Bryan Burwell - Madden: A Biography

Foreword by Pat Summerall

Why did it work? Because we listened to each other.

Whenever I think of my incredible partnership with John Madden, the first word that comes to mind is respect .

Im not sure how football historians will ultimately look back on us, but if some consider us the best football broadcasting team ever, I take that as a great honor.

When we first got together on that makeshift broadcast platform high above old Tampa Stadium way back on November 25, 1979, I had no idea how long we would last or how wonderfully our personal and professional friendship would blossom. I never imagined that our presence in a stadium would one day signify the Big Game in the National Football League. All I knew was that I respected John and believed he respected me, too. I think part of it was because I had been a player before I became a broadcaster. John knew that I understood the game from the inside out. And I respected him because of the coach he had been and for his incredible knowledge of and passion for the game.

It didnt take long to discover that his knowledge and passion were contagious. It helped create a broadcasting partnership with me, producer Bob Stenner, and director Sandy Grossman that would last over two network stints at CBS and FOX. We looked at game film together like a coaching staff does. We prepared like coaches, which is how we knew why a player missed a block or made a great play. I remember John had us interview everyone on both teams before one Super Bowl broadcast. Seriously, we interviewed the entire teams, from the star quarterbacks to the last guys on special teams. Because of our preparation for the broadcast, we were never caught off guard by anything that happened during our three hours on TV. We were ready for any situation, and thats part of why America enjoyed watching and listening to John.

But the real essence of our broadcasting relationship was even simpler. Why did it work? Because we listened to each other.

In the following pages, I hope you too will listen and learn, because the John Madden you are about to discover is nothing at all like the person you think you know. I probably got to know him as closely as anyone. I know about his kids and his grandkids. I know about his wife, Virginia. He knows all about my family, too. And I can honestly say that the John Madden I know is totally different in person from the one you see on the air.

You might be surprised at just how different. He likes you to think hes this big ol goofball, this lumbering guy who waves his hands a lot and gets excited when he talks and is completely immersed in football. Well, that surely is part of the John Madden I know. Regardless of how we started the eveningperhaps ordering dinner or sitting at a poker tablethe conversation would always involve football. Before long, John would be moving salt and pepper shakers around to diagram a play.

But the John Madden I know is also a diverse and very intelligent man who loves reading everything he can get his hands on. He loves talking about politics, world affairs, and movies, and he has a strong opinion on just about everything.

When people ask me if there is one highlight from our time working together that stands out, I honestly cant choose just one. Why? Because to me, working with John Madden and being his friend has been 22 years of highlights.

Pat Summerall

8. Three Simple Rules

They were all renegades, but John had a way of handling guys. My parents always told me, If youre going to leaddont treat them the way you want to be treated, treat them the way they want to be treated. In other words, you have to learn about other cultures. And John was good at that.

Al Davis

Whatever satisfaction he might have derived from finally chasing off the belligerent John Rauch, whose greatest sin was not letting Al Davis do what he damned well pleased with his own football team, the Raiders boss was now in a very strange place emotionally as he began preparations for the 1969 season. Losing the 1968 AFL Championship Game fueled Davis public disgust with Rauch. Davis had spent the better part of the 1960s in the trenches of the bitter AFL-NFL wars, and the loss to the Jets had ultimately robbed him of what he surely felt was his destiny.

In this AFL-NFL battle, Davis had been as great an agent provocateur as any man. In his heart, he felt that it should have been the Raiders racing off the Orange Bowl field on January 12, 1969, as the first AFL team to take down the NFL in a Super Bowl. But Rauch had ripped that page right out of Davis legacy and sent it to Joe Namath for a Hollywood rewrite. To make matters worse, the AFL-NFL merger was complete, and the AFLs final season was only a few months away. The war was ceremonial now, and Davis was expected to lay down his weapons and make peace. It was not an easy thing to do. To Al, they were the enemy, John Madden remembers. I mean, Al was out there taking players and hiding them, putting them in motels and taking them to different places. He was signing players under the goalpost.

As the AFL commissioner, Davis came up with the aggressive plan to go after all the NFLs quarterbacks and sign them to big futures contracts, a move that infuriated the NFL owners and coaches and was the final blow that forced the established league to a merger. And now they were expecting Davis to forget about all of that and play nice.

Davis didnt know how to play nice.

So a lot was going on in the summer of 1969 when Madden took over as the new Raiders head coach. The two leagues had nervously sized up each other from a distance and were a year away from interleague play in the regular season. For the time being, the only way to measure up was during preseason games. This was the third year the Raiders had scheduled an NFL team for the preseason, and of course it was the cross-bay rival San Francisco 49ers. One evening during the off-season, Madden was invited to dinner by Davis and another owner, Ed McGah. At one point during the meal, Davis had to leave the table to use the phone. As he politely excused himself and walked away from the table, McGah leaned across the table, stared Madden in the eyes, and spoke in the urgent tones of a man wanting to reveal a deep secret.

You know, theres really only one thing that you have to do to ensure that youll keep your job, McGah told Madden. All you have to do is beat the 49ers.

Because he had witnessed the intensity of the battle during his first two years with the Raiders, Madden had already been properly indoctrinated in the AFLs underdog mentality. Hed felt the indignant lash of the NFL, too. Hed listened to the constant look-down-their-nose superiority of the NFL establishment and the snide remarks from the pro-NFL reporters, too. Now his marching orders were being laid out by McGah.

It was just a preseason game, Madden says. But back then it was a lot more than that. [Davis and the other owners] had lived this life with Oakland kind of being secondary to San Francisco and then the AFL being secondary to the NFL. It was that important to them. In those days, it was so competitive between the owners that once they got a chance to face the NFL teams in the preseason, those games were big games, in many cases bigger than some regular-season games.

In the fifth and final game of the Raiders 1969 preseason, before more than 53,000 witnesses in the Oakland Coliseum, the Raiders defeated the 49ers 4228, and Madden passed his first test as head coach.

As the Raiders began training camp in Santa Rosa that summer, Madden was taking over a championship-caliber team that had won 27 of its last 32 regular-season and playoff games. It was a veteran team with its own peculiar personality. The renegade Raiders were just beginning to find their wild and unconventional spirit, and 33-year-old John Madden was not about to screw things up.