What made John Madden great: "John understood how television worked, why it worked, why it didn’t work, and when it didn’t work"

The Athletic

That's according to NBC's Sunday Night Football executive producer Fred Gaudelli, who was the last producer to work with the iconic sports broadcaster, during his stints on ABC's Monday Night Football and NBC's SNF. Gaudelli said Madden, who died last week at age 85, used to have a saying that has always stayed with Gaudelli as a producer: You can’t format a live event. “John understood how television worked, why it worked, why it didn’t work, and when it didn’t work,” Gaudelli said. “He got TV on a level like a Dick Ebersol level. Al (Michaels) has the same quality. They just know what the audience needs and they know when they need it. Not that they’re perfect. I mean, no one’s perfect. But in those big moments, they’re not somewhere else when there’s something in front of the audience. If I made a decision differently in the game that took us away from something, which invariably I did, he would hit that talk-back button and say, ‘Hey, can we get back to the game?’ I mean, even to this day, if I feel like I’ve been on a topic too long that’s away from the game, I feel his voice coming through that talk-back.” Gaudelli added: "John was one of the most curious people I’ve ever known, and curious about everything and curious about you. He wanted to know your background. He wanted to know why you were wearing a pink shirt. He wanted to know why you don’t wear socks with your shoes. He just wanted to know. He was authentic in the same way Barkley is. They are who they are. He didn’t try to be somebody on the air that he wasn’t off the air. He was John Madden 24-7. Like Dick Vitale too. There are a few of those guys out there, but his curiosity did not have a ceiling."

ALSO:

• Every sport could use a John Madden: "Madden had a master’s in education, but in retrospect that combination of performance and education, theatrical goofiness and real rigor, was coaching—he helped you understand, and got you to care," says David Roth. "Those are valuable skills for a television commentator or anyone else, but the NFL is not really about this kind of demystification anymore. In its current iteration, the NFL is less concerned with winning people over than reminding them how significant it is; the battle has been won in a way it was not during Madden’s tenure, and the NFL now celebrates and consolidates and brands and rebrands that victory much more than it does anything else. As befits a league that sees itself as a sort of unofficial auxiliary branch of the armed forces, mystification is very nearly the point. This is where the difference between Madden and, say, Jon Gruden is at its most obvious—Madden saw his job as fundamentally being about clarifying and communicating, the other in the catechistic recitation of coachy bluster and jargon. It’s not just that Madden would be too singular and silly a figure for the contemporary NFL, although he would be. It’s that what he did best isn’t something the NFL is currently much interested in doing."
• Madden made audiences smarter by teaching them the subtleties of the game