Cal Sports Report

John Madden Taught a Class at Cal -- Boom, It's True

He also was the Raiders coach in a significant NFL game played at Cal's stadium. Ex-Golden Bears great Joe Kapp is part of the Madden story too

Jake Curtis

John Madden Taught a Class at Cal -- Boom, It's True
John Madden Taught a Class at Cal -- Boom, It's True /

Did you ever wonder how John Madden learned to operate a Telestrator so efficiently, skillfully manipulating X’s and O’s while integrating a well placed “Boom” or Doink” to teach TV viewers the subtleties of pro football?

Well, folks, he learned it at Cal. Yep, John Madden, who died Tuesday at the age of 85, was an instructor at UC Berkeley at one time.

It happened in 1979, soon after Madden had quit as head coach of the Oakland Raiders. He was hired by Cal to teach an extension course called “Man to Man Football.”

That is where he started diagramming plays on the blackboard to teach college students about football.

Bryan Curtis of The Ringer, wrote this about the Madden class:

Professor Madden stood in front of a board that was like the Telestrator he later used on TV. Madden drew X’s and O’s and carefully studied his students’ faces. “I wanted to see at what point I lost ’em,” he told me years later. Madden was trying to find the most simple way to explain a complex game. He was converting passive football fans into smart fans. For the next 30 years, Madden performed the same trick on TV every week.

He later did the same thing as perhaps the most famous TV football analyst of alltime, as Curtis noted:

The CBS Chalkboard (a precursor to the Telestrator) was developed so Madden could draw a play on the screen, just as he had at Berkeley. When a running back broke free for a long touchdown, Madden demanded viewers watch a replay of a key block so they could understand how the back got loose. He once told a director: “You ever show me a replay with just a guy running with the ball in his hand, you can expect silence.”

Two other elements of Madden’s career connect with Cal.

First is the fact that former Cal football star and head coach Joe Kapp was offered the EA NFL Football video game naming rights before Madden was. That’s according to Trip Hawkins, the founder of video game maker Electronic Arts (EA), as reported in an ESPN.com story

[First-choice Joe] Montana was out. Already had an endorsement deal with video game console maker Atari. Also out was Cal football coach Joe Kapp, Hawkins' second choice, who wanted royalties.

Madden was the third choice. So if Kapp had not insisted on royalties we would be playing the Kapp NFL Football video game instead of Madden NFL Football.

One other Madden connection to Cal:

On Sept. 23, 1973, the Oakland Raiders, coached by Madden, ended the 18-game winning streak of the Don Shula-coached Miami Dolphins in a game played at Cal’s Memorial Stadium.

A crowd of 74,121 showed up to watch the Raiders pull off a 12-7 win in the only NFL regular-season or playoff game ever played at the Berkeley Stadium.

The New York Times explains why this game was played in Berkeley:

The game was played at the University of California's Memorial Stadium instead of the Oakland Coliseum, home field of the Raiders, because of a schedule conflict with the baseball.

Yes, the Oakland Coliseum was also the home stadium for the Oakland A’s in 1973, but here’s where the story gets a little murky. The A’s did play a game on Sunday, Sept. 23, 1973, and beat the Chicago White Sox 10-5. But record books indicate that game was played in Chicago.

The A’s played a home game the next day, Sept. 24, so perhaps the A’s did not want the Raiders to tear up the field on Sunday, making it unplayable for baseball on Monday.

We need John Madden to explain what happened – perhaps with a Telestrator and a “Boom” or a “Bam.”

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Cover photo by Stan Szeto, USA TODAY Sports

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Jake Curtis
JAKE CURTIS

Jake Curtis worked in the San Francisco Chronicle sports department for 27 years, covering virtually every sport, including numerous Final Fours, several college football national championship games, an NBA Finals, world championship boxing matches and a World Cup. He was a Cal beat writer for many of those years, and won awards for his feature stories.

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