Sports

About time Madden sees violence in video game

BOOMER ESIASON
Sees no evil.

In these very late-to-arrive concussion-sensitive times, the come-latelys in all sports are starting to collide with the phonies.

Though the media became conditioned to claim that he was TV’s best NFL analyst of all time, John Madden, through four networks, chiseled for himself an inside reputation as a money-mad, me-firster.

So it was with a crooked grin last Sunday that I read in the New York Times that the latest annual edition of Madden’s wildly popular and profitable video game, “Madden NFL 12,” for 2012, would be cleaned up to include, at Madden’s altruistic insistence, concussion and head-shot-attentive moving images and rules.

“Concussions are such a big thing, it has to be a big thing in the video game,” Madden told the Times. “It starts with young kids — they start in video games. I think the osmosis is if you get a concussion, that’s a serious thing and you shouldn’t play. Or leading with the head; that you want to eliminate.

“We want that message to be strong.”

Excuse me a moment, while I retch.

Madden’s video game, year after year and for more than 20 years — the first edition was in 1988 — has included excessively, remorselessly and even gleefully brutal football action. Annually, the newest, worsened addition of what Madden now claims “you want to eliminate” was exploited to serve as the game’s hot new selling points.

And as long as Madden is now worried about impressionable kids, his games annually included the latest in non-violent unsportsmanlike conduct, too.

In the early 1990s, a new edition of Madden NFL included this come-on, right on the packaging: “Sack the QB! Send him to the hospital!”

In the game, if the quarterback were sacked a certain way, he would stay down until a computerized ambulance appeared on the field. And if the game’s operators didn’t remove their football players from the path of the ambulance, that ambulance would crush those players.

I called Madden about this. He wasn’t much in the mood to speak about it, but conceded that some content was extreme and could promote a twisted view of the sport in kids. “But what do you want me to do, pull them off the store shelves?”

I suggested he might make sure it doesn’t happen again. Make sure the next version promotes football, not garbage. Cut kids a break. The game, after all, has his name attached to it. It has to meet with his final approval, right?

Besides, how can he criticize excessive and exacerbating misconduct and illegal, dangerous hits on televised games while selling them in “Madden” games?

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. We left it at that.

Well, we saw what he could do. Nothing.

The games grew even more noxious while Madden, perhaps not coincidentally, in his role as a CBS (then FOX, then ABC/ESPN, then NBC) analyst, weekly ignored nearly every demonstration of needless brutality and self-smitten conduct that occurred in real games.

Madden, who off the air claimed to dislike showboating and taunting, had the forum and clout to help rid the game of the bad acts that began to permeate both NFL games and his video games. But the only folks he regularly criticized on the air were NFL game officials, although he often didn’t know the rules.

Now, nearly 25 years after his first video game, he has nobly decided to do what he should have insisted upon when he first put his name to the game and pocketed his first dime from it, nearly 25 years ago. What a guy!

Boomer takes pass on criticizing Garden

Not that we’re surprised, but now that WFAN’s “Boomer & Carton” show is simulcast on MSG, Boomer Esiason — “Weekday Boomer” — is extra nice and cautious when addressing the Garden.

Tuesday, the guest was comedian/actor Jay Mohr, who said he attended the previous night’s Rangers game in the Garden.

“It is a drunken house of people,” he said with emphasis.

Weekday Boomer quickly piped, “That’s great!”

Not when you have your wife with you, Mohr replied. Mohr then riffed about the vulgar incivility of the crowd.

Esiason then amended his statement to claim that all is civil where he sits at Rangers games.

Though MSG’s website carried a collection of taped interviews conducted on the “Boomer & Carton” show, last week, that chat with Mohr somehow didn’t make the cut.

Meanwhile, where would Mohr’s career be without drunken houses of people?

Yes, Keith, time sure flies by

If ever Keith Hernandez sounded genuinely wistful on the air, it was Wednesday from Philadelphia on SNY, when he noted — with self-amazement — that he was now retired from baseball for more than 20 years.

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How’d ya like to reach much too deep to take your kid, a Dwight Howard/Magic fan, to a game, and that’s the day or night that Howard, for a second time, has to sit out, sent to his room for misbehaving, for accumulating too many technical fouls?

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“J&R is now proud to be the official consumer electronics retailer of the New York Yankees.” Hmmm, didn’t know that spot was open.

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Would Jim Dolan Enterprises exploit Christmas to extort an eight-month interest-free, loan? You betchya! Ticket sales to the “Christmas Spectacular” at Radio City began last week! Don’t be shut out!

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What a shame that SNY’s Gary Cohen, on drives to deep right in Citi Field, where a Modell’s sign hangs, has to say, “It’s back toward the ‘Mo Zone!’ ”

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If Michael Kay and Al Leiter thought that folks tuned in to Friday’s Yankees-Red Sox game on YES to hear Leiter spend three-plus hours talk pitching — often in great detail — well, I think they were wrong.

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Reader T.J. last week read that tickets were available to the Mets’ home opener Friday.

So he went to Mets.com to read this offer: Two seats, $325 per, plus $39 in order fees, a total of $689. “What a steal,” wrote T.J. “I quit.”

Brings to mind an old gag: Kangaroo walks into a bar, orders a beer. “That’ll be 10 bucks,” says the barkeep. “Say,” the barkeep continues, “we don’t get many kangaroos in here.

“Well, at these prices,” says the kangaroo, “I can see why.”