His face was perfect for the role, massive and gently angled, with easily identifiable characteristics and not a hint of pretense, a Mount Rushmore in and of itself.
His body was ideal, too, insofar as it possessed similar, caricature-friendly characteristics.
And then there's the name: Madden. Madden!
John Madden looked like football, smelled like football, sounded like football and felt like football, which made him uniquely qualified to talk about our national passion. No wonder he was such an astonishing, enduring success as an American sports icon.
Madden on Thursday announced his retirement from football broadcasting, 30 years after he moved into America's living rooms, dens, bars and bloodstreams. He is 73, secure in his legend, with more money than he could ever count and ready to spend more time with his family in the East Bay.
The most famous sports broadcaster in history, Madden will be missed — even if he no longer was the best and never was the most articulate, the most candid or the most controversial.
He'll be missed mostly because he is the most popular football personality we've ever known. Anybody believe that didn't influence his 2006 enshrinement in the Pro Football Hall of Fame?
Madden's mug and voice were seen during games on TV. They were on commercials. His face was on books and magazines and, eventually, video games. In a sport where all the players wear helmets and coaches rarely
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become stars, nobody was more instantly recognizable.
That's a testimony to the power of the video age — and to a man so wonderfully compatible with it.
And to think, Madden began as a coach. One of Raiders owner Al Davis' greatest discoveries, Madden was promoted from assistant to head coach of the Oakland team in 1969. He spent a gloriously accomplished decade on the sideline before retiring because the stress was affecting every aspect of his life.
Madden had bathed in the highest peaks, leading the Raiders to the playoffs in eight of 10 seasons, seven American Football League or American Football Conference championship games and a Super Bowl title after the 1976 season. Madden also had been devastated by painful defeats, the most agonizing of which was a 1972 playoff loss at Pittsburgh on Franco Harris' "Immaculate Reception."
So the big man waded into the TV booth with sterling credentials, having experienced practically every aspect of the game he openly adored. His knowledge was evident from the start. He knew the game, was familiar with its nuances, felt its rhythms and understood its place in society.
Before long, Madden was touching fans all across the country. He was a community barber. A short-order cook. A butcher. A dockworker. An uncle. A neighbor. He was a fixture, by turns silly and serious, with a unique and unmistakable performer-audience chemistry that made his services worth millions to the networks.
And Madden worked all four major networks: CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox. They each recruited him, even though it meant the inconvenience of an employee who refused to travel by plane. Madden didn't fly, and it didn't matter. His ticket was being Big John, with 16 Emmy awards, a singular presence and a brand name as familiar as Budweiser.
Well, that, and the fact that Madden's partners, from Pat Summerall to Al Michaels, wanted him in the booth.
The greatest secret of Madden's success was his ability to express. Nobody — player, coach or broadcaster — captured the essence of his sport better. He did not simply describe or analyze. He effectively communicated the game and the games behind the game. He had the gift of football gab.
Take the 2006 promo for "Monday Night Football," when Madden said, "What's the toughest thing in a professional football game? It's being the mother of the quarterback — toughest thing."
Yet Madden wasn't everybody's mug of beer. He was too gimmicky for some, with his statements of the obvious and his simplified, exclamatory descriptions of collisions and such. For a grumpy minority, he was too much the oaf.
I suspect, in their own way, they also will miss the big guy.
Cris Collinsworth has been chosen to replace Madden on NBC's telecasts. Collinsworth will be more incisive, more daring, more willing to challenge and criticize. He'll be a better journalist.
But there's no way Collinsworth can be as big a star. It's not that his feet are too narrow. It's that the shoes left behind by Madden are too wide.
Contact Monte Poole, Bay Area News Group sports columnist.
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