John Madden, Hall of Fame Coach, Is Dead at 85

Fox snagged him in the mid-1990s to establish credibility for its fledgling sports division. ABC followed in 2002, to boost the sagging fortunes of “Monday Night Football.” NBC hired him when it regained football in 2006 — because, as Dick Ebersol, then the chairman of NBC Universal Sports, said: “He’s the best analyst in the history of sports. He’s able to cut through from people my age, who remembered him as a coach, all the way to 12-year-olds.”

Madden received 16 Sports Emmy Awards, including 15 for top analyst.

He parlayed his appeal into a series of career incarnations — commercial pitchman, successful author, video-game entrepreneur — and embraced them all with zest. He produced three New York Times best-sellers. He peddled Boom! Tough Actin’ Tinactin as an athlete’s foot remedy and broke through reams of paper (and the odd door) in advertisements for Miller Lite. His Electronic Arts video game evolved into a cultural phenomenon with annual midnight releases and widespread tournaments since its inception in 1988, selling tens of millions of copies with revenue in the billions.

At his core, though, Madden was a coach and by extension a teacher; as he proudly noted in interviews, he graduated with a master’s degree in physical education, a few credits short of a doctorate, from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. His unscripted manner translated as well in the Raiders’ locker room — where he guided a cast of self-styled outlaws and misfits to eight playoff appearances in 10 seasons as head coach — as it did in living rooms, man caves and bookstores.

“He was who you saw on TV,” said Ted Hendricks, a Hall of Fame linebacker who played for Madden from 1975 through 1978. “He gave us freedom, but he always had complete control of his players.”

A Fear of Flying

As inclusive as he was beloved, Madden embodied a rare breed of sports personality. He could relate to the plumber in Pennsylvania or the custodian in Kentucky — or the cameramen on his broadcast crew — because he viewed himself, at bottom, as an ordinary guy who just happened to know a lot about football. Grounded by an incapacitating fear of flying, he met many of his fans while crisscrossing the country, first in Amtrak trains and then in his Madden Cruiser, a decked-out motor coach that was a rare luxurious concession for a man whose idea of a big night out, as detailed in his book “One Size Doesn’t Fit All” (1988) was wearing “a sweatsuit and sneakers to a real Mexican restaurant for nachos and a chile Colorado.”

For more than 20 years, that bus shepherded Madden to and from his assignments, a fulfillment of sorts of a favorite book, “Travels with Charley,” by John Steinbeck, who had driven around America in a camper with his poodle. When Madden greeted family members and friends on the flight he had chartered for them to attend his induction ceremony at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, in August 2006, it was his first time in an airplane in 27 years.

“When you pulled up somewhere in that bus, it was like Air Force One had arrived,” said Fred Gaudelli, who as Madden’s producer at ABC and NBC traveled with him for seven years. “It was amazing the way people would react to that thing.”