PS-OCT13-BOOKS1-MADDEN

When John Madden began calling his local San Francisco radio station in 1997, it signaled the start of nearly 20 years of conversations between the football legend and morning-show host Stan Bunger, as the presenter writes in “Mornings With Madden: My Radio Life with an American Legend’ (Triumph Books, out Tuesday).What made the discussions on KCBS all the more remarkable was not only that Madden did it five days a week, at 8.15 a.m.sharp, but that it came at a time when the Super Bowl-winning coach was at the peak of his glittering broadcasting career and, thanks to the video game that bore his name, was making more money each year than any NFL player.“You’d have to have missed about 40 years of American culture to not know who John Madden was,” Bunger writes.“John Madden was a Big Damned Deal, but not too big to show up every day, ready to shine on local radio.”Simply put, Madden is synonymous with football. Not only was he the television face and voice of the nation’s most popular sport, broadcasting with CBS, Fox, NBC and on ABC’s “Monday Night Football” from 1979 to 2009, his name also adorned the best-selling sports video game, and he was the man who led the Oakland Raiders to Super Bowl victory in 1977 and had the highest career winning percentage of any NFL coach.‘Mornings With Madden’ grew out of the huge sense of loss Stan Bunger felt when Madden passed away in December 2021, a loss also felt by friends, family, colleagues and millions of fans across the United States.

“The sense of duty came from my belief that this story needed to be told,” adds Bunger, “and there really no one other than me to tell it.”However, Bunger is keen to point out that his book isn’t another biography or ghost-written memoir.“Here’s what it is: the inside story of an underreported part of the life of a remarkable man,” he writes. For Madden, their chats were an opportunity to engage with his hometown radio station.

“[They were...