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Madden required no further illustration of how fragile the pro player truly is, but in 1978, his final season, he absorbed a terrible one. In an exhibition game at Oakland, Safety Jack Tatum, the Raiders' most notorious hitter, collided with New England Receiver Darryl Stingley, leaving Stingley permanently paralyzed. Madden donned a surgical smock to stay with Stingley in the hospital that night and opened his home to the injured man's family. But, with a shrug, Madden minimizes the accident's part in his decision to quit coaching. He prefers to repeat a wistful anecdote about how he thought his 16- year-old son was still only twelve. "It was just time to go," Madden says. "There are only about ten years of emotional and physical shocks in your locker. I said I'd never ride another airplane, and I'd never coach another football team, and I never will."
To be truthful, he sympathized almost equally with Tatum, who was renowned and then reviled for his aggressiveness. Madden is able to wince at football now and then, but he is unable to blame the sport significantly: he loves it too well. Though he had planned to loaf for at least a year after stepping down as the Raiders' coach, he succumbed to CBS's blandishments when the 1979 season came near. "Every year from the age of ten, I had a season. Through high school, college and the pros, over 30 of them. With CBS, I still had a season. I was still part of it. I thought, 'Here's the answer.' "
He took to his preparation like Van Brocklin. "Studying films, I started out thinking what I would do if I were still the coach; I've stopped that." But his fascination with strategy is unending. "Getting ready gives me an excuse to be nosy, to go out to practice and see what's going on. If I say a guy's a good player, I don't want to have read that or been told that. I want to know it."
Madden is able to let the audience know it too. His commentary is a whir of windmilling arms and an exuberant bark of POW!, WHAM! and ZAP! as the linemen collide. The fans have come to recognize the All-Madden players by their grimier shirts and more human qualities. They know Madden favors real grass over artificial turf and mud over dirt. From last Thanksgiving's broadcast: "That's kind of the way the game should be played. I mean -- Thanksgiving Day, the fireplace, the turkey, football players out there playing in the snow. Wet, mud, stuff like that, not carpet."
In the booth, Madden has a fresh eye and a sense of mischief, but in between all the sound effects, he tells you something you didn't know. "When Reagan got shot, they had this doctor on TV, and he explained the surgical procedure with a diagram. This thing goes in here, that thing goes in there. The blood . . . boom, bam. I thought, 'Yeah, I get it. I understand.' You can't simplify complicated things, but you can make them understandable."
Back at Hancock J.C., before he could be appointed football coach, he had to be hired as a phys-ed teacher. And he sees himself as a teacher again. One with a master's in education, earned at Cal Poly in 1961.
"You know what I'd really like to do? Teach women football. Every woman who ever asked me about the game did it for one of three reasons: her ( boyfriend, her husband or her son. I'd like her to enjoy it for herself."