John Madden was Football as much as anyone has ever been anything. As a head coach, he never led a team with a losing record — ending his career with a .750 winning percentage and a Super Bowl ring to boot. He retired after 10 seasons, which is an excellent number to stop at. After all it’s not the 9 Commandments. Madden then moved on to be a football commentator which is what he did for the next 30 years. Another good number to stop at. But he wasn’t just a football commentator. He was, without hyperbole, the greatest anyone has ever been at talking about sports. Not only was he brilliant in his analysis — he was one of the best coaches ever after all — he was also unique in his ability to break down intricate concepts in ways a child could understand. His folksy demeanor, catchy use of “BOOM”, and penchant for drawing on the screen in bright yellow garnered him 16 Emmy awards and turned into an icon.
And if he was an icon before 1989, he was a legend after. The founder of Electronic Arts had the brilliant idea to get Football himself, John Madden, to be the face of their video game. ‘Madden NFL’ was born and immediately became a mega-hit. And just like on Sundays, when you played a game of Madden you had the pleasure of listening to him talk about football. He would even suggest which plays to use.
Just to keep track: Hall of Fame coaching career in just 10 years, Hall of Fame broadcasting career over three decades, and the face, voice, and name of one of the most popular video game franchises of all-time.
Somehow that’s not the amazing part. It’s that he was a good man. The folksy demeanor on television wasn’t an act. By all accounts that is who he was when the cameras were off, too. There’s the incredible story of the time he spent days overnight at a hospital, waiting for a player from an opposing team, Darryl Stingley, to recover from a spinal fracture. He very likely saved Stingley’s life. No cameras, no press…just a good man showing up when he was needed.
Everyone loved John Madden. It’s hard to imagine anyone being universally loved now.
So many of the men who were once thought to be heroes turned out to be anything but; Bill Cosby accused by 60 women of sexual assault, R. Kelly found guilty on eight counts of sex trafficking, Joe Paterno, once legendary head coach of the Penn State football team, fired after the discovery of a sexual abuse scandal involving one of his assistant coaches…even someone as seemingly innocuous as Jared Fogle, the ex-Subway spokesman, had a meteoric fall from grace.
262 celebrities, politicians and CEOs have been accused of sexual misconduct in the last 5 years as a direct result of the #MeToo movement. When someone has an excellent public reputation nowadays, there’s a skepticism…they can’t really be that good a person, can they? And at this point skepticism seems more than healthy.
It’s not just sex crimes, either. The spiritual successor to John Madden, Jon Gruden, resigned earlier this year in disgrace after emails were uncovered in which he used racist, sexist, and homophobic language. Gruden was also a coach turned broadcaster (turned coach again), and like Madden, had a folksy charm to him. That charm was more of an act, it would appear. In private, Gruden was more than comfortable calling the commissioner of the NFL a “f*ggot”, while publicly coaching the NFL’s only openly gay player, Carl Nassib. As fate would have it, Gruden and Madden coached the same team — but only John with an ‘h’ was carried away triumphantly.
Jon Gruden’s status as an NFL head coach with a 10yr/$100m contract led to the media attention and public scrutiny his downfall received. A random PR executive is not going to get that kind of attention for saying something similarly offensive. Except, at a time where social media dominates so much of our lives, they can.
Social media is very good at directing thousands and thousands of eyes to one spot — a fact that works for both positive and negative. As it was once so eloquently put: “Every day there is one main character on Twitter. The goal is to never be it.” These are not the Bill Cosbys and the Jared Fogles of the world. For starters, these people are not famous to begin with — and their transgressions rarely rise to the level of what could be legally classified as crime. Consider this very real headline for a moment: ‘Bean Dad’ John Roderick apologizes for Twitter thread about daughter, racist tweets.
There’s a commonality to these ‘main character’ stories, outside of an initial wrongdoing. The reaction to what has been said is almost always disproportionate to the original sin. Because when that viral spotlight hits, there’s no turning it off. And when it’s on you, hardly anyone will be looking to give you the benefit of the doubt. Instead they’ll be digging through your back catalogue, trying to find something worse.
For video essayist Lindsay Ellis, the crime was a comparison between Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon and Avatar the Last Airbender. A very small number of people found the comparison offensive to some degree, but as is the nature of Twitter, things began to snowball out of control. Suddenly hundreds of tweets rushed in, each responder seemed to want to one-up the last reaction. Then amateur Twitter detectives went back and found older, significantly more offensive material from Ellis. Just like wine, the vintage stuff is the good stuff. It doesn’t matter if the old comments have been deleted and now exist only as screenshots, or if the material in question has been apologized for. Ellis’ name trends and a whole new audience is introduced to both the original tweet and the vintage material. Rinse, repeat.
Lindsay Ellis is widely considered to be skilled at what she does. Her videos are very popular for the type of content she makes — her YouTube channel has 1.2m subscribers and the feedback on the content she produces is overwhelmingly positive…yet if you go on Twitter and do a name search, you would think she was a member of Vox’s list of people accused of sexual misconduct.
This isn’t to say that Ellis has been blameless. Producing a two hour long video essay on the original tweet heightens it to a place it didn’t deserve in the first place. Inadvertently or not, the ‘Mask Off’ response video landed her name back onto the trending tab, back into the discourse battleground. And at that point anything goes, takes get hotter, and what started as a simple ‘oops, that probably wasn't a great tweet’ becomes an all-out ideological war with her name at the center. Ellis’ case is a fascinating example of someone with everything to lose by sharing stream-of-consciousness snippets who cannot stop themselves from doing it. Until she did — because as of December 27th, Lindsay Ellis is now retired. In a lengthy post to her Patreon, Ellis detailed the emotional toll that this year has taken on her. The pain came across as genuine and significant. Being forced to constantly relive your worst moments by people who do not care if you are alive tomorrow sounds like a terrible proposition. It begs the question: why does anyone who stands to lose anything at all use these platforms for anything more than sharing links?
Once again Ellis ended up misstepping with a couple of inappropriate comparisons to her situation, and people were quick to pounce on that aspect of her announcement. The post was lengthy and significantly more than it needed to be. The reaction to it was either more anger OR the most aggressive praise one can get. It felt like a funeral for a President — either they can do no wrong or they’re the scum of the Earth. Maybe that’s why so many content creators are walking away. Human beings aren’t meant to get that much feedback at one time, let alone from a situation as polarized as Lindsay’s.
The absurdity of the whole saga remains staggering. Having your career end over a tweet about Raya and the Last Dragon is like getting killed by a vending machine. No one’s ever thought ‘that’s how I’m going to die, that is what will do me in’. But inevitably that’s how someone goes.
One of the last tweets Lindsay Ellis sent before retiring was a reply to another YouTuber, Tom Scott, insisting that he take down the latest video he made in collaboration with someone she found objectionable. The offender had made a series of transphobic posts in the past, deleted them years ago, and is purported to no longer hold those views. Less than five hours later Ellis posts her retirement message. In it she recounts the pain of being stuck in bad social standing:
“Many will say this is being melodramatic, that my life isn’t over, that there was absolutely nothing stopping me from brushing myself off, building back up goodwill and shutting up and playing the game. And I tried that; in a way I suppose it’s good that I did, because I needed to learn the hard way that that was never going to work. There is no un-fucking this.”
Don’t tweet your heroes.
Joe Buck is a controversial name in sports broadcasting on a good day. Many dislike him for the style of his commentary and any other reason people dislike people. Donald Parham is a wide receiver for the Los Angeles Chargers. On one particular play on December 16th, Parham went to catch the ball before falling and landing on his back. What looked like a routine play turned frightening. Donald managed to land in a way that caused his head to hit the turf. The blow knocked him unconscious and his body seized up. He was taken off the field on a stretcher. Buck saw the video feed of Parham’s arms and hands shaking as he was being moved on the stretcher and said “The last thing we would ever do is speculate about any injury, especially that type but…when you see his arm shaking and his hand shaking on the way out…I will just add this: it is very cold, at least by Los Angeles standards down on the field. Hopefully that’s the issue more than anything else.” Not only did Joe Buck immediately do the thing he said he would never do — the comment made no sense on several levels. It was 54°F in Los Angeles on the 16th.
As dumb as his comment was for someone who gets paid to talk, it’s possible Buck meant to be hopeful, to look for any reason other than the obvious — to refuse to accept that a man’s life could be drastically altered for the worse on what appeared to be a harmless play. The Twitter reaction was swift: “Joe Buck WTF” — “NFL Commentary has hit rock bottom.”
John Madden famously had what were called ‘Madden-isms’, statements that he would make that were so obvious only Madden could think to say them. Statements like, “If you’re going to lose, you lose,” and “If you outscore your opponent, you’re going to win the game”. They are often funny and always harmless — however I couldn’t help but think what a social media era Madden career would have looked like.
The man knew when to quit. He retired in 2008. Facebook just started to overtake Myspace in 2008, Twitter didn’t get popular until 2009, and Instagram wasn’t founded until 2010. 30 years is a long time to be in a broadcast booth. It takes a lot of words to fill that amount of time on air. In this hyper-scrutinizing moment, would a figure like Madden reach the approval rate that he did? I’d like to think that he didn’t say anything that doesn’t fit the affable image I have of him in my head. Fortunately he was from a time when every mistake wasn’t on tape, every verbal fumble wasn’t readily available for replay.
On the Internet, everything is forever. And it feels like all of us are being watched by a faceless void — a void that will record any misstep, no matter how small. The void won’t forget. If you ever have the misfortune of being the main character one day and end up getting swallowed, just pray you get spat out for someone else the next.
The truth is, John Madden was one of a kind. There’s only a handful of people who were as good a coach as he was. And there’s none who were as good a broadcaster. And he was as good a man as he was at either job.
Reality sets in. The world lost an incredible person Tuesday. John Madden, dead at age 85. What a life.
Even if there is another John Madden somewhere out there, can they exist without us tearing them down? He was human after all…but we never got close enough to see his imperfections. Maybe that’s a better way to live. All of us online are constantly bumping into each others’ elbows— maybe it’s time we all take a play from Madden’s playbook and quit while we’re ahead.
