John Madden – a synonym for football and Thanksgiving

Thursday is Thanksgiving in the USA, the most American of all holidays, which focuses on three things in the States: family, lots of food and football. One person who stands for the NFL and Thanksgiving like no other is the legendary John Madden, who has shaped the NFL in a variety of roles for decades and is now being honored by the league in a special way on this day.

The name John Madden is certainly still familiar to countless football fans today. The football icon, who died in December 2021, is still the namesake of the popular football video game “Madden NFL”. But he was so much more. He was a highly successful head coach of the Oakland Raiders in the 1970s, leading the team to seven AFC Championship Game appearances in ten years and winning Super Bowl XI.

Madden went on to be the NFL’s most colorful figure on television broadcasts on ultimately all four major networks for more than three decades. He was the TV expert. He managed to bring this complex game of American football closer to a wide audience in the most trivial and clear way.

He explained the sport with almost childlike enthusiasm and created excitement in front of the screens. With his “Booms”, “Zooms” and “Zaggs” he accompanied the action on the pitch and made the telestrator – the TV tool that is used everywhere today for drawing on the screen, for example to illustrate moves – socially acceptable, even if his drawings sometimes appeared chaotic.

But what he probably enjoyed most was the annual Thanksgiving broadcast from Detroit or Dallas. Madden loved football and good food. Accordingly, he was always in a particularly good mood, especially at Thanksgiving.

But he didn’t just stop at the traditional turkey. It was Madden who introduced the so-called “Turducken” to the general public. The what? “It’s a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck stuffed into a deboned turkey,” as he once explained during a football broadcast, complete with telestrator explanation of how to cut open the construct.

NFL: Thanksgiving is John Madden’s holiday

“There is no place I would rather be today on Thanksgiving than right here at a football game,” Madden once emphasized his love for this holiday and thus became synonymous with it in the NFL. It was also Madden who created a special award for the best player in the game he broadcast. The “Galloping Gobbler Award” (Gobbler is a synonym for the turkey) was created in 1989 and has had many incarnations. Initially it was called the “Turkey Leg Award”, but it was always a trophy that was coveted by the participating players.

The NFL now took these traditions as an opportunity to particularly honor John Madden, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2006. At all three Thanksgiving Games, players will wear a patch with a Madden logo on their jerseys. In addition, the coin for the toss will also have the Madden logo on one side, while the other side will feature a six-legged turducken. The logo will also be visible in the stadiums and TV channels will broadcast tributes to it.

Madden shaped the NFL in a variety of ways over five decades as a coach, as a television pundit and even as the face and creator of a video game – he consulted on the game’s design. In addition, since his retirement, he has continued to work closely with the NFL, NFL Films and the Rules Committee as a behind-the-scenes expert, helping to improve the game in the long term.

“John Madden was football,” as Commissioner Roger Goodell perfectly described it after his death. Madden was football, and Thanksgiving is the day of the year when we celebrate the legacy of this unique man.