They Taught America to Watch Football

[ed. Steve Sabol (October 2, 1942 – September 18, 2012)]

In the summer of 1968, Steve Sabol went on the road. He was driving a beat-up old car with the windows open. From Pennsylvania to Ohio to Indiana, the towns drifted by, the neon vacancy signs outside the motels, the taverns, the fields where the high-school football teams played. Steve was 26, strong as a horse, his hair too long for the Podunk provinces. He had a reel-to-reel projector in the backseat, the kind every randy best man used to drag to stag parties in the 1950s. Each night, he set up in another wood-paneled room where, after the Kiwanians or Rotarians or Boy Scouts had finished their business, he showed his movie. He was stumping like a politician, building an audience for a film he’d made guerrilla-style, with nothing but a few thousand dollars and a vision. He wanted to show football as it might have been shown by the old Hollywood directors: the game as directed by John Ford.

They Call It Pro Football was produced by NFL Films, a small company Steve’s father, Ed, had founded as Blair Productions in 1962. After Steve had first shown it in New York several months earlier, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle shook his hand and said, “That’s not a highlight film, it’s a real movie.” But none of the TV networks were interested, so Steve had to find his viewers, one screening at a time, amassing an audience that would eventually be among the most prized in the marketplace. But even in the beginning, when there was just this determined kid and a weird movie that could not find a distributor, all the elements were there: speed, color, narrative. The first line of They Call It Pro Football sets the tone: “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” A primer on the game itself, with passages dedicated to “the linemen,” “the quarterbacks,” and so on, the movie is a collection of dramatic images, explained, glorified, set to music. It came to define the aesthetic of modern, hyper-­vivid sports coverage, taking viewers inside the huddle, letting them hear the collisions and understand the coaches’ tactics. It turned every game into Waterloo and every player into an epic hero. It taught America how to watch football.

The bloody fingers of the lineman, the clouds of breath on the cold, clear day, the chewed-up turf, Gale Sayers pulling away from the last defender like a driver who had discovered a seventh gear (Sayers in the film: “Sixteen inches of daylight, that’s all I need”), the uncertain wobble of a mid-flight football—­and always the heroic voice-over: “Special men in a special game. A uniquely American game with a history as rich and as rugged as the country in which it was born.” It was all there, crystallized, perfected. If Steve showed it to kids on a Friday, they’d be in their yards early the next morning, the narrator’s voice running through their heads as the receiver ran the hook-and-ladder: “His range carries him into heavy traffic, or through the shifting dangers of a broken field … Men on the run, measuring their survival by the twist of a shoulder.”

That voice, the NFL Films voice—Steve calls it “the voice of God”—would become more than a sports narrator: for those of us who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, it remains the voice in our heads, lending drama to even the most mundane decisions (“Cohen knew the tortilla chips were old, possibly stale, but hunger is a beast that first devours the mind of a man”). For many years, that voice belonged to John Facenda, a Philadelphia broadcaster, though others have filled the role as well. In 1969, for instance, Burt Lancaster narrated Big Game America—he took the gig in return for a football signed by Johnny Unitas—because, as I said, Steve wanted to show the game as it would’ve been shown by Hollywood.

They Call It Pro Football finally made it to television in 1969. It was shown early in the morning, late at night. Junk time. Garbage hour. Just ask Fidel Castro: all revolutions begin in the sticks.

NFL Films is located in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia. The sprawling complex and the parking lot, with its gleaming rows of Mercedes and Saabs, speak of the success of They Call It Pro Football and the hundreds of movies and millions of miles of footage that have followed. The company has produced some 10,000 features since 1964, and supplies hundreds of hours of content a year to HBO, ESPN, ABC, Fox, CBS, and Showtime, including the highlights played during halftime and the features for the Sunday pregame shows. NFL Films generates 25 percent of all content for the NFL Network, including award-winning shows such as Hard Knocks and America’s Game. In 2004, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave Steve and his father, Ed, its Lifetime Achievement Emmy—one of 107 Emmys the company has won over the years. In 2011, Ed was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, a signature recognition for a man who neither played nor coached.

But all of this actually understates the company’s achievement. Slow motion, color, extreme close-up, ubiquitous micro­phones and cameras, omniscient voice-over: the Sabols pioneered the style of modern sports coverage. There are no secrets in the Sabols’ NFL. Everything is revealed. As much as George Halas and Sid Luckman, or Tom Landry and Roger Staubach, it was Ed and Steve who created the modern game, a contest more in tune with the speed and violence of modern America than any other sport. Baseball? Please! Nine angels dancing on the head of a pin. Football is blood and guts, the ticking clock, sudden death, the sack, the blitz, the bomb—symbols of a nation locked in endless war. Almost every detail of the game has come to the attention of its fans through the sensibilities of the Sabols. Asked to describe his goals, Steve paraphrased Matisse: “The importance of an artist is bringing new signs into a language.”

by Rich Cohen, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: NFL Films