Maybe a little bald spot, but I didn’t have the silver hair or the glasses. “The silver hair, bald spot and the glasses. “I think the silver hair and the bald spot do it,” he said. Madden - whose fashion style was once compared to an unmade bed - doesn’t skip a beat. “Why is it he looks so distinguished, and you never looked that neat on the sidelines?” “There’s Bill Walsh,” Glieber said during a lull in the action, likely trying to coax out some bombast from Madden. There would be more of these barbs throughout the broadcast. Although Madden’s Raiders also played in a baseball-football hybrid stadium with an infield near midfield. We’re chalking this up to Madden giving his former cross-Bay rivals some guff, or their field anyway. Madden, without skipping a beat, says, “That’s a real cloud of dust, with a little cement mixed in.” Saints Pro Bowl running back Chuck Muncie has a nice gain up the middle, with Glieber calling the run “12 yards and a cloud of dust” as Muncie rumbles through the Candlestick infield, retrofitted for football. Bits and pieces that would later mushroom into one of the celebrated voices in sports. There were hints of foreshadowing throughout the broadcast. There wasn’t an All-Madden Team yet in 1979, but it’s as if Glieber had planted the tiniest of seeds for the future in that moment. “He’s your type of guy,” play-by-play announcer Frank Glieber said of 49ers QB Steve DeBerg, after Madden explained DeBerg’s toughness in playing through a broken wrist - in the preseason, no less. Even then, his roots as a coach carried over into the booth. It’s a measured, reserved Madden, feeling his way through the call. A few years later, after rotating with different play-by-play men (including legends such as Dick Stockton and Vin Scully), he'd be paired with sidekick Pat Summerall, forming the signature football announcing tandem of the 1980s and beyond.īut this debut performance is not the same Madden we came to embrace in the 1990s, nor the legend in his twilight of the 2000s. ![]() Clearly, for the Madden completists, this video is easily consumed. It’s great for football junkies and historians. ![]() Before he became an announcing legend, John Madden's debut broadcast for CBS in 1979 shows a different side of the one-time coach who had just retired at age 42 to reluctantly take a job in the booth.
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