The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (12 page)

Yet while the game itself grows ever more complex—in-game playbooks that once came from Cooney's collected assistant-coach scribbles are now based on actual NFL coaching film—finding a happy medium remains more art than science. Online data mining can tell Cummings that Madden gamers threw more than 7 million interceptions while playing as Favre. But stat tracking can't tell him whether those same gamers had a thrilling time doing so.

For Madden NFL '06, EA Tiburon introduced the first major change to in-game passing since Hilleman's button-to-receiver mapping on the Genesis. They called it the passing cone. When gamers dropped back to throw the ball, they had to use an analog stick to steer an on-screen cone—imagine light from a flashlight—toward the receiver they wanted to target. The cone was intended to approximate the real-life difference between great quarterbacks and lousy ones: Peyton Manning's cone was nearly as wide as the entire field, Rex Grossman's as narrow as a laser beam. The system worked: the cone made playing QB hard. Gamers hated it, and it was gone by Madden '09.

"Whenever a feature is that polarizing, it ends up being a failure in our eyes," Frazier said. "We have to develop stuff that is pretty much universally liked."

Can Madden itself remain universally liked? That's the larger question keeping EA Tiburon up at night. The franchise has surfed a pair of rising cultural tides: video games and pro football. But the ocean is shifting. Madden was once a disruptive product, a killer ambulance bowling over competitors. Now it's the status quo, established and entrenched, but possibly vulnerable. To wit: Madden NFL '10 sales were lagging behind during the game's August re-lease, usually a prime selling period. For the first time, EA Sports paid for significant television advertising in November and December. The spots helped, but launching into the teeth of a recession still kept overall sales flat. Still, current sales are less of a concern than future growth.

The game's consumers are loyal and legion, good for 6 to 7 million copies sold, year after year. The same gamers are aging, however, guys in their late twenties who are starting families and running out of the free time needed to set the price of hot dogs in franchise mode. Meanwhile, younger gamers have been weaned on Halo and Call of Duty. First-person shooters—not sports simulations—are their default genre. Industry growth is being driven by simple, social gaming—the runaway sales success of the swing-your-arm, even-Grandma-can-play Nintendo Wii; the reported 80 million users of the cartoony, point-and-click Farmville on Facebook.

Scott Orr helped design the original Genesis Madden. He shepherded the franchise through the 1990s. After leaving EA in 2001, he stopped playing the game. He recently gave it a whirl.

"It was so complicated," he said. "It used to be you didn't have to be a video game expert or a football aficionado to have fun with the game. That's why it exploded and resonated. Three buttons. Everyone could pick up and play. Now, unless you practice and have time to devote to it, you'll get your butt kicked. I suspect that on Friday and Saturday nights, guys that used to play Madden are playing Texas Hold 'em."

Jeremy Strauser started at EA in 1995, working for Orr as a game tester. Today, he's the executive producer for Madden, the man in charge of the franchise. He wears a perpetual look of earnest concern. Nobody loves the game more; nobody at EA Tiburon knows Madden (the man) better. On a shelf in Strauser's office are copies of every Madden game he has worked on, neatly boxed and stacked, tangible points of pride and dread.

"There's a lot for us to live up to in terms of history, expectations, the legacy of the franchise," Strauser said. "We're in our 22nd year. I lose sleep over screwing it up."

The sun dips over a distant San Francisco skyline. Hawkins sits in the San Mateo office of his current company, Digital Chocolate, a mobile phone game maker. The place is mostly empty. Now 56, Hawkins still plays Strat-O-Matic; like Orr, he hardly plays Madden anymore. His memories are fond but tinged with regret. Hawkins left EA in the early 1990s to spearhead 3D0, an ill-fated console maker that became a doomed software house. An icy rift between the company and its founder ensued. Detached from the game, and the company, he created, he sometimes feels like the stepfather of his own children—never more so than a decade ago, when he wasn't invited to a 10th-anniversary Madden party. Mention the old coach, however, and Hawkins smiles.

"John and I have a special shared feeling from what got created there, a mutual appreciation," he said. "It wouldn't have been created as well without the both of us. He could have thrown me under the rug. But he knows what we did."

Every Christmas, a gift arrives at Hawkins's office. A three-pound box of chocolates.
Regards, Virginia Madden.
John's wife.

"At the anniversary party, I heard John kept asking, 'Where's Trip?'" Hawkins said with a sigh. "'Where's Trip?'"

"I used to say, 'Damn it, you can't go for it on fourth down all the time,'" Madden laments. "But nobody in video games wants to give up the ball."

He is sitting at the far end of a marble-top conference table inside his Pleasanton, California, production studio, a short drive from his family home. There's plenty of food, divided into what Madden terms "floaters" (mixed green salad) and "sinkers" (baked ziti, meatballs the size of cue balls). Chowing down are Madden's son, Joe, who runs the studio's soundstage, and a handful of people from EA Tiburon: Strauser, playbook guru Anthony White, and a few others. They're here to discuss the upcoming Madden NFL '11. That is, when the former coach isn't holding court on gap control and overload blitzes.

"Let me ask," Madden said. "When we get into the spread, the quarterback in shotgun, do the linemen get in three-point stances?"

"In some sets," White said. "But largely in two-point."

"They should all be in two-point stances," Madden admonished.

Madden is 74, a grandfather, and retired from broadcasting. Clad in a black tracksuit and a collared, button-down shirt, he seems smaller in person than on television—voice less booming, movements more ginger. A few years ago, EA removed Madden from in-game color commentary duties. (When Strauser broke the news, Madden replied, "I feel that something is being taken away from me.") Sipping from a can of diet cola, his enormous cigars long gone, he remains an advocate for real football, for art imitating life.

White flips open a laptop. Using "all 11" Detroit Lions coaching film, shot from the same perspective as Madden's original pseudo-3-D field, he demonstrates new in-game blocking schemes. Madden nods his approval.

"The quarterback may fake," White said. "But the guards never lie."

Another nod.

"Anyway, running the ball wasn't Detroit's problem," White continued. "It was passing."

"Once they had Daunte Culpepper in [at quarterback], teams just dared him to pass," Strauser interjected. "He used to be so accurate. What happened to that guy?"

"Wasn't he on our cover one year?" White asked.

Everyone laughs. Madden gets serious. He breaks down upcoming rules changes. He brings up concussions, helmet-to-helmet hits and gimmick quarterbacks. A digression on how the Dome Patrolera Saints used to frustrate Bill Walsh's 49ers teams with short linebacker drops becomes a lecture on the obsolescence of the fullback, which then morphs into a short aside on player character.

Who, Strauser asked, are the hardest players to coach?

"Single guys," Madden said. "Because they don't have anyone to report to."

When Madden left the Raiders, he took a job at the University of California, offering a course called "Football for Fans." Three decades later, he's still teaching. In a way, so is his game. Current Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Raheem Morris told game producers that playing Madden has influenced the way he runs his team. Before scoring a game-winning touchdown last season, Denver Broncos receiver Brandon Stokley killed clock by running parallel to the goal line, an unconventional move familiar only to anyone who has ever picked up a control pad. Years ago, Madden wanted his namesake to resemble a television broadcast; by the late 1990s, network producers were flipping the script, deploying skycams and electronic first-down markers, peddling their own brand of hyper-real entertainment. Life imitating art.

Strauser mentions 3-D televisions and the movie
Avatar.
A compatible version of Madden, he said, is already in the works.

Talk turns back to real football. The Super Bowl. Indianapolis versus New Orleans. In the first half, Saints coach Sean Payton went for a touchdown on fourth-and-goal, eschewing a "gimme" field goal. He opened the second half with an onside kick. Madden watched the whole thing from his California studio, incredulous and oddly transfixed. Even now, two months later, the old coach knows exactly what he was seeing.

"I was thinking,
'S
—,'" Madden marveled, "'
this guy is playing a video game!
'"

FROM SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

C
ONSIDER A MOMENT.
Now take that moment—maybe the most significant in sports in 2010—and break it down frame by frame into 100 or so smaller moments. Hit Stop, Rewind, and Play. Now do it again. Follow the traveling puck, the dot that connects four men. Team Canada forwards Sidney Crosby and Jarome Iginla, American goalie Ryan Miller, and referee Bill McCreary. Seated in front of oversized plasmas or small laptops earlier this fall, clicking through a DVD, they watch adjustments, assumptions, decisions, and unadulterated dumb luck. No need for a spoiler alert. The climax never changes. Crosby scores with 12:20 left in overtime. Canada 3, USA 2. Olympic gold. These men know too well what will happen because they were there.

The golden goal in Vancouver is embroidered on the tapestry of hockey, part of a Crosby legacy that will one day veer into legend.

But what if Crosby had not scored to end the most significant game ever played on Canadian ice and an American like, say, Joe Pavelski, who had a credible chance seconds earlier, had?

The same people who still bask in the reflected glow of the goal light would be muttering about a hockey messiah who, other than a round-robin shootout winner, had experienced a middling Olympics.

Canadians would be lining their sackcloth with fur in anticipation of winter.

Hockey in the U.S. might have undergone a dramatic updraft that likely would have made Miller a breakout star, boosted interest among hockey agnostics in NHL cities such as Atlanta and Columbus, and maybe even prodded owners of the 24 American-based teams to look past their wallets and embrace participation in Sochi 2014 so Team USA could properly defend its gold medal.

"If we'd lost to the U.S.," Iginla says, his eyes dancing, "they'd've probably made another
Miracle
movie."

The four men met separately with
Sports Illustrated
and talked through the most memorable goal scored by a Canadian since 1972 and the most deflating one scored against the U.S. since, well, ever. Viewed through the prism of personal experience they deconstructed the kaleidoscopic twists of those last eight seconds, offering explanation but not excuse, hammering happenstance into narrative. As their tales eddied and flowed, it was clear they were not simply reliving how four men came to be in one quadrant of Olympic ice on the last day of February—but telling a universal story of how the regimented and the random blend to make history.

Crosby barrels into the high slot with the puck on his stick, trying to barge past defensemen Brian Rafalski and Ryan Suter. Their teammates, forwards Zach Parise and Jamie Langenbrunner, apply backside pressure, swallowing Crosby in a deep blue sea of U.S. and A. as the puck skitters ahead toward the American net. He is in jail. Crosby might be Superman, but unless he leaps defensemen in a single bound, his options are limited. The Americans are in control, which appeals to the man on the ice who most craves it.

Miller is a problem solver who likes to muse about the position he has played since age eight; he recognizes the egocentricity innate to goaltenders, wonders if the controlling nature of a goalie has psychosocial implications for a team. This is how he thinks. Sometimes this is how he talks. In any case he derives visceral pleasure from the challenge of denying shooters: Sid the Kid vs. Ryan the Id. During Miller's three years at Michigan State he would drop in at the basketball offices to visit Tom Izzo, not to have the coach help him think outside the box but to expand that box. Izzo, NCAA champion, and Miller, Hobey Baker winner, often would talk about how to meet expectations.

Three hundred fifty-four minutes and 59 seconds into his Olympic tournament, Miller has exceeded expectations. Those in the States who watch hockey once every four years reflexively attach themselves to goalies (Jim Craig in 1980, even Ray LeBlanc during a surprising run to the medal round in 1992) because it is the black-and-white position in a game with so many moving parts. The goalie stops the puck. Or he doesn't. Simple. And Miller has stopped it 138 times on 145 shots at the instant the puck dribbles toward him. In the past 13 days a goalie who plays in the modest market of Buffalo has become a quasi-celebrity, one whose back story—he is dating an actress, he owns a chic clothing store in East Lansing—has become front-page material. He is accustomed to hockey being a cult sport to which people pay attention at their convenience, but now his game is the main attraction at the five-ring circus. The phrase Miller-cle on Ice is tweeted and retweeted. Four years after being left off the Olympic team because of a broken thumb, Miller is at the zenith of the position. The thing making him uneasy is having all the attention lavished on him rather than on his U.S. teammates.

Although Rafalski is deep into his shift, Miller, at the edge of his crease, backhands the loose puck toward the corner to his right.

McCreary is anticipating that Miller will freeze the puck—he guesses Rafalski is tired—and prepares to blow a quick whistle but then sees the goalie send the puck to the corner. Legs churning, Crosby pursues it as Suter and Rafalski, whose helmet has been knocked askew, sort out who will chase him and the play. Within one second, a benign one-on-four morphs into a one-on-one in the corner.