"I'M Just a Guy"

By Tom Callahan

Huge celebrity, accompanied by great wealth, can occasionally befall an odd character, especially when television is involved. But has there ever been a more unlikely national figure than John Madden, the animated elephant who used to coach the Oakland Raiders and now instructs the country in its most bewildering sport? Though he won more than 100 National Football League games in only ten years and directed his team to a Super Bowl victory in 1977, Madden was obscured in Oakland by autocratic Owner Al Davis.

Retiring abruptly in 1979 (at just 42), not really because of his ulcer, not precisely because his fear of flying was nearing a frenzy, Madden reluctantly accepted CBS's second or third offer of a commentator's tryout and hesitantly began jumping through paper hoops in Miller Lite beer commercials. Nine years later, his network stipend is crowding $1 million a year, and the rewards from his myriad motor-oil and antihistamine accounts may be two or three times that. He has written two best-selling memoirs (Hey, Wait a Minute, I Wrote a Book! and One Knee Equals Two Feet; Villard Books), and is at work on a third. Over the next few weekends, as pro football's best teams meet in the playoffs, Madden's audience will approach 50 million people a broadcast. Like a rock star, he travels the country in a customized bus, the benefit of a glad-handing deal with Greyhound, and while in New York City, lives at the Dakota, the realm of Leonard Bernstein and Yoko Ono. He likes to hang out in front of the building in untied tennis shoes with pushed-in heels or to squeak along Columbus Avenue communing with the town. "The people," he says, "are the best theater in New York."

At big prizefights, his favorite entertainment ("I enjoy being at a fight, I think, more than anything. The simplicity of it: two guys, no zone defenses"), Madden stirs more ripples of recognition than the actors and actresses, along with a surprising level of affection. "There aren't a lot of big, fat, redheaded people like me," he shrugs. Madden does a good deal of shrugging. For an analyst, he is not very analytical about himself. "I've ! never been caught up in that stuff. If you start believing you're somebody special, you'll start acting that way, and pretty soon you'll be a phony. I'm just a guy. I don't tie my shoes, and I don't go out to fine places. If you don't tie your shoes, that eliminates a hell of a lot of fine places. I don't know why any of this has happened. Probably because none of it was planned. All I'm doing is being myself."

Growing up in Daly City, near San Francisco, Madden heeded his father's advice to resist formal work as long as possible. (In fact, forever.) Earl Madden, an auto mechanic, knew from experience, "Once you take a job, that's it." In constant cahoots with his best pal at Our Lady of Perpetual Help grade school, the present Los Angeles Rams coach John Robinson, young Madden tried the pool halls and bowling alleys before settling on the caddie house as his preferred den of iniquity. There he learned about shuffling cards, pitching nickels and living life. He recalls, "I shagged balls for Ken Venturi," who would win the U.S. Open and end up a CBS commentator. Among Madden's less renowned golfing clients, all highly successful men, he could discern only one sure denominator: college.

About the fourth college Madden sampled was Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, where, he unfailingly tells people, he first encountered his wife of 28 years, Virginia. (Her story is that they met at a bar in Pismo Beach.) At Cal Poly, his love of football deepened. In conversation with a beachboy down the hall, Bobby Beathard, Madden started to consider the game a sophisticated study. Beathard, an undrafted quarterback, failed a trial with the Washington Redskins in 1959 and is now their general manager. Madden, an offensive lineman, was drafted in the 21st round by the Philadelphia Eagles. The year after Madden was graduated, an airplane carting the Cal Poly football team crashed in Ohio, killing 16 players. But he shrugs off this clue to the terror of flying that so complicates his life and schedule. "It wasn't the crash. I flew for a long while after that -- not comfortably, but I flew. I just got claustrophobia."

A knee came undone during his first training camp with Philadelphia in 1959, and his professional playing career was finished before it began. But by a happy chance, the whirlpool room adjoined the projection room, where Eagles Quarterback Norm Van Brocklin customarily sat alone in the dark with his game films. Those who remember Van Brocklin as a hot-tempered player and coach might be surprised to hear how quietly accommodating the "Dutchman" was to a weak-kneed rookie who would never play another down but still craved more knowledge of the game. Football coaches are known too easily by their sideline demeanor, like the "Plastic Man," Tom Landry, in Dallas, or the "Ice Man," Bud Grant, in Minnesota. Vince Lombardi's sadistic way with the Green Bay Packers seemed as plain as the icicles in his jack-o'-lantern grin. Last November Earle Bruce lost the Ohio State job in some part because of the unstylish cut of his jib on the sideline. "That's all television," Madden says wearily.

His own sideline persona, once he made his coaching way from Allan Hancock junior college in Santa Maria, Calif., to San Diego State and, eventually, to the now Los Angeles Raiders, was that of a disheveled clown, grievously overweight, flapping his arms hysterically. Maybe this attracted the Miller Lite people, but something else draws his audience. Madden's two volumes of football stories -- gerunds furnished by New York Timesman Dave Anderson -- are filled with gentle insights and sweet qualities of understanding. The prototype of the menacing Raiders, self-proclaimed villains of the league, was a large, mustachioed defensive end named Ben Davidson. One afternoon, in his first season as head coach, Madden screamed at the other end, Ike Lassiter, for garroting the quarterback during practice. "He's our quarterback, Ike," he reminded Lassiter. Two plays later, Davidson hit the quarterback. "Only two plays later!" Madden berated him afterward. "How could you do the same thing only two plays later?" Davidson looked at him meekly. "You got mad at Ike," he said, "and I wanted you to get mad at me."

Madden required no further illustration of how fragile the pro player truly is, but in 1978, his final season, he absorbed a terrible one. In an exhibition game at Oakland, Safety Jack Tatum, the Raiders' most notorious hitter, collided with New England Receiver Darryl Stingley, leaving Stingley permanently paralyzed. Madden donned a surgical smock to stay with Stingley in the hospital that night and opened his home to the injured man's family. But, with a shrug, Madden minimizes the accident's part in his decision to quit coaching. He prefers to repeat a wistful anecdote about how he thought his 16- year-old son was still only twelve. "It was just time to go," Madden says. "There are only about ten years of emotional and physical shocks in your locker. I said I'd never ride another airplane, and I'd never coach another football team, and I never will."

To be truthful, he sympathized almost equally with Tatum, who was renowned and then reviled for his aggressiveness. Madden is able to wince at football now and then, but he is unable to blame the sport significantly: he loves it too well. Though he had planned to loaf for at least a year after stepping down as the Raiders' coach, he succumbed to CBS's blandishments when the 1979 season came near. "Every year from the age of ten, I had a season. Through high school, college and the pros, over 30 of them. With CBS, I still had a season. I was still part of it. I thought, 'Here's the answer.' "

He took to his preparation like Van Brocklin. "Studying films, I started out thinking what I would do if I were still the coach; I've stopped that." But his fascination with strategy is unending. "Getting ready gives me an excuse to be nosy, to go out to practice and see what's going on. If I say a guy's a good player, I don't want to have read that or been told that. I want to know it."

Madden is able to let the audience know it too. His commentary is a whir of windmilling arms and an exuberant bark of POW!, WHAM! and ZAP! as the linemen collide. The fans have come to recognize the All-Madden players by their grimier shirts and more human qualities. They know Madden favors real grass over artificial turf and mud over dirt. From last Thanksgiving's broadcast: "That's kind of the way the game should be played. I mean -- Thanksgiving Day, the fireplace, the turkey, football players out there playing in the snow. Wet, mud, stuff like that, not carpet."

In the booth, Madden has a fresh eye and a sense of mischief, but in between all the sound effects, he tells you something you didn't know. "When Reagan got shot, they had this doctor on TV, and he explained the surgical procedure with a diagram. This thing goes in here, that thing goes in there. The blood . . . boom, bam. I thought, 'Yeah, I get it. I understand.' You can't simplify complicated things, but you can make them understandable."

Back at Hancock J.C., before he could be appointed football coach, he had to be hired as a phys-ed teacher. And he sees himself as a teacher again. One with a master's in education, earned at Cal Poly in 1961.

"You know what I'd really like to do? Teach women football. Every woman who ever asked me about the game did it for one of three reasons: her ( boyfriend, her husband or her son. I'd like her to enjoy it for herself."

One of Madden's early broadcasting partners, Dick Stockton, says flatly, "Nobody else is even in his league. You know why? He sees through things." Six years ago, Madden joined Pat Summerall in the broadcast booth, and they have become an institution. Summerall, a former New York Giants place-kicker, smoothly handles the play-by-play and generously provides Professor Madden time to explain what just happened and why.

In the course of Madden's curious sojourns, amounting to more than 100,000 miles a year, he might bus from New Orleans to Dallas to Washington for three games in eight days. Though the comforts of the new $500,000 Maddencruiser range from an outsize bed and shower to a full kitchen and dinette -- "plus I got all my stuff on there," such as two televisions and a VCR -- he misses the strangers on the trains he used to subsidize single-handed. "But then, a train can't veer off the track," he says. "I love the small country towns and the cafes. It's fun going to the Mexican restaurant in Van Horn, Texas. The guy's wife is the cook." Showing why he usually avoids fancy restaurants, Madden surveys the menu at one, declares, "Nothing here looks like food," and orders a cheeseburger. "On occasion, I've been over 300 lbs.," he confesses, though he is happiest when he is carrying 270 lbs. on his 6-ft. 4- in. frame. Madden is more likely to wash down his cheeseburgers with Diet Coke than with Lite beer, but he is as faithful as a near teetotaler can be to the product that has forged his fame. When passersby shout out, "Tastes great!" he dutifully responds, "Less filling!" Miller Lite commercials have become a kind of folk art.

Despite the elegant address in New York and the family's place near Oakland (where he largely spends the seven-month off-season and from where two sons have sprung to Harvard and Brown), Madden feels especially at home on the road. "America is my home," he likes to say. "I look out my window, and I see Wyoming and Nebraska, and the sycamores of Indiana, and the Hudson River. That's my front yard." Like a John Steinbeck traveling without his dog Charley, Madden is turning his journey into the third (and probably last) book. "I enjoy writing them a lot more than reading them," he says. "It's like I never watch tapes of the broadcasts. I was that way as a kid. I never looked at the photographs. When people hear their voice on a tape recorder, they can't believe that's the way they really sound. I don't want to hear it. I'm not anactor."

If he were, he would have taken one of his earliest television offers and become the original bartending coach on Cheers. If he were, he would be the mountainous John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (rather, make that Trains and Buses but No Planes), alternately waving his arms and shrugging.