A calm look at an excitable NFL icon

Posted Sep 20, 2011 by Bob D'Angelo

Updated Sep 20, 2011 at 09:13 PM

To a generation of fans, John Madden has been the lovable, disheveled big uncle, the guy who pitched products on TV and was an energetic football analyst for NFL games on CBS and Fox.

That would be a disservice to Madden, who was an excellent coach for a decade with the Oakland Raiders. Madden’s teams went 103-32-7 in the regular season from 1969 to 1978 and won Super Bowl XI after going 13-1 in the 1976 season.

And Madden achieved this success by bucking the iron-fisted coaching tactics that made Vince Lombardi, Don Shula and Tom Landry so successful. Madden had just three rules for his players: “Be on time, pay attention, and play like hell when I tell you to.”

That was all the renegade Raiders of the 1970s needed.

In “Madden: A Biography” (Triumph Books, hardback, $24.95), Bryan Burwell weaves together the life of a pro football legend. It’s a sympathetic, but not overly sugary, look at Madden’s career through his eyes and those of his contemporaries.

A recurring theme throughout this book is the friendship between Madden and John Robinson, who also would find coaching fame at Southern Cal and the Los Angeles Rams. The two boyhood pals were inseparable during their youthful days in California and competed against one another in baseball and football. Robinson’s observations are quoted extensively by Burwell and sheds some light on the intensity that fueled the young Madden.

Madden’s NFL career with the Philadelphia Eagles was cut short by injury, but it gave him the chance to sit with quarterback Norm Van Brocklin and dissect game films. The valuable experience would pay dividends when he became a coach. He would become an assistant to Don Coryell at San Diego State, and a chance meeting with Al Davis on a practice field ultimately led to Madden, at age 32, becoming head coach of the Oakland Raiders.

Burwell, a sports columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, brings the reader into the locker room of the Raiders, first under John Rauch (Madden was an assistant), and then under Madden. The players responded immediately to Madden, Burwell writes, because he shattered the “my way or the highway” credo of institutional control.

“Madden was the perfect coach for the most imperfect team,” Burwell writes, “a man who was young enough to relate to the rapidly changing sensibilities of the time” without caring what other people thought.

The reader is then taken through a wild decade of Raiders’ football, from the bizarre “Immaculate Reception” that sent Pittsburgh to the 1972 AFC title game, to the ultimate victory in Super Bowl XI four seasons later.

After a decade of coaching, Madden resigned — and ultimately, he would find his way into the broadcast booth. That’s where the Madden legend truly grew, and Burwell documents the transformation from uneasy announcer to comfortable legend.

Burwell gives the reader a light, easy and uncomplicated look at Madden. His research is good, and a good cross-section of players and fellow broadcasters add insight through Burwell’s interviews. It’s a calm, measured look at one of the NFL’s more excitable characters.