John Madden, Dead, At Age 85 -- Details Pending -- December 28, 2021

Link here.

He was a football savant—named head coach of the Oakland Raiders at age 32, he won a Super Bowl in the 1976 season, and didn’t have a losing year in a full decade on the sideline. On TV, he never talked down to his audience. Football is a complex sport, often described through stiff wartime lingo, but Madden cut through the bombast and made it sound like backyard fun, using newfangled Telestrator technology to diagram schemes as if he was sketching them in the sand. 

He was always gently selling—the playmaking, the atmospherics, the coaches, the stars, and especially the lesser-known fellows on the line, because he’d been one of those. Madden loved hirsute centers, rumply ends and roly-poly nose tackles, and on any given Sunday, he’d make household names out of them, too. He began selecting an All-Madden Team, full of his kind of guys, tough men who played with broken thumbs and ate bolt screws for breakfast. 

He was both a critical phenomenon and a relentless populist. Madden on TV spoke like he was sitting next to you in an airport bar, except if you knew anything about Madden, you knew he’d never be in the airport. He always took the train, then a customized bus—a choice owing to claustrophobia and a bad episode on a flight while with the Raiders.