A coach takes his leave

 John Madden's burden was always that he was too good at his second act. It made people forget how good he was at his first act.

And that was the act that mattered most to him.

Madden, who died suddenly Tuesday morning at 85, won 16 Emmys as a broadcaster and got his name on a video game that launched an entire genre, but before all that, and mainly, he was a football coach. If you cut him, he bled Xs and Os. If you gave him access to a telestrator, he ...

Well. We all know what he did with that.

He became famous for the way he drew all over your TV screen like a toddler coloring outside the lines. If much of the world knew him as that guy, and the guy who traveled everywhere on a bus because he hated to fly, and the guy who said "Boom!" all the time with unrestrained zeal, it was the football coach in him who informed all that.

Casual observers of the Madden phenomenon might be shocked to learn he wasn't just a novelty act as a coach. In 10 years prowling the Oakland Raiders sideline, his teams won 103 games and a Super Bowl and played in seven AFC title games. His .759 winning percentage remains the best in NFL history among coaches with at least 100 games -- better than Lombardi, better than Landry, better than Shula or Noll or Walsh or Belichick.

The youngest coach in NFL history when Al Davis handed him the reins at the age of 32, Madden was just 42 when he turned in his clipboard. It left him with a whole pile of life still to live, and consequently his broadcasting career lasted three times longer than his coaching career.

So that's how the world came to know him, mainly. He was the cheerful rumpled man who explained the game in layman's terms, and who sold you beer and food and power tools on the tube, and who became, well, a celebrity.

He lived in Gilda Radner's old apartment in New York, and befriended Yoko Ono and her son, Sean Lennon, and made an NFL fan out of Elton John. 

And yet, that's not why the flags aren't at half-staff at the Pro Football Hall of Fame today.  Nor is it why all those old Raiders are mourning today.

They're mourning because John Madden was their Hall of Fame coach, and they loved him long before the rest us did. And that's his most enduring legacy.