Sean Connery once acknowledged that to a large number of people he will always be James Bond but to an entire other generation he will only be seen as Indiana Jones’ father. This is someone not generally known for his self-awareness, but he is absolutely right. Even on blu-ray the old James Bond movies just seem campy now (yes, I said it) and as a result the suave action-hero has faded into a father-figure paving the way for the next generation of adventurers. Despite our best efforts, we age and we change and through all that we are rarely lucky enough to have that one quintessential success—it is truly exceptional to find someone that has even more than that.
John Madden quietly retired yesterday, a story almost immediately lost among the season-ending injuries and the GM heart-attacks and the rest of the constant buzz of the sports world, but the career that ended yesterday was anything but quiet. In fact, you could say that John Madden was the Sean Connery of football. Both Connery and Madden were 32 when they took over that first archetypical role, Connery as Bond, Madden as head coach of the Raiders. Both were followed by replacements who had mixed reviews—just in case you were wondering, in this analogy George Lazenby is Joe Bugel (who? Exactly.) Roger Moore would be Art Shell. Timothy Dalton would be Bill Callahan. Pierce Brosnan would of course be Jon Gruden, and we can only hope that Daniel Craig will have as crazy a career as Lane Kiffin already has. Weirdly enough, both walked away after ten years, and Madden was able to walk away with a hit list worthy of Bond. He was the youngest to reach 100 wins, never having a losing season in those 10 years; he has the highest win percentage- including playoffs, and he ended with a winning record against coaches that eventually made the Hall of Fame. He ended up taking his team to the AFC Championship 7 times in those ten years including the win in Super Bowl XI.
Madden of course immediately went into the broadcasting booth upon retiring from coaching. And looking over his broadcasting resume—every season for the last 30 years, the long partnership with Pat Summerall, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, the Super Bowls, Monday Night, Sunday Night, the cameo in Little Giants, Al Michaels willing to follow him anywhere, the turducken—you start to see the pattern—the Rock, the Hunt for Red October, the Untouchables, Entrapment… there are roles that some people just own. Scotland-Forever is clearly as important as All-Madden, these little expressions that now mean so much more because of what they’ve come to represent. But this isn’t just about a string of influential hits, this is about a standard of success leading to the next generation. And while his use of the teleprompter was truly groundbreaking, I for one will always remember Madden drawing a penis on live TV and getting away with it (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1z03b1wveM).
But is there higher praise for a commentator then Madden-esque? I will admit that it took me a long time to come around on Cris Collinsworth—and even now I’m not sure I’ve forgiven his inappropriate relationship with Michael Phelps’ Mom—but I now begin to see in him the things that I will miss from Madden. The play-by-play knowledge, the detail on where every player should be, the types of insights that only come from spending a week in a dark room with lots of gametape.
But if coaching is Madden’s Bond, and his commentating is the string of box-office successes, then his video game is truly his Dr. Jones. There’s a story that the original Madden Football guys tell: for the sake of the developers the original version was only going to have 7 players per side but Madden threatened to walk out if they didn’t make the game as realistic as possible. Twenty-one years later, EA and the Madden series continue to push the boundaries of realism- even at the sake of game-play (I mean, can anyone actually use that QB Vision mode from ’06, that thing is impossible!) I remember upgrading my Madden every time I upgraded the system, then upgrading from Madden ’01 to Madden ’02 just to have Chad Pennington be able to complete a pass, I remember turning off exhaustion so that Mike Vick in Madden ’04 could accomplish anything, and I remember the first time I heard that Collinsworth was going to take Madden’s place as the voice of the game. It was the warning shot across the bow that said ‘Hey, I’m not gonna be around forever.’ I’m going to remember the game, and the Madden cards, every time a punter kicks a 60 yarder or a QB hits 10 passes in a row, but mostly I’m going to remember “You used to be able to put stick ‘em on your hands to catch those balls, now they’ve got those gloves.” I heard that comment over and over again every time my receiver would miss a pass, heck I think he even said it when my QB spiked the ball. It’s such a simple comment, a throwaway-line designed to make us feel like he’s playing with us, but it’s more than that too. It’s the kind of thing your grandpa would say, it’s a way of saying “In my day we’d use our hands; we didn’t have all these newfangled advantages you guys have.” He might as well as have said that in his day they had to drive 70 yards, uphill, in the snow, barefoot.
When I first saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Sean Connery wasn’t a father-figure, to me he was a grandfather. He had all those stories, all his life’s work, and everything was harder in his day. But he let you in just enough so that you noticed that he truly had forgotten more than you will ever know. Yes, John’s stories kinda meandered, and his highlights this past season were things like telling us about eating at the buffet with the Eagles. He wasn’t a hard-nosed coach anymore, he was just a sweet old-man who loved food and football and sharing his stories. But we’ll miss that guy too—even if it was his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Madden retired on a Thursday and it was a retirement that was so expected and yet so surprising. The sports world recently lost Harry Kalas but it was a way that we all kinda expected- one day he just couldn’t make it to the ballpark. And as much as it breaks my heart, I know one day we’re gonna lose Vin Scully the same way. These guys are old-school in the most complimentary sense of the term. They are from a different generation in which you show up, everyday. So it’s actually kind of refreshing to see him be able to walk away on his own terms. And whether as a coach, commentator, or video game personality John Madden always had such success that it is now nearly impossible to think of anyone ever replacing him. It’s enough to make you want to get on a bus, go to Canton, and look for that 1970s Madden- back before he was an icon, when he was just a really cool young man ready to take on the world. If you let yourself slip back to him back then, you can hear him say “Madden. John Madden.”