Reddit mentions of Madden: A Biography

You joke, but it's very much true. Consider what John Madden did to influence TV coverage of football and how Gruden approaches it.

Also worth mentioning that John Madden was compulsive about preparation and study. He was found to be studying tape deep into the night and would sometimes be leaving the film room as guys were getting in. Madden never gets much credit for his game prep or his focus and fixation, but he was as maniacal as Gruden if not moreso.

Now compare this (long) excerpt with this Real Sports on Gruden

Excerpted from Madden: A Biography by Burwell, Bryan (2011-08-01). Triumph Books.

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As early as May 1981, Madden expressed this concern during a conversation with [CBS Sports Producer Terry] O’Neil over lunch. Madden was upset that everyone on the production team was thinking of his precious game of football rather cavalierly as “a show.” It was that same description that had angered him the first time he heard it seven years earlier when Howard Cosell had approached him after a Monday Night Football game that the Raiders had just lost 21–20 to the Buffalo Bills.

“John,” Cosell gushed. “You gave us a great show!”

“Show? A great show?” Madden exploded. “To you it’s a show, but to me it’s a goddamned game we just lost! And there’s nothing great about it!”

During his lunch meeting with O’Neil, Madden conjured up that same contempt. “Our people are always saying, ‘The show this and the show that.’ Hell, this isn’t a show. Kukla, Fran and Ollie is a show! Laverne and Shirley is a show! This is a game!”

O’Neil promised to change that attitude with the troops. “What else?” he asked. “Well, they don’t know anything about the game. Don’t know and don’t care,” Madden said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, football. They don’t know whether you blow it up or stuff it…take defense. Simple things, like showing what a zone coverage is. Or showing a pass rusher coming onto the field on third down.”

“Yeah, so?” O’Neil asked.

“So the producer and director tell me they can’t show it. Say they don’t know it’s going to happen until it’s over.”

“Well, don’t they pick these things up when they watch game film?”

“Game film? Game film? Hell, some of these guys don’t even show up until the morning of the game,” Madden retorted.

The industry critics agreed with Madden’s brutal assessment. They too were convinced that “old” CBS Sports had a problem, but unlike the coach, who was coming at it from a football sense, the newspaper critics shaped their evaluations from a technical point of view. They saw uninspired people who were just showing up and putting out a product that was “produced in a stodgy, schizophrenic manner almost, it sometimes seemed, half-heartedly,” according to Television Age magazine.

When Madden and O’Neil arrived at CBS, they were walking into a culture that desperately needed to be changed. To put it mildly, O’Neil (and his new boss Van Gordon Sauter) believed it was an enterprise built on laziness and excessive partying. Pregame preparation was nonexistent. “Before Madden, the way we prepared for a game was showing up on Saturday,” Sandy Grossman says. “With [Pat] Summerall and [Tom] Brookshier, we’d sit down with the PR directors on Saturday, and they’d hand us their press guides, a few newspaper clippings, and that was it.”

The height of this cavalier attitude came during preparation for Super Bowl XIV (Los Angeles Rams vs. Pittsburgh Steelers) when the CBS crew was informed that a meeting had been arranged with Steelers coach Chuck Noll, and Brookshier’s initial response was, “Do we have to go?”

If Brookshier was the class cut-up, then Madden was the teacher who gave homework on the weekends. He brought a coach’s work ethic to television. He wanted the entire production team to study game film and attend practices. He wanted them to interview players and coaches, gain better insight into the broadcast, and better prepare for essential camera shots that would capture important elements of the coming game. The deeper he got into the television business, the more his personality came out. Madden wasn’t upset that they liked to party. Hell, he used to coach the Raiders. But his wild and rambunctious players worked hard, prepared meticulously, and cared deeply about the jobs they were expected to do. Most of all, they knew the game. So Madden had to become a control freak. He had to take charge because if their broadcasts looked bad, that was a reflection on him. So he once again was a coach and teacher, and he was going to have to coach up an entirely new group of students, many of whom weren’t all that interested in learning.

Noted sports television critic Bob Raissman, who has covered the industry at Advertising Age and the New York Daily News for the last 27 years, remembers sitting in on some of those production meetings in the early years. “He would teach these guys football,” says Raissman. “He had longtime producers and director [Bob] Stenner and Grossman, and he was telling them what he was looking for. He was instructing them on what to look for in an important football game. I know some people thought he was overbearing, but I was in the room. He wasn’t necessarily ordering them around, but he was putting out a game plan for these guys. His attitude was like this was his team. They were his players, his coaching staff. They were his team.”

Grossman and the rest of the crew began to feel that “team” vibe almost immediately, even if they weren’t all that thrilled to be sitting there with glazed eyes, entranced by the whirl-click, whirl-click of Madden at the control of the game films. “Yes, it was like we were becoming a part of his new coaching staff,” Grossman chuckled. “We would watch [game film], and we’d go back and forth, back and forth on certain plays and, to be honest with you, it was boring to us. But we kept doing it and listening to him. And as we went along, we did start to see things, and we would then ask questions.”

All of the technical staff would be there for hours. Summerall didn’t always stick around very long. But then again, he didn’t have to because Madden already knew Summerall had built-in credibility. “Pat had been everywhere,” says Madden. “He had been a player, a coach, an analyst, and a play-by-play man. So that [gave me] a lot of confidence that the guy sitting next to [me] knew more about what was going on than [I] did.”

We look back historically and think of Madden and Summerall as the quintessential broadcast partners. They lasted 22 years together, becoming synonymous with every big game in the NFC, from Thanksgiving Day in Dallas to championship duels in San Francisco, from Gatorade baths in the Meadowlands to unbridled celebrations of the Hogs in D.C., to marveling at the Greatest Show on Turf in St. Louis. However, Summerall wasn’t completely sold on his new partner right off the bat. In early September, right before a preseason game they would be broadcasting between the Dallas Cowboys and the Houston Oilers, Summerall gave the Dallas Morning News a rather clear picture of how different it was working with Brookshier and surprisingly how apprehensive he felt about Madden’s more serious approach:

“It puts me in a tough position. Deep down, it’s really true that I’d rather be with Brookshier…. It was not like going to work when Brookie and I did games. It was like I couldn’t wait to get there. As he is fond of saying, when we arrived we were laughing and when we left on Sunday night we were still laughing. If it were Brookshier and me, we would have had the production meeting, then we would have been out drinking margaritas. Now I’m not sure what’s going to happen.”

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