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YChang

YChang 3430

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Sad. He was so much fun to listen to on TV. But he had a great life! My Madden-adjacent story:

About 5-6 years back I was working on a game that required filming actors in front of a green screen. We were in a film studio in Pleasanton. Turns out Madden owned it or at least had partial ownership. The staff was telling me how on Sundays, he would come to the studio (think giant warehouse space), have the games broadcasted against the wall, and invite all his friends to watch the game. Even had a staff on site to cook for them. 

I imagined it was a lot of fun hanging out with him. 

 

Edit: My memory was a bit fuzzy. It wasn’t a projection screen… the warehouse just had tons of tvs as evident from this article: https://www.polygon.com/22857879/john-madden-obituary-nfl-video-games-ea-sports-sales-legacy

image.thumb.png.96055a16620482df436e58051404d7ff.png

 

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Jive Turkey

Jive Turkey 12568

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my all-time favorite intro to a game was the 1994 NFC Championship game.  Cowboys v. 49ers on Fox.  Summerall and Madden.  still gives me chills.  those two were the best that ever did that job.  this is hitting me harder than i expected.  Madden was such a part of my upbringing.

"In two weeks, the Super Bowl will be played.  After that, the Pro Bowl.  Today, we'll play both."

 

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Dilligas

Dilligas 666

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4 minutes ago, YChang said:

Sad. He was so much fun to listen to on TV. But he had a great life! My Madden-adjacent story:

About 5-6 years back I was working on a game that required filming actors in front of a green screen. We were in a film studio in Pleasanton. Turns out Madden owned it or at least had partial ownership. The staff was telling me how on Sundays, he would come to the studio (think giant warehouse space), have the games broadcasted against the wall, and invite all his friends to watch the game. Even had a staff on site to cook for them. 

I imagined it was a lot of fun hanging out with him. 

He mentioned at the beginning of the documentary that he was pretty good at business, sounds like that was accurate.

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Deej

Deej 76542

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9 minutes ago, Jive Turkey said:

my all-time favorite intro to a game was the 1994 NFC Championship game.  Cowboys v. 49ers on Fox.  Summerall and Madden.  still gives me chills.  those two were the best that ever did that job.  this is hitting me harder than i expected.  Madden was such a part of my upbringing.

"In two weeks, the Super Bowl will be played.  After that, the Pro Bowl.  Today, we'll play both."

 

I was in New Zealand for that game. Pretty sure I was the only person on the North Island watching it. 

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Underdog

Underdog 28445

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19 minutes ago, Jive Turkey said:

His overall record as an NFL coach, regular season and playoffs, was 112-39-7. Good lord.

RIP

Would’ve had a few more SB appearances if not for running into that little ol Western PA football team.  Ran into a pretty damn good team in Miami a time or two.  The AFC was brutal back in the 70s, Oilers/Bengals fans can attest to that. 

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32318

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In '97, a writer for The NY Times rode on the Madden Cruiser:

 

Spoiler

John Madden was on the road. Like a pigskin Charles Kuralt, he pursues his personal nirvana from the confines of a large, earthbound vehicle.

The Rabelaisian Madden is the best-paid, best-known and, arguably, the best announcer in sports. What he loves most is standing beside Pat Summerall and calling football games. At 61, his body rhythms remain in tune with his days as a college player and pro coach. You can almost believe that he hibernates in Green Bay from February to July, when he awakens refreshed for football.

''I don't live a calendar life,'' he said, wedged into the upholstered, diner-style booth that is the sovereign's seat of power in the 45-foot-long bus. ''I live the season and the off season. I'd be bored if I couldn't do this September, October, November, December, January. It would kill me.''

This was renewal for Madden, unwinding after Dallas's 37-7 season-opening drubbing of Pittsburgh at Three Rivers Stadium. ''Some game, huh?'' he said, not to praise the Cowboys' lopsided victory as a classic, but to seemingly mark it as the start of his 19th season in television -- his fourth for Fox Sports -- and his 40th in pro or college football since being drafted in 1958 by the Philadelphia Eagles.

Madden has crossed the country in a bus from preseason through the playoffs since 1987 to avoid panic attacks that made him dread flight. The interstates are as cozy to Madden as 100 yards of turf. He traveled by train when he started at CBS in 1979, but the bus lets him move at his own pace, lets him chow down at truck stops or offbeat eateries if he has time to stop, and lets him market his Every Guy-in-the-Easy Boy image in stadium parking lots and along America's asphalt. He will not fly, but his wife, Virginia, has no qualms about being aloft.

''It's unbelievable!'' he said, shaking his head of unruly, once-red, now almost all gray hair. ''She's flying! She took lessons and she's flying the plane she wants to buy!''

Madden, who is paid about $7.5 million a year by Fox, is buying a new bus for next season that will let him install a treadmill. But the current edition, his second one, is hardly Kramdenesque: three TV's, including one in the bedroom, which is dominated by a queen-size bed and desk with swivel chair; a sofa and four cushy leather chairs; a galley with a microwave to cook high-cholesterol food and a refrigerator stocked with Dr Pepper, which he endorses (so don't ask him for a Diet Coke), and a satellite dish on the roof that lets him watch games on the move (with occasional breakup and loss of signal).

With the destination Madden's Manhattan apartment, football was in the bus's 66-degree air. But food concerns overruled. What had people brought John Madden to eat? Madden is in sync with hearty food that fills you up, food you can get without a reservation, food you can slather with Tabasco sauce (kept on a shelf beside the booth), free food you can carry in bags from the nearest Outback Steakhouse that his drivers chance upon. ''If I talk about food on the air, I get it,'' he said, wearing a blue shirt over wrinkled khakis.

He assessed a basket of small fruits toted from western New York by the mother of Dallas Cowboys fullback Daryl Johnston. ''Moose fruit!'' he said, looking at the peaches and plums and apples. From her handwritten letter, he read aloud: ''The apple is an early variety called Pristine.''

But the Madden crew's main dining experience came in aluminum pans and a white pail that looked like it once contained industrial cleanser. Here was sausage, chili and kluski, a noodles-and-cabbage dish no one could pronounce.

''You guys going to eat the haluschkes?'' asked Wayne Tyra, a friend of Bill Maas, also a Fox analyst, who had stocked the bus with the cuisine and had waited to see the bus off from the Three Rivers Stadium parking lot.

''Yeah, we got 'em!'' Madden said. ''We got the lupkes!''

''Coach, you're large!'' shouted Tyra, who is nicknamed ''Taz.''

''No, Taz, you're large,'' Madden said.

Do you know him, Madden was asked. No, not really, he said. But hey, it's food -- heavy, masculine food -- isn't it? Does it matter whether he knows Taz?

As Fran Morison, a Fox broadcast associate on Madden's production team, warmed the food to serve the group, Madden inhaled deeply.

''Mmmm,'' he said. ''The only things that smell good are fat and sugar. Tofu being boiled doesn't smell good. Anything that smells good is fattening.''

After he finished a plate of sausage, Madden shouted to Morison: ''Hey, Fran, who chose these little plates? This is a saucer. Get me a man's plate!''

''It was just an appetizer,'' said Morison, handing Madden a heaping serving on a plate fit for a Madden.

''I've got to have this haluschke,'' said Madden, digging in. ''I don't know what haluschke is.'' He probed as he ate. ''Hey, there's onions in here!''

Seeing that Lou D'Ermilio, a media director at Fox Sports, had eaten sparingly of the chili and sausage, Madden pushed him to indulge, as if he had slaved over a hot stove all morning.

''You want lupkes?'' Madden asked. ''Come on, Lou. Mangia! You can't come here and not have the lupkes. You'll love the lupkes!''

Madden did. Then, after servings of kluski, sausage and chili, Madden padded to the kitchenette and laid a smear of Jif peanut butter on a roll.

Sometime later, the smell of a skunk seemed to permeate the bus. ''That's not a skunk,'' Madden said conclusively, breathing in. ''It's the lupkes!''

About an hour into the trip, Joe Mitchell, one of the drivers, pulled into a rest stop. He and Willie Yarbrough, who rotates shifts with Mitchell on drives up to 48 straight hours, got out to cover the ''Madden'' name on the side of the bus, to deter honkers and C.B. users from bothering the man inside.

Later, back on the road, a thought occurred to Madden, as they often do, seemingly from nowhere.

''Hey, Fran, you know what? We never got the confluence,'' he said. Madden was referring to the overhead blimp shot of Three Rivers that shows the confluence of the Allegheny, Ohio and Monongahela Rivers, which never appeared during the Steelers-Cowboys broadcast. ''And what happened to our blimp?'' he asked. ''The blimp goes and the confluence is gone?''

Like Summerall, Morison replied, in deadpan: ''Well, John, the confluence is always there.''

Flipping from one game to another with his remote, Madden landed on the Baltimore-Jacksonville game. ''What's the score -- hey, there's bunting!'' Like tailgate barbecue, celebratory bunting hanging from stadium fences is one of Madden's obsessions. He brings his own bunting on the bus because he likes the way it looks at baseball games. ''Baseball has better opening days and All-Star Games than the N.F.L. does,'' he said. ''Ours stink.''

The game was also the debut of Jim Kelly, the former Bills quarterback, as an analyst for NBC. ''He probably knows what he's doing,'' Madden said. ''I didn't have any idea what to do. I didn't even know how to hold a microphone. My wife said, 'Hold it like Pat does.' And that was my fourth year.''

As he watched the Jets score at will against Seattle, Madden contemplated the genius label on Jets Coach Bill Parcells: ''If you win a Super Bowl before you're fired, you're a genius, and everyone listens to you. But a coach is just a guy whose best class in grammar school was recess and whose best class in high school was P.E. I never thought I was anything but a guy whose best class was P.E. In Oakland, Al Davis was a genius. We had Ron Wolff there, too, and he was a genius. There was no room for me to be a genius.''

Pointing to the sofa, he said: ''Brett Favre sat right there in his flip-flops. Matt Millen and Bill Maas were here, too, and Maas looked at Favre's feet and said, 'Hey, are those fingers? Your foot looks like a hand.' So Favre said, 'I can pick up a baseball and throw it with my foot.' So I had him prove it. I got my ball from my glove'' -- a well-oiled black Mizuno tucked in a cranny above the couch-side window of the bus -- ''and the S.O.B. threw it.''

As the hours passed, Madden showed off some personal artifacts: a Steuben glass replica of the bus, a cap commemorating a Texas truck stop's induction into his All-Madden Haul of Fame, and Taz's homemade bottle of red wine.

''You want some?'' Madden offered. Nah. Not after the kluski.

Madden then called Sandy Montag, one of his agents, to discuss the opening-week performances of players on their football fantasy teams.

''Hey, I got eight touchdowns, including Testaverde's three,'' he said.

Football, even at a fantasy level, remains Madden's life. It has made him into an in-demand pitchman for hardware, soda, athlete's foot balm, a steakhouse and video games. Like kluski, football nourishes him.

''Nothing jazzes me up like football,'' he said. ''I've acquired more passion of the years, not less. Not to love it wouldn't make sense.''

 

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hundredTT

hundredTT 576

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50 minutes ago, Jive Turkey said:

my all-time favorite intro to a game was the 1994 NFC Championship game.  Cowboys v. 49ers on Fox.  Summerall and Madden.  still gives me chills.  those two were the best that ever did that job.  this is hitting me harder than i expected.  Madden was such a part of my upbringing.

"In two weeks, the Super Bowl will be played.  After that, the Pro Bowl.  Today, we'll play both."

 

It is a scientific fact football will never be this good again. From the broadcast, the uniforms, the players. It really is unpossible. 

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conVINCEd

conVINCEd 21468

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21 minutes ago, Scooter Monzingo said:

It’s called nostalgia, every generation feels the same.

The implementation of salary cap ensured that the Cowboys and 49ers that year were the two most complete teams to ever take the field.  If they had a weakness, they threw money at it.  See Deion Sanders and Charles Haley.

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Hagbard Celine

Hagbard Celine 10751

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9 minutes ago, conVINCEd said:

The implementation of salary cap ensured that the Cowboys and 49ers that year were the two most complete teams to ever take the field.  If they had a weakness, they threw money at it.  See Deion Sanders and Charles Haley.

i spent a lot of time in the city from '90 to '95 and it was extremely pleasurable to answer "Dallas" to the question where are you from after that game when jimmy shoved it up their ass no lube

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MrBig

MrBig 5283

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5 minutes ago, Buzzrock said:

Just think of how many cases of athlete’s foot he cured!

RIP to the on field in booth and video game legend.

Tough Actin Tinactin!

Life pro tip: I knew a guy with athlete’s foot who keep saying to put your socks on before you put your underwear on in case your toes grazed the crotch area and gave the wife a yeast infection. Because he wasn’t a cheater of course. 

 

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Beantown Express 2.0

Beantown Express 2.0 6554

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1 hour ago, Sgt Hulk said:

Came here to post this. Madden 92 for sega. Best game ever.  
 

at the end of the game the team with the most points on the board is going to win.

john madden

 

RIP.  I never lost at Madden 92 as long as I was the Vikings.  Their D line could block every pass and stop every run.  Years ago I went to the Packers/Cowboys game at Lambeau on Sunday night with Madden and Al Michaels announcing.  We had seats on the 50 up top right under their broadcast booth.  It was an open window to their booth and Madden would stick his head out and wave to us below.  By halftime some drunk Packer fan somehow climbed up towards the booth and was hanging their screaming at Madden “circle me with the telestrator” over and over again.  

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pch

pch 1259

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Listened to KTCK this morning who played the commercials we all remember here.  Didn't realize he retired at 42 as a coach.  Always remember when the Madden Cruiser came to DFW and his refusal to fly anywhere.  Also wonder what percentage of EA Sports Madden products he owned-reportedly this company is a multi-billion dollar operation.  Glad Madden now joins his former partner Pat Summerall and will probably get the playoff announcing gig for the rest of eternity.

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