On the road again . . .
For the 13th consecutive Thanksgiving, John Madden will spend the holiday with Pat Summerall and the rest of the CBS crew at a pro football game. Be it the Bears and Lions-as it is Thursday-or the Eagles and Cowboys, Madden enjoys what he calls the start of “football’s fun time.”
As for missing what in most families is a traditional day to be together, well, “it’s something I’ve always done,” says Madden. “It goes all the way back to high school, when we always played our last game of the season on Thanksgiving Day. And when I coached, we always coached on Thanksgiving; it was just another day. Thanksgiving has never been one of those traditional things I’ve been home for.
“And then in television when you work for a network, there’s only one team that works on Thanksgiving Day. And I always want to be on that team. Then it gets to be a tradition of its own.”
Traditions like inviting the game officials to his custom-made bus for dinner Wednesday night and the All-Thanksgiving Day Award (a turkey leg to the best player-or players-on that day’s CBS telecast).
“I started that five years ago,” Madden says. “We never give any `Players of the Game.’ But we were doing this game and Reggie White was playing so well, I said he ought to get a turkey leg. So we gave him a turkey leg. That’s how it started. Sometimes you’ve got more than one guy, so you have to have more than one leg available. So you get more legs. And sometimes you’ve got to get more turkeys because you give them the whole thing. But you always have to save one (leg) because we always have one on the bus after the game. If you give the legs and everything away, you end up eating a bologna sandwich.”
And the turkeys, brought by Summerall, are the smoked variety, which makes for “really good eating,” says Madden.
The CBS crew, which also includes producer Bob Stenner and director Sandy Grossman, began inviting the game officials “because they’re on the road, too,” says Madden. “So we have this whole traditional thing the night before. There’s even a poker game that goes with it. One of the technicians, Charlie Carlucci, always gives a speech and involves everyone in it.”
Another Madden “tradition” is the scheduling of three telecasts in eight days. For instance, this week he goes from Philadelphia on Sunday to Pontiac, Mich., on Thursday and then to Minneapolis next Sunday. Sometimes, though, he has been forced to race from a Thanksgiving Day game in Pontiac or Dallas to a Sunday contest on the West Coast.
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“Those are the kind of challenges that are fun,” he says. “This year is an easy one. Even though I don’t fly, I never asked for any special favors. I’ve never run into problems. If I have to go to the West Coast, it’s just a longer trip. If there’s bad weather, we just drop down to a more southern interstate.”
So Madden keeps collecting his own Thanksgiving traditions as the years and miles roll by.
“That never gets old,” he says. “It’s a challenge and it’s fun. In the season, that’s the first real fun thing that we do. The good times of football start at Thanksgiving.”
Good thinking: Thursday’s game will be only Madden’s second look at the Bears. He worked the season opener against the Giants. And he misses them. “Some of the teams that have been good,” he says, “you kind of miss them when they’re not good. (But) the Bears are going to be good because Dave Wannstedt’s going to make them good.”
Set, on two: After an absence of several years, Bears exhibition games are returning to WBBM-Ch. 2. The CBS affiliate and the team signed a three-year agreement Friday that gives WBBM the rights to those preseason games not aired by the networks. It also includes “The Dave Wannstedt Show,” which will air Sunday mornings starting next season.
Everything’s rosy: ESPN has made it official: It will carry the Wisconsin-Michigan State football game with the Rose Bowl berth on the line from Tokyo Dec. 4. Whether it will be live or on some kind of tape delay has yet to be determined. . . . Also, ESPN airs the now-meaningful West Virginia-Boston College game at 3 p.m. Friday.
Random thoughts: Why did NBC’s “NFL Live” have yet another Lou Holtz interview and not one with BC coach Tom Coughlin? . . . Isn’t it kind of late for ex-NFL boss Pete (“I wish I hadn’t done it”) Rozelle to apologize for playing games on the weekend of the Kennedy assassination on CBS’ “NFL Today?” . . . And didn’t ex-Redskins coach Joe Gibbs sound more like a talk-show host on the Nashville Network than a network football analyst for NBC?