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John Madden Spoke To Me
A lesson in creating your own destiny, from the NFL video game guy
For the entirety of my adulthood, I only knew John Madden as the guy who lent his name to both a video game and a curse. His coaching career ended years before I was even born, and I have no memory of his beer commercials. It wasn’t until his death that I realized he’d been with me in one of the most pivotal moments of my teenage years.
Madden believed that the game of football was for everybody, women included. Indeed, the documentary “All Madden” shows him teaching a football course at UC Berkeley in 1979 to what appears to be a majority-female audience. In such a football-obsessed metropolis as Philadelphia, I too realized the critical urgency of learning the game in order to carry on an adult conversation. With no one in my life who agreed that this was important for a teenage girl, I recruited a gridiron-savvy friend to watch an Eagles game with me and explain all the terminology as the game progressed. At one point, she (yes, she — Madden would have been proud) walked away, returned, and asked what had happened in her absence. I quickly rattled off which down we were on and how many yards to go. The obsession had begun.
In the fall of my junior year, I would spend the majority of Sundays in my basement, anxiously bouncing on an exercise…