Remembering John Madden

Remembering John Madden

There are two towering American sports personalities, John Madden and Hank Greenwald. These two folks are solely responsible for arousing my interest in Football and Baseball respectively. Hank, with his dry humor and straightforward way of describing the game got me interested in Baseball. To be sure, the Giants management many times did not like Hank, but he just call spade a spade. For example, he once described an outstanding double play executed by Giants, and coolly said something like this "but when I look at my calendar, it is September, so clearly this play would have helped a lot few months ago". Giants were pretty bad that year and had long being eliminated from playoffs. 

Madden, of course came on KCBS every day at 8.15 AM, and provided us insights every day. The guy was simply amazing. Even for someone like me, who only heard him on radio, and saw him on TV in commentry role, connected with him easily. That was the simple charm he had. He could connect easily with an electrician, janitor, player, waiting staff, people like me, coaches, fellow commentators,  CFOs, CEOs and everyone in the middle.

He made football simple. But don't get me wrong, he was a very successful coach. So he knew every damn detail that was out there. His genius was in making things simple for everyone. I remember his story when he took a train across the country, for recording some commercial; got down for dinner at an obscure station, and got the entire waiting staff in the restaurant to listen to his commercial practice session. He could connect with everyone. He once even pulled a highway patrol guy during one of his KCBS 8.15 AM live show. The guy criss-crossed the country in his RV, and took the 8.15 live program from wherever he was. 

NFL did very well this year to celebrate him during Thanksgiving. Although I am a vegetarian, I still remember his Turducken recipe. 

He once said that as a kid, when school was out, they would leave home in the morning and come back only when ball just wasn't visible due to darkness. That is the kind of childhood he had. 

Thanks to him, I was very, very interested in football. And now I can claim that I can pretty comment on the game as it goes, fully expecting that the TV commentary will follow exactly what I had said. Same for baseball too! 

More about Hank some other day...

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