John Madden, iconic Raiders coach, NFL video game namesake and TV commentator, dies at 85 (2024)

Because of his video game empire and his hilariously bombastic broadcasting style, it might be easy to forget that John Madden was one of the best coaches in NFL history, too.

Madden, who died Tuesday at 85, helped transform the Raiders into a decade-long power, a renegade outfit that proved as wildly irreverent — and deceptively brilliant — as the coach himself.

“On behalf of the entire NFL family, we extend our condolences to Virginia, Mike, Joe and their families,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement Tuesday night. “We all know him as the Hall of Fame coach of the Oakland Raiders and broadcaster who worked for every major network, but more than anything, he was a devoted husband, father and grandfather.

“Nobody loved football more than Coach. Hewasfootball.He was an incredible sounding board to me and so many others. There will never be another John Madden, and we will forever be indebted to him for all he did to make football and the NFL what it is today.”

The Raiders said in a statement: “Few individuals meant as much to the growth and popularity of professional football as Coach Madden, whose impact on the game both on and off the field was immeasurable.”

Just a few days ago, on Dec. 25, Fox aired a documentary, “All Madden,” chronicling his life as a coach, commentator, pitchman, husband and father.

With his frantic gesticulations and a tie that never quite fit, Madden’s sideline demeanor offered comic relief in the era of stoic taskmasters like Tom Landry and Bud Grant. Raiders players sometimes called him Pinky because “you could always tell he was mad when his face got red,” linebacker Ted Hendricks once said.

But the counterculture coach and his free-spirited teams demolished opponents with ruthless efficiency, as Madden amassed a 103-32-7 regular-season mark before abruptly retiring in 1978. When Madden walked away from coaching at age 42 — just shy of half his lifetime — his .739 winning percentage ranked as the highest in NFL history for a coach with at least 100 wins.

And that, more than any “boom!” or “whap!” or “doink!” uttered over the airwaves, is what earned him enshrinement in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“Time never really stops for the great ones,” owner Al Davis said during Madden’s induction ceremony in 2006. “We wrap them in a cloak of immortality and remember what great people they were.”

Madden never had a losing season and captured seven division titles in his 10 years as coach, but even his greatest triumph came with an air of everyman levity. On Jan. 9, 1977, after the Raiders walloped the Minnesota Vikings 32-14 in Super Bowl XI, players carried him off the field in celebration — or tried to, anyway.

“I was told it took like five or six guys to lift me up, then they dropped me,” Madden recalled years later of his lone Super Bowl victory. “But that’s OK, because that was me and that was them. You carry him off for a while — boom! — you dump him on the ground. It was the happiest moment of my life.”

Madden, who became a longtime Pleasanton, Calif., resident, had open-heart surgery on Nov. 30, 2015, and mostly withdrew from the public eye after that, with the exception of his annual charity bocce ball tournament with former 49ers coach Steve Mariucci.

Up until then, John Earl Madden was the most relentlessly gregarious ambassador the sport of football has ever known. He popularized the game while winning 16 Emmys as a broadcaster while also presiding over a “Madden NFL” video game franchise that ranks among the top-selling titles of all-time.

Madden carved much of his legacy zig-zagging the country in his “Madden Cruiser,’’ a 45-foot luxury bus equipped with three plasma TVs, a queen-size mattress and a sauna/shower.

Madden swore off airplanes in 1979, a decision he explained as claustrophobia, not fear of flying. But he loved the game his whole life.

“Football is what I am,” he once said. “I didn’t go into it to make a living or because I enjoyed it. There is much more to it than just enjoying it. I am totally consumed by football, totally involved.”

Madden, of course, followed up his coaching stint with one of the most remarkable second acts in sports history.

He debuted as a color commentator with CBS in 1979 and went on to earn 16 Emmys, emerging as a transformative figure whose telestrator work and folksy playfulness — “Turducken,” anyone? — set a new gold standard for television analysts. At the peak of Madden’s broadcasting powers, in 1994, he signed a four-year contract for $32 million which, as TV Guide quickly noted, was more than any NFL player was making at the time.

Madden, like Yogi Berra before him, had a knack for nonsensical phrases that arrived with an air of fortune-cookie wisdom.

For example:

• “Hey, the offensive linemen are the biggest guys on the field. They’re bigger than everybody else, and that’s what makes them the biggest guys on the field.”

• “He was standing in the hole waiting for something to develop …. and WHAP! He got developed.”

• “Don’t worry about the horse being blind, just load the wagon.”

As John Leonard, a critic for New York Magazine, wrote of Madden in 1984: “We need him because we are otherwise in danger of confusing fun and games with serious news.”

Born April 10, 1936, in Austin, Minn., Madden turned life into a playing field almost from the start. His parents, Earl and Mary, moved the family to Daly City, Calif., when John was little and constantly encouraged him to play sports.

Madden was a standout two-way lineman at Jefferson High School and also a terrific catcher on the baseball diamond. By the time he was a sophom*ore, he was playing on three or four different teams one summer and decided to quit a few of them so he could make some spending cash.

Instead, Earl Madden, who made a modest living as an auto mechanic, slipped his son a few extra bucks and told him, essentially, play ball.

“He said, ‘Don’t work. Once you start work, you’re going to have to work the rest of your life,’’’ Madden recalled during his Hall of Fame induction speech.

Some of his early Daly City playmates turned out OK, too. Madden’s elementary school chum was John Robinson, who would grow up to coach USC to three Rose Bowl victories. They met when they were 9.

“We were degenerately absorbed in sports, only sports,” Robinson told Sports Illustrated in 1987. “Madden and I had it figured: We’d play for the Yankees in the summer, the 49ers in the fall. Later, we began to see what the chances of doing any of that really were. So the coaching fantasy came fairly early to us both.”

Madden’s college playing career never really took flight. He started out at Oregon, transferred to College of San Mateo and finished up at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

The Philadelphia Eagles drafted him in the 21st round (244th overall) in 1958 but a knee injury in training camp torpedoed his playing dreams.

Instead, Madden got his teaching degree — which he put to use on the gridiron. He started as an assistant coach at Allan Hanco*ck College (Santa Maria) in 1960 and was promoted to head coach by ’62.

From 1963 to 1966, he served on the staff at San Diego State (where he crossed paths with another brilliant strategist, Don Coryell). The Raiders hired Madden as a linebackers coach in 1967 and he was such a meteoric force that Al Davis could hardly wait to hand him the reins. He anointed Madden as his head coach in 1969.

“Who the heck names a guy 32 years old as a head coach?” Madden once said. “Al Davis did. But he not only named me head coach, he stood behind me and he helped me and he provided me with players — with great players.”

Soon, Madden’s sideline histrionics became a staple of the most famous games in Oakland history. The Sea of Hands. The Immaculate Reception. The Heidi Game. Ghost to the Post. The Holy Roller. Madden was the coach for all of them.

Not exactly one for rules, Madden’s list of edicts would fit in a tweet these days. Former tight end Ted Kwalick once said that Madden’s laws consisted essentially of “don’t be late” and “do your job.”

Madden’s view was that fewer rules to make meant fewer rules to break.

“To me, discipline in football occurs on the field, not off it. (It’s not) a coat and tie and a clean shave,” he wrote in one of his several books.

It worked, especially against the established old guard. In head-to-head, regular-season matchups against 10 future Hall of Fame coaches from his era, Madden went 36-16-2 (.685). The playoffs were a different story, as his playoff record was a modest 9-7. The Raiders lost six of their seven conference title games under Madden, the perils of competing against the potent Pittsburgh Steelers and Miami Dolphins of the 1970s. Five of Madden’s first six losses in the postseason were all to teams that went on to win the Super Bowl.

“It was crazy,” former Raiders linebacker Phil Villapiano once said. “We kind of thought we were ready by ’75. We lost in the Immaculate Reception in ’72, we lost to Miami in ’73, lost to the Steelers in ’74, and then we lost to the Steelers again in ’75, and we thought we were better.

“When it came to ’76, Coach knew we were ready. All we talked about all year was the Super Bowl. You have to forget the other stuff by looking at the big prize, so we didn’t worry about the game-to-game, we worried about winning the whole thing.We enjoyed the run.You know, everybody hated us anyway, so we got meaner and nastier. It was just fun.”

After the Raiders went 9-7 in 1978 and missed the playoffs, Madden retired from coaching and vowed to never come back.

This proved wise, both for his new business ventures and for his home life. He’d married Virginia on Dec. 26, 1959, but in his 1984 book, “Hey, Wait a Minute (I Wrote a Book!)” Madden admitted that he was so out of touch with his family that he thought his son was 12. He was 16.

“They talk about how hard coaches work. They work 18, 20 hours a day. They sleep on a couch. You know, that’s not the hard job,” Madden wrote. “The hard job is a coach’s wife, believe me.”

A younger generation of fans can be excused for knowing Madden only as the name on their favorite video game. And as with so many other things in his life, it was a bit of a happy accident.

Trip Hawkins, a Harvard graduate and founder of Electronic Arts, had played Strat-O-Matic football as a kid and recognized the appeal of X’s and O’s. He approached Madden while envisioning a game that would turn users into sophisticated play callers.

Madden knew little about gaming but offered his expertise as a chance to build a coaching tool — something akin to a flight simulator for aspiring pilots. The original collaboration — “Madden Football” — was released for Apple II in 1988 and evolved into a sensation that has yet to abate. It remains the go-to game for couch potatoes and NFL players alike, and a “real” player’s so-called “Madden rating” can seem as important to them as their NFL Scouting Combine stats.

Madden, though, missed a chance to parlay his involvement into a grand fortune. Patrick Hruby, who documented the birth of the Madden game dynasty for an ESPN “Outside the Lines” piece, wrote that Hawkins offered Madden a chance to buy as much stock as he wanted at the IPO price.

Instead, Madden pointed sternly at Hawkins and said: “I gave you my time. I’m not giving you my money.”

“That was the dumbest thing I ever did in my life,” Madden told Hruby with a laugh.

His annual All-Madden Teams during his broadcasting days were a celebration of the overlooked and underappreciated. “It’s about a guy who’s got a dirty uniform, mud on his face and grass in the ear hole of his helmet,” Madden once explained.

In a way, that was essentially Madden himself, the son of an auto mechanic who made his career largely on passion over polish. He didn’t comport himself like a football coach or orate like a network broadcaster, but he soared to the loftiest heights in both fields with a style on his own.

In his Hall of Fame induction speech, on the stage in Canton in 2006, he said he was sure that his father, who died in 1960, was looking down and laughing.

“The reason I say that he’s up there laughing right now is because I listened to him and I continued to play, and I have never worked a day in my life,’’ Madden said. “I went from player to coach to a broadcaster, and I am the luckiest guy in the world.”

(Photo: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)