John Madden is gone, but his family is keeping his legacy alive as an NFL player

PLEASANTON, Calif.-

The best seat in the house is still reserved for John Madden.

His throne is fully reclined and covered with a Raiders fleece blanket. He sits directly in front of a 20-foot LED wall, a studio of sensory overload that shows every NFL broadcast at once.

When the Hall of Fame coach retired from the television booth in 2009, he watched games from his personal shrine until his death in 2021. eye – a family-run production studio in a quiet business park.

He sits on that bench or table at the back of the dark, cavernous room where his family now holds a weekly shrine in his honor. There is a cup of coffee, a glass of orange juice and a freshly baked apple, all of which will go undisturbed during the day.

Madden is gone now, but his family and several friends still gather every Sunday to watch the games on a futuristic video board that rivals a modern stadium.

In the same building is his office, filled with mementos from his years as the Oakland Raiders’ Super Bowl coach, a distinguished career as a broadcaster and decades as the name of a multimillion-dollar video game.

“This is where he ran his business, but every Sunday it was our home,” his son Joe said. “It wasn’t an office anymore.”

Long after his retirement from broadcasting, Madden continued to influence the NFL. He was a special assistant to Commissioner Roger Goodell and led a league staff that made sure the game was as safe as possible.

“He volunteered to be Roger’s football player,” said his son Mike Madden. “He said, ‘You guys have your businesses.’ You’ve got your legal guys and your stadium guys. I want to be the guy that makes sure football stays football.”

“I would call Roger during Sunday games from here. ‘Do you see what’s going on in Cincinnati?’ I wanted to make sure football didn’t get watered down or changed.”

In an email to The Times on Sunday, Goodell wrote of Madden: “As a fan, he was fantastic. As a coach, he was incredible. I was fortunate to have his vision, experience and support during my years as commissioner.”

Madden didn’t just turn to Goodell during games. He also kept in touch with his friend Andy Reid, coach of the Philadelphia Eagles and later the Kansas City Chiefs.

“He would call Andy in the middle of the game,” said Madden’s widow, Virginia. “I said you can’t do that. He said, ‘Well, you don’t have to answer her.’ He can call her or text her after the game. He did that a couple of times. Sometimes Andy would talk to him. Andy was his friend. She really loved Andy.”

That was the kind of respect Madden inspired, especially from those who knew him as little more than a commentator who described games in cartoonish tones.

“It probably surprised people how smart he was,” Mike Madden said. “He was a coach and a teacher. These were the common threads. eye and blow and doand turducken and six-legged turkeys, which was kind of a trick created by some clever guy.

“We love (comedian and impressionist) Frank Caliendo and his imitators, but he’s not that guy. Dad was a very smart guy who had that coaching mentality in everything he did. It was, you have to prepare, you have to explain, you have to prepare those around you, then you have to execute. This was a recurring theme.”

The Sunday routine was, and still is, an established process. An integrated video screen was recently installed, but the screen Madden used was a movie theater-sized screen placed in the middle with four flat screens on either side. He would rank the games by importance and arrange them on the screens accordingly. If the moment was worth it, he would move the game to the big screen in the middle.

This on-screen juggling act was controlled by a “switcher,” a human remote control who acted as a DJ. Bobby Mattos has been doing this for the past nine years.

“It wasn’t an advertisement, it wasn’t an offense for entertainment,” Matthews said of Madden’s instructions. “If someone was hurt, I wanted to see it. I wanted to know if there was a rule, a penalty or a technique that could eliminate this problem from the game.”

Mattos still handles the switching functions, but now he does it wirelessly with a tablet, and it’s Virginia who decides at the start of the day which game will appear on which screen.

There is a printed “menu” for visitors that lists which games will be played at which venues and the broadcast crews for those games.

“Coach Madden sometimes gets text messages from broadcasters and they want to know what screen they’re on,” Mattos said. “He’d say, ‘You’re on hole 1.’ It was pretty cool. They wanted to be on top.”

It’s not as if the friends invited to watch games in the studio are a collection of Hall of Famers or even people with deep connections. For example, among the people watching Sunday were a handyman who works on the family property, two of Mike’s high school friends, a retired basketball coach from a local high school and longtime endocrinologist John Madden.

Two of John Madden’s grandsons were also there: Joe’s son Sam, who helped create the massive video screen, and Mike’s son Jack, who recently graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a degree in food science and is now starting graduate school.

Although not a big football fan, Jack joined his grandfather in preparing meals. Madden was just as particular about that as he was about football.

“We started with the strategy of just going to the buffet,” Jack said. “I was giving him a scouting report on what the best things were.”

This tradition continues for viewing sessions. Sunday’s meal included steak sandwiches, spaghetti, and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.

“When Dad left his radio shows and commissioning duties, that was all he had,” Mike said. “So he had all this bandwidth and brain power, and he applied himself to this. That’s a lot of brain power for food and games.”

Family or friends, the Maddens make no difference.

“Some families have lunch,” Mattos said. “It’s a big family dinner.”