star quarterbacks and star running backs and wide receivers and so on. But he made names of the Nate Newton's and so on,

people who were in the trenches, people who weren't getting their name or number shouted, unless it was a penalty usually in a game. He certainly, you know, brought some spotlight on them. It's interesting too because, and this point was made by a number of people in the aftermath of his death, but like the footballity is quite sophisticated now. I mean, you have, you know, whether it's your Ben's select generation has grown up with incredible degrees of knowledge about the game. But you don't, at that time, people weren't completely consumed with it in the way that they are now. And a lot of the stuff that Madden was describing to people about, you know, what a nose tackle did was rather novel for its time.

Yeah, and he was basically the only source. I mean, I remember in the early 90s, he was in love with Nate Newton, the kitchen, Cowboys Guard. And I remember as a kid or kind of a high schooler, I guess at that point going, is Nate Newton like really the best guard in the NFL or is John Madden just obsessed with him? Like I know he's really good, but I can't tell because there was no Ben Solac or no pro football focus to be like, actually Nate Newton is the 18th best guard in the NFL. We don't know those kind of things. Sure. And I think that, you know, toward the end of Madden's career, the kind of like corrective generation came coming for it, right?

They were the people kind of saying, well, in fact, the way that he views the game is a little bit antiquated. Maybe he doesn't have the fastball he once did. But in terms of being evangelical for the game, in terms of widen the audience, in terms of sensing the moment, you know, a lot of people who wrote to me after his death, mentioned one thing that they just felt like hearing his voice, never mind sitting down in front of the television and watching the game, just hearing it in the other room where they're based in a turkey or they're doing something else. In and of itself felt like this ritual. And I think that speaks to

an incredibly rare quality. There are only a handful of people who come close to his space. I would say, I think you and Bill were talking about this the other day, is there anybody in his airspace? And I think the only people who are are maybe some of the iconic baseball announcers because they have the same kind of ambient quality where you don't need the pictures, you don't need the full composition to understand their largeness around the game.

So it's Vin Scully from that time. Yeah. So that kind of crowd. Orwell, maybe Johnny Most, you know, somebody like that. Yeah. I mean, Howard CoSell certainly for recognizability, though not maybe the comforting sort of sense that John Madden would have given. And Howard was, you know, incredibly famous,

but also in his era wildly divisive. He was not somebody who was this, you know, beloved anchorman like figure that Madden was. Actually, Anchorman isn't correct at all. He is the opposite of the anchorman. He had none of that kind of like stentorianness that I think we would both agree is really overbaked in football media. I mean, there's still a lot of people who, sort of grew up on NFL films and still want to do the war metaphors and still want to do the kind of like voice from the mountaintop. That wasn't what John Madden was. It was much more of a guy sitting next to you in the bar talking to you about what's happening in the gate. It was not this kind of like holier than now approach at all. I think that's exactly right. It's the NFL

films steam coming off the heads and guy wearing the cape on the sidelines, but without John Fissenda's voice, right? It's the same pictures, but just taken away down. Yeah, you know, and your brain goes into all these kinds of crazy places when you're writing about, you know, tributes like this. But I was like, you know, it's sort of a Garrison Keeler quality to it or like a Calvin Trillan thing going on where like he did have this kind of like, you know, our town aspect to him. He was the narrator. He was somebody who was going to take you by the hand for three and a half hour. and get you interested in Eagles versus Giants, even if you didn't give a damn about either one of these teams

or what the stakes were. I was thinking about before we came on, like the number of TV announcers, sports announces in our lifetime that you could imagine as being one of your family members. Sure. As opposed to man on television. Yeah.

John Madden, Bill Raftery now, I think has that kind of Wiley-Uncle feel, maybe Al McGuire in the 80s. Sure. It's a really tiny list. You know, maybe Dickie V is your crazy grandpa, I think, is probably, you know. Sure. And let's say something also about what television was in the 70s and for much of the 80s.

It was the provenance of haircuts. Haircuts, okay? These were individuals who, you know, had incredible abilities to communicate over, you know, a camera to millions of people. But at the same time, there was an incredible priority placed upon look, aesthetic, smoothness, right? Now in sort of the social media era, the podcast era, that everybody's got a channel era, there's much more focus on authenticity and realness is appreciated in a way that it was, they tried to strike it from television in the 70s days.

They didn't want to look rough around the edges. And Madden was the counter to that. He was somebody, you know, when he put on that coat and tie for the game, you knew that was the only time he had the coat and tie on that entire week, okay? that was not, you know, if he had combed his hair once before he got on camera, that was the first time. He was not somebody who, you know, had any kind of Ron Burgundy qualities. And there was a lot of that back then. No, absolutely.

I know reading a bunch of the early profiles of him when he first became a big television star, they would always talk about how he combed his hair once a day, you know, versus the hairdoes that were surrounding him in the TV universe. I think the interesting thing about that is when you talk about the smoothness and the kind of, you know, very televisionness of the 80s, is that he was in a way very anti-television with the way he talked, the way he scribbled, the way, woo, woo, and also at the same time, an absolute genius at television and clearly understood the medium to a degree that almost nobody else in sports did.

Yeah. That's just so funny to me, like to be both of those things at the same time. Yeah, I know a lot of people got a chance to see the Fox documentary that they did on Christmas, you know, before he passed away, but they re-raned it the other night after his passing. And one of the more interesting things in it is, you know, he didn't want to do this. He was not somebody who was raising his hand to do television immediately after retired from coaching. He had to kind of get talked into it. He did it kind of as a trial.

And it wasn't until actually having the experience, they said, okay, this is it. I found what I want to do. I think there's a through line of a lot of people who end up being wildly successful in television aren't necessarily people who are striving for it right out of the box. They have to be kind of talked into it because they have that thing, that sort of, you know, that it quality or whatever cue factor, whatever it is, that is not something that you can teach. And it's certainly not you can, not something you can just simply look in the mirror and achieve. Yeah. And with him, it's, it's so many different things that made him good at TV. One is just being funny.

and knowing, you know, funny things to say and the right things to say. And the other thing I think is just matching his voice to the pictures in an amazing way. When watching all these clips online, like, you know, it's that kind of basically what's the equivalent of B-roll during a game where the play is over and the camera is just watching something. You're seeing like the third replay, which is kind of a funny element of the play. He can just speak to a picture as well as anybody can. And again, you know, not to just dump on people like Tony. Roma or whomever, but he just had this improvisational quality of a sea picture, say thing that matches picture, and enhances picture that I just have never seen since.

Right. And, you know, candidly, I haven't gone back and watched a ton of like, you know, pre-Madden tandems to sort of get a sense for exactly how it was beforehand. But one of the things that seems very clear about his success was that like no one else before he figured out what you could do in the rhythm of the game. And people are always trying to figure out, well, why is football just so much more phenomenally popular than any other sport in America as a television sport? And a huge reason of it is the television rhythm of it.

It's not a sport where there's a tremendous amount of action. The journal famously did a story a decade and a half ago where it takes about 11.5 minutes worth of actual on-field action over the course of three and a half hours. And yet it has this kind of ebb and flow where somebody like a John Madden, can get in there and serve as this chorus throughout it and really form a bond with the audience because you can inform, you can elucidate, you can replay, you can do all, you have all this sort of new gadgetry. And I think a big part of this too is that, you know, we all kind of made the dutiful mention of the Telestrator in our appreciations of him. That was brand new technology.

That could have gone wrong. Like he could have just been somebody who, you know, rejected it, He certainly had the status at that point to be like, yeah, I don't want anything to do with that. But he embraced it. He made it his own to the point where you see anybody do anything comparable to that. They're just doing the Madden, you know, from then on out. So I think that he had the combination of the tools, but also really figured out what it was about football that made it so conditioned to having success as an analyst.

You're saying having that big canvas after the play's over. Yeah, I mean, you know, look, we all love to like, let's take a sport like basketball. You know, I think, you know, everybody likes to weigh in about like what analysts they like, what color commentator is not working or whomever is great. I think that's a really hard sport to be an analyst of it because it's just nonstop moving. The momentum is shifting all the time. You know, football is like, I don't know, it's like reviewing the theater. There's like an intermission.

There are breaks. They're literally commercial time baked into the thing. It's much more of a palette for people to have the opportunity to shine. Yeah. And there is a sense, you know, with any analyst play-by-playman team, it's always competition for airtime. They'll tell you it isn't. But at some sense, there's only X amount of time that you can fill up.

And I thought it was so interesting that, you know, CBS rejected Vince Gully, the sainted Vince Gully, because you just talked to him. much for John Matt. He wanted to be the guy. He had an ego and like almost every broadcaster does. Like, no, no, this is my game. And, you know, they're like, no, no, we need somebody who's just going to be like, here you go, John. Floor is yours. And by the way, Vind would probably think they made the right call, right? I mean, absolutely it was the person, you know, Pat was sort of more chemically suited to being his his partner because exactly that he sort of didn't need to fill the fill the spaces in between they weren't going to be competing for that they were

also just so you know um different in terms of you know their tenor in terms of the pacing of their i mean one of the things i think was interesting about madden is that for a man of his size he actually got kind of a light voice you know it wasn't this kind of like you know roar or a roar or something like that that just sounded like you know from a behemoth he he actually had kind of a likeness to his voice that was very cheery and you know so the gentle giant aspect to it hey hey and then pat was and then pat was right here first and ten yeah no pat had a deeper voice for sure they were such a funny combination i just always thought you know as a kid and then you know as an adult there was just something humorous about the two of them together, Pat,

because he just said almost nothing, you know, first and 10, right, great catch, you know, and then, but he was a really good counterpuncher with John. So John would go, you know, look at that, look at that. We're going to go here. And can you imagine that? And he would come in and like, well, and hit the counterpunch, and then they would go on to the next play. Like the rhythm was almost vaudevilly in that kind of way they talked to each other.

One thing I got to kick out of and watching the Fox documentary is that, you know, we sort of, you know, at this point, underappreciate how incredibly hard that transition is to go from a high visibility job in a sport to becoming the voice of the sport. And the graveyard is deep and long of people who have been, you know, given the world in terms of a platform to make it on television after very successful careers. And it doesn't work out for whatever reason. and he made it seem so seamless, and yet it's not a seamless thing at all. And we know many, many stars, many, many coaches. I mean, how many coaches can you name have made that kind of transition? I'm saying, like, gotten anywhere near what he did. It's not a natural thing.

Did you, you have a sense of this question. Somebody asked me this the other day, but when we think about what Madden did for football, like what he added, you know, I don't. know if he added to the audience because that seems impossible because the football audience is so big, but what he did for the sport over 30 years on the air, do you have a sense of what that is? Are you, are you referring, I think it was Peter Schrager asked if he's the most influential person in the history of football. Is that what you're referring to? Yeah, what I would say what he did for the sport. Did he make us enjoy it more? Did he make us enjoy it in a different way?

Or if to take Schrager's thing, how did he influence it? It's an interesting question, It's certainly a provocative 2020 television question. I don't, you know, look, I think that if John Madden didn't exist, we would have had something exciting to keep us watching football. I don't think it, you know, football was like, you know, on its way out, and he brought it back. And I think there are probably, you know, innovators and people behind the scenes who are developing contracts with networks and things like that

who had, you know, theoretically much bigger hands and these things happening. But I definitely think he pushed it. it to another level. There's no question about it. And I think that the proof is in he's not been replaced. There's nobody who occupies the same territory. I mean, Romo has come along and, you know, become a fascination and done a huge money deal and so on. And the network deals are bigger than ever. But nobody kind of grabs people by the shirt tails or by the collar in the way that John Madden did. And is that just because it's impossible because we're in a different era media and there's no way somebody can be that big merely by calling a football game?

I want to say so, but football is one of the few things where, you know, the numbers are, you know, everything is down. We know this, right? Every, you know, like fewer people watch the Oscars, fewer people watch, you know, the World Series, fewer people watch the Super Bowl, you know, even football, you know, the numbers are actually coming down a little bit. But proportionally, football's just never been bigger. It is the most dominant television entertainment form. There is, and nothing is close. So I do think that there is an opportunity

where there somebody who is just, you know, hyper-talented up, to jump in there and be that person. But actually what I think it is, is instead of it being one individual, it's just this whole economy that swirls around the sport from your Adam Schefters to your Kevin Clarks to, you know, all the betting agencies and all that kind of stuff too. Kevin's agent asked you to mention him in that roll call of people who are

influencing the way we think about the sport. I'm just I'm just. I did. And I spoke to Kevin's agent for the Danny Rose. Danny Rose was his agent. I was trying to think of the question. Like what if you just had a replacement level announcer on CBS in the 80s? And we've had plenty of replacement level announcers even calling Super Bowls over the years.

like John Matt had gone back to coaching. Let's say he want to go coach Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which by the way, he got a billion offers to do as soon as he left the Raiders. I just think probably what he did in the end was lay out this welcome mat for football and sort of bond people to the game

in a really, really happy, joyful way. You know, you and I have watched enough pro football and written enough about it that pro football is hard to love. It's easy to watch and hard to love a lot of the time. Sure. There's a coldness to it. there's a hugeness to it. And he was sort of the welcome Matt at the Death Star, right?

Come on in. It's fun here. Right. I would add another aspect to it. There's a sameness to it. I think that there is a real sameness to the NFL product to his detriment. I think that, like, you know, they move the Super Bowl around, but once you sort of step in the perimeter of it, it could be any old city.

They do it the same way wherever they go. And there are very little things that signify that this is going to be a little different this year. And like a lot of people, you know, there's just great temptation in media to just replicate the formula over and over. It's why people like you and I went bonkos about the manning thing because at least it was something different. At least it was something that challenged the status quo. I think there's no question about that. And I think that for somebody like him, you know, he had the benefit of it didn't really matter if he succeeded or failed because he was always going to be John Matt.

He was always going to be a guy who won't assume. Super Bowl before the age of 40. And I don't think it was the kind of thing where, or did he win it before the age of 40? I don't know. Right around that, right? You might want to fact check me, but right around that. He started at 32. He left at 42 or 43, I believe, but the Super Bowl happened in the 76 season. But, you know, he was always going to be a high demand person. You know, he had another life. I mean, I think one of the things that's interesting about him, too, is that, you know, he had this interior life that pretty fascinating. You know, he had, A lot of people who sort of were interested to learn that he had an apartment at the Dakota

that he bought from Gilda Radner. Amazing. He was a bi-coastal man. He owned a great deal of, you know, Bay Area property. He was somebody who had interest in other things. He, of course, as you wrote about, was a college educator. I think he was going to be fine whether or not television worked out for him. So it didn't put him any pressure on him to just try to replicate formula.

Oh, that's interesting. You do talk about sort of doing the same. thing. Do you remember the baby Madden movement in television where the networks were trying to clone Madden and come up with younger versions of him? You're going to have to give me a name or two because I mean, again, like watching the Fox thing, like, you know, like Parcells, people were betting the ranch that Parcells was going to be this phenomenon on television. It didn't really turn out that way. And he ran screaming back to coaching very quickly. Yeah. No, it's like, I think Matt Millen is probably the most successful one. He was friends with John.

He was funny. He has a kind of funny in that same kind of unbuttoned every man kind of way. I believe Bill Moss would have been who had a pretty short career, long, you know, lowish profile career on network. There was this whole idea of where do we get our own John Matt? I think first on TV, and I've read some of the reviews from the early 80s. A lot of people are like, he talks too much. Sure.

He won't shut up. This is not, we're not used to this, right? We're used to the analyst who is not as verbally gifted as him kind of sputtering out a few sentences and then shutting up in the play-by-play man takes over. Sure. And to defend, you know, the baby Madden's or whomever else had come in Madden's wake, I mean, the other part of this is that, you know, we talked about this at the top. Madden had this tremendous benefit to come along the sport at a time when all these iconic stars and teams were happening. He was the DJ at the time that the Beatles broke. He was playing

Led Zeppelin won. He was playing the music that got people excited and sort of changed the form. It's not terribly hard to make people care about the Joe Montana 49ers. Now, if you can be value-ad to that, you can be iconic yourself. But it's a lot harder to have the kind of success that John Madden had if you're calling lousy games and a lousy slate every weekend. He had the cream of the crop. He, you know, by the prime of his career, the biggest game of the week every week. Yes.

And the value add to me is the explaining football part. Yeah. Because you could do, I think, and again, you and I are kind of working in more of what we think this is and what we know this is. But if we just imagine like generic 70s football announcer, I think you could have been the funny, you know, nickname dispensing version of that in the 80s with the 49ers and then the Bears and Washington and the Giants and been fine. But he decides to come in and says, you know what? I think football on television really sucks because it's not teaching people anything about football. And I want to change the camera angles. I want to develop the Telestrator, as you said.

I want to just make sure that we are actually teaching people real things about the game, rather than doing this ex-quarterback gloss over, you know, oh, what a great pass by so-and-so. Well, why was it a great pass? Where was he supposed to throw it? Why did the line block well for him and who missed their block and who got their block on that play? That to me is kind of the miraculous part about him because he could have been John Madden, personality and not done any of that.

And then he added all that and it has made broadcast. You watch Romo now. You watch Collinsworth. You watch Aikman. Like they talk a lot of football during a broadcast. And that became standard. I think another part of this too, and this is quite a parse, is that at the time, Sunday football was a different thing than primetime football.

Monday night football occupied its own little space where it could be this kind of like loungy product. But Sunday football was a different thing. It was treated a little bit more agustly. It was not the kind of thing where like you were going to have, you know, three people on the booth, one of whom was, you know, saying goofy stuff. It was just a different kind of thing. And, and, and I think that he brought some of that kind of prime time energy into a product on Sunday, which was much more traditional and stayed than what had been on Mondays. And, you know, It's funny because people, of course, say he shook up the booth and he changed the way that people, you know, processed television and sports.

I agree. But if you think he was the only person changing boundaries, go listen to any Monday Night Football broadcast from the heyday of that because that was truly out there as a product. Yeah. And I think, I think, you know, the way to think about him, just a little bit of the piece I wrote is him and CoSell. And it's not, it's because, one, because they were just so big, you know, the two biggest of that time. But also, they just have such totally different ideas. Like CoSel is like, we are leaning into entertainment here. This is going to be like dynasty, right?

It's going to be storylines. It's going to be exciting. It's going to be issues. It's going to be everything. And John Madden says, I'm happy to do all that. I can do all that. But let's also just add in the football part of that and not think that people are incapable. CoSell's whole thing was the people will watch this if I sell it.

to him, right, in a particular way. Madden's like, I agree I'm just going to sell it to him in the other way. I'm just going to make a little run around this. Speaking to which, segue, Madden the salesman. Yeah. What do you make of that character? I want to know how many light beer spots he actually did. It feels like he had kind of like an 80% participation rate for a good chunk of that. I went back and watched a bunch, as I'm sure many other people did, one of the most amazing things about the Miller-like spots was that were the group ones where they had kind of the Miller-light All-Stars. And let me get this, it's light beer, right?

It's Miller. I want to make sure that I'm not offending anybody was kind of. Miller-Light, yeah. Miller-Light. You know, Marf Throneberry's in there. They're not like putting a lot on the Chiron, Mar-Throneberg. You're just supposed to know, okay? You're just supposed to know who Ben Davidson is, who Billy Martin is, you know, U-Kerunberg.

of course, Madden. They had these kind of players, and, you know, that was probably, you know, he and John got the button, right, on the ones that he was in because he got to rip the screen in half. It's interesting because we look upon it so warmly, but he was probably 47 times more ubiquitous than Baker Mayfield is now, and people give him nothing but grief for being on lots of commercials. He would pitch anything. I mean, wouldn't you have loved to have been in the room with Sandy Montag and Madden when Tenacton came and said, okay, you've done beer, you've done hotels, you've done Ace Hardware, we've got the anti-fungal cream now. Was Maddening like an immediate yes for that?

Like, oh, sure, tough act and Tenacton. Let's do it. Yeah, I mean, what of, I mean, I would love to read a story. And it's probably been done about the ad agency approach to light beer, you know, ads over time. I mean, you know, that was a huge part of my childhood, like trying to decipher what taste great versus less filling was. But it felt like this very primal argument that I should probably have a position on. You know, that. And in those days, of course, you couldn't run liquor ads on TV.

So that was all we were getting. But they really packed them in. Have you seen this book that Frank DeFord wrote back in the day about the light beer ads? Has that ever crossed your threshold? You saved that on me. I'm like, somebody should write about this. And of course, DeFords done a book. The Ford did it while starring in the Miller Light as.

It was like the Jordan documentary on ESPN. You know, he was like, I'm going to get a little. So he did kind of the sociocultural context, a very bizarre document. But if anybody wants to know about the. And, you know, I was going to put this to my piece. And, you know, on deadline, I could not quite figure out the dates and didn't want to throw something bad into the universe, but I'm pretty sure John Madden does his first Big Miller Light at, the one where he's, you know, talking about, oh, I'm done coaching. I'm not, I'm not

excitable anymore and playing off his sideline personality with the Raiders. And that kind of got, helped get him the number one job at CBS. It was an announcer to add. I believe it was actually add to announcer. Right. Because everybody's like, oh, that's the guy from the commercial. And he has this extra sheen of stardom on him. Right. Yeah, that's another thing that's kind of interesting about the, you know, his career arc is that it was happening at a time when football, you know, it wasn't the national pastime that it is now, right? The 70s, you know, his ascension through the Raiders and the Raiders winning their world title in the 76th season. That was still a place when, you know, the NFL was behind baseball in terms of its, you know, national

mind share. It was certainly growing. But people who were Raider fans, they weren't, I mean, people who were Raider fans were following the teams, of course. But if you lived in New York City, you weren't watching 16 Raiders fans. Raider games or 14 Raider games or whatever. You didn't have the kind of like ability to follow a team nationally that you do now. This kind of like error of the obsessive fan who knows everything about everything.

It just was impossible technologically at the time. So like people were a little bit of a mystery. And so it sounds strange, but I'm sure it's 100% true that like the guy coached for 10 years in the NFL won a Super Bowl was a 32 year old prodigy. And it was a Miller Light ad that put him on the map for the networks. It was probably longer than the highlight packages of the Raiders that most people were able to see in the 70s at 30 seconds, 40 seconds, whatever it was. I'll in here, Jason, because you know, you get the cultural references that I get because we're both old. There's no, this is not a pat on the back.

It just means we're old. But I love the thing that Jim Gray told me one time because there's like two people in the history of television that walked away under their own footing and that also refused to come back under their own footing. and they could have come back at any time. It's John Madden and it's Johnny Carson. People were tweeting at me. What about Seinfeldon? Have you watched television? Jerry's back.

Jerry never left, folks. He's back. Those guys walked away and basically vanished for the rest of their natural lives. What do you think about the John Madden walk away? It's really interesting. And it definitely colored the way that people processed his death, I felt. because as a lot of people pointed out, you know, every obituary sort of had the obligation to mention that he had this like generation spanning fame of people who, you know, first grew familiar with him as the coach, people of most people who grew familiar with him as an analyst. And then this whole next generation of people who knew that he was the face or the name of this eponymous video game empire that, you know, changed football in video games.

but it didn't you know his career had a long tail for somebody who had stepped off the train and it wasn't the kind of thing where he was coming back and doing events and TVs he wasn't like hanging out it's like you know like Chris Berman retired from ESPN but I don't feel like he's left the orbit of ESPN I feel like he's doing a good deal ESPN I still see him doing highlights and so I don't feel like he's gone off and become a recluse man really did fall out of the public eye. In fact, I was fascinated to watch in the Fox Dock, you know, just him sitting there talking, you know, real live 84 or however old he was at the time that he did the interviews, John Madden, you know, sounding super cogent and fun and with it. And it was

a beautiful thing to see. But we hadn't seen a great deal of it over those last bunch of years. It's amazing to walk away like that. It really is, you know, because we've seen a lot of bad endings for announcers and a lot of garbage time. Yeah. And it's funny now to look back and to think that people were thinking that Madden, like, let's say 2000 to 2009 is when he walks away from Sunday night football, was garbage time. Because it was so good compared to a lot of the unfortunate ending of a lot of announcers'

careers. Yeah. And there was a lot of people doing this thing where it's like, well, he, you know, we know linemen are big and athletic. Why does he have to go on and on about it? I was like, no, no, he taught you that. in 1985. You forgot where you learned it.

Can I ask you as a resident historian a question about his, his arc because I confess I don't know the specifics. But like, so he leaves CBS to Fox. He leaves Fox not after 20 years at Fox, but after, I don't know, what, 12 years at Fox? Yeah, it was about a little, yeah, I would say a little under, a little under a decade. I think he does two contracts at Fox.

Yeah. He goes to people always think that he leapt to Sunday night football. Not true. He did Monday night football. What was that like? Was that like a, was that a ABC's like, like we got to make this work. We need the pot best. Was this after Miller and everything and after a cornizer?

So they tried to. Cornizers after. Yeah. They tried to get him in 94 when Fox did. Got it. And they had been one of the three. Brinks trucks that were backed up into John Madden's front yard. The one that I love is that Dick Ebersol and Jack Welch offered him a train car.

GE said, we'll build a train car to take you around the country, John. We got this. And John said, I don't know if we can make the timing work quite as well as we can with the bus, but thank you very much for the office. They tried to get him in 94. They didn't. They come back and they get him. And that was, yes, that was post, that's Monday night chasing its own tail, right?

that's Monday night. Monday night was trying to recreate the 70s for so long that they finally forgot about the 70s and just went and recreated CBS in the 80s. But did they already have Al at that time? So was Al already in the fold for Monday night football? For a decade plus at that point. He'd done Deirdorf and Gifford. He'd done Dennis Miller.

He'd done Boomer Ossiocin, if you remember that very quick experiment. That's right. Okay. That's what I'm sort of airbrose. over. So Al had had a number of partners, but then at that point, the move gets made to Madden. And how long does that go? It's like five years before they go to Sunday night? Yeah. And then ESPN, you remember, gets the rights to Monday night. The package is switch. Monday night gets downgraded ESPN gets it. NBC creates the Sunday night thing. And ESPN comes to John Madden. This is in Jim Miller's book

and comes to Alan Mous and goes, you know, you guys are really good, but we feel like we've got another really good team, which is Mike Patrick and Joe Thaisman. They're really good too. So we haven't made a decision yet. And both Al and John, I don't think I'm speaking at a turn here, are like, are you fucking kidding me? Al Michaels and John Madden, you're saying we're one of a number of people you would think about giving the job to.

And that is, audios, we're going to go create Sunday night football, which has been the number one show in America, basically ever since. Yeah. Yeah. It was amazing. I mean, that's the thing about John. He worked at four networks. He was a number one guy on four different networks. Well, you know that you had a very iconic career when they do this big documentary about you and it was very clear they had a 100% commitment from the guests that they asked to do it. I mean, it was, I was like, who said no to this thing? I mean, it was amazing. Can I say one? And I think it's only because he must have been booked. But did you see Terry Bradshaw on that documentary? I did not and it occurred to me that like they went with Howie because Howie played for him.

Oh no, Howie didn't play for him, but Howie's a raider. But Troy Aikman was on it. Yeah. And here's the thing about Terry that Terry I think is written about and Vernon Lundquist told me about Terry Bradshaw was the number two guy at CBS behind Madden. Yeah. And he was so frustrated that he couldn't get the number one job. He's like, I'm never going to be number one. I'm number two that he went to the pregame show so that he could be number one in a different way.

Yeah. Like he was like, so this is blocked. This is like the Supreme Court Justice, and he had to go do a different thing. This is like talking about lightsabbers with Yoda. I'm sorry. I just, I'll shut up. You're going to have to come on my bike racing pod so I can dance circles around you. Jason Gay, you can read his column about John Madden at the Wall Street Journal.

I'm Brian Curtis production magic by Erica Servantes back next week for slightly changes topic. The anniversary of the January 6th, insurrection at the Capitol with David Schumacher and more. Luke Wormtakes about the media. See you then.