Sabol and NFL Films
Posted: February 2nd, 2010 | Filed under: Other Sports, Pop Culture | 61 Comments »
The following is something new. It is a director’s cut story to accompany my Sports Illustrated column on Steve Sabol and NFL Films. Every week in the magazine, I write a column to kick off the Scorecard section. It’s a terrific honor and terrific space. It’s also 900 words and as my friend Buck O’Neil would say about himself “It takes me that long just to say ‘Hello.’” So, rather than just let all extra the stories and details die on the cutting room floor, many weeks I will write a longer story online to supplement the column. This is one of those weeks.
If you look very closely — I mean very closely — you can see the NFL Films camera quiver ever so slightly as it follows Kansas City Chiefs coach Hank Stram up and down the sidelines at Super Bowl IV. You will remember that Super Bowl film — that’s the one where Stram was miked and said that it looked “like a Chinese fire drill out there.” A high pass made Stram wonder if the ball had helium in it. And, mostly, the film showed Stram calling the 65-toss power trap, begging for the 65-toss power trap, celebrating his own genius for coming up with the 65-toss power trap. It’s fair to say that, because of NFL Films and Hank Stram, the 65-toss power trap is the most famously named play in pro football football history.*
*Though Red Right 88 — the pass play that led to Brian Sipe’s tragic interception and a Cleveland Browns playoff loss to Oakland, and a giant hole in my childhood — is right up there.
The point is that if you watch closely, you can see the camera shaking just a tiny bit. That is Steve Sabol laughing. There are a million beautiful things about NFL Films — its history, its writing, its voices, its music, the way Films changed the landscape of story telling in and out of sports. But if I could sum up the thing that had made NFL Films different and such a special part of my life as a sports fan, it would be, simply, the humanity of it. When Stram was riffing on the sideline, Steve Sabol — now president of NFL Films — was filming. He heard it all through his headset and could not keep himself from laughing. And that, too, is part of the record of Super Bowl IV.
“My Dad was so mad when he saw the film,” Steve Sabol says of his father Ed, who unwittingly started NFL Films when he bought the 1962 NFL Championship Game rights for $5,000. “But I told him: ‘Dad, wait until you hear what the guy’s saying. You won’t be able to stop laughing.’”
* * *
Here are five of my favorite NFL Films coach quotes:
1. Vince Lombardi at the chalkboard: “What we want is to get a seal here and seal here, and run the ball in the alley.”
2. Bill Cowher: “Yeah, I’d like to have 75 degrees and sunny all the time too, but that’s not football.”
3. Marty Schottenheimer: “This is a game of the heart. Focus and finish.”
4. Lou Saban: “You can get it done. You can get it done. What’s more, you gotta get it done.”
5. Jerry Glanville to official: “This isn’t college. You’re not at a homecoming. … This is the NFL, which stands for ‘Not For Long’ when you make them horse-bleep calls.”
* * *
Steve Sabol is an interesting case. Here is a guy doing something he has wanted to do all his life. And that is special. Only in Sabol’s case, it’s jaw dropping because the job he has wanted all his life did not actually EXIST when he was young. There was no NFL Films and no particular reason to have such a thing. It would be like someone today dreaming of, I don’t know, getting paid to sit in baseball dugouts and come up with snarky comments or making the NBA by just shooting half-court shots at the end of halves and games. Make pro football films? Who is going to pay you to do that?
Then, Steve Sabol came from a family of dreamers. His mother, Audrey, ran an art gallery in Philadelphia and had a remarkable feel for the direction art was heading — she championed (and was friends with) pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Wayne Thiebaud, Ed Ruscha and, frankly, a bunch of other people I had never heard of until Steve mentioned them. Steve’s father, Ed, sold overcoats, but he had been a spectacular athlete in college and he had performed on Broadway in his younger days. Steve’s sister, Blair, would write for The Village Voice and be a radical force on the fashion scene. She still writes.* The Sabols were people who felt certain that their bodies were too small to contain what they wanted to do while living on this earth.
*Steve Sabol: “My sister is the kind of person who, if she calls you, well, if you are in a certain business you don’t want her to call you. You better be careful. She’s a tough critic.”
Steve Sabol, perhaps, felt that even more than the rest. “I’m more talented than Jimmy Brown,” Sabol told Sports Illustrated in one of the more fascinating stories ever to appear in the magazine. The story is fascinating not so much because of what’s in it — it’s an interesting story — but because it was ever written at all. The story appeared in 1965 — before Sabol had even started working full time for NFL Films. He was just a moderately talented running back for a decidedly non-football power, Colorado College. As you might suspect, moderately talented running backs at small losing schools do not generally get 3,000-word features in Sports Illustrated. Sabol literally talked himself into national stardom. He took out advertisements in the program and local paper celebrating his own greatness. He invented an exciting past for himself.* He created this character — Sudden Death Sabol. He made himself into a piece of pop art.
*The story is called “The Fearless Tot From Possum Trot,” — Sabol had claimed to be from a place called Possum Trot, Miss. Of course, the place doesn’t exist. Possum Trot was not Sabol’s first choice as imaginary hometown — originally he claimed to be from Coaltown Township, Pa., another place that doesn’t exist. Sabol had grown up in Villanova, Pa., which does exist but was not romantic enough for Sabol’s football sensibilities.
Steve prepared to be an artist because, as mentioned, he did not have even the slightest suspicion that he would be able to make a career out of filming football games. Then Ed hired him to be a part of NFL Films. And together they created a whole new vision of the NFL. The editing, the cinematography, the sound, the music, the rhythms — a lot of people are responsible for the NFL Films style. But the vision comes from Steve. When it came to football, he heard John Facenda’s voice of God narrating in his head long before he knew John Facenda. In his mind, even as a kid playing sixth grade football, the games were epic struggles. The players were gladiators. The uniforms transformed mortals into gods. The autumn wind was a Raider. No, Steve Sabol never thought small.
To make the point: Before the Sabols and NFL Films, mud on the football field was just mud on the football field. NFL Films turned that mud into something holy, something that reflected guts and manhood and courage. Mud proved a Herculean test for the players’ souls. NFL Films showed cleats sloshing in mud, mud dripping off taped hands, mud caked on arms, the way mud made turned linebackers into heroic and dangerous figures. We take that for granted now because NFL Films has created this image of pro football, but there’s nothing intrinsically romantic about mud. This is best demonstrated by Eric Dickerson’s semi-famous and unfortunate “This is a cleat” sideline report during a Monday Night Football game.
But this was the lens Steve Sabol saw football through long before he carried around a camera. Mud! Snow! Heroes! Warriors! Villains! Sabol will tell you he spent his childhood mainly doing two things — playing football and going to movies. And he was never entirely sure where one began and the other ended. Truth is, he never thought one or the other ended. It was all the same thing. The plays did not matter. The scores did not matter. The only thing that mattered was the story.
* * *
Here are five of my favorite characters on NFL Films (in no particular order):
1. Lou Saban. NFL Films turned Lou Saban — a nomad who coached at 10 places in his life and who had a losing record in the NFL — into an every man legend. He’s the guy shouting, “They’re killing me, Whitey!” And, as mentioned, who can forget the gritty yet desperate look on his face when he told his men: “You can get it done. You can get it done. What’s more, you GOTTA get it done.”
2. Earl Campbell. One of the greatest player in NFL history anyway, but NFL Films took him into a whole other stratosphere. My vision of Campbell is of the NFL Films where he runs over Los Angeles’ Rams Isaiah Robertson. The thing that turns the amazing run into art is the voiceover NFL Films uses of Campbell. He essentially says, “I saw this guy standing straight up and I thought, ‘You don’t really think you’re going to tackle me standing straight up.” In later years, Campbell — one of the classier men you will meet — has refused to talk about that run because he was told that it really messed with Robertson’s head and he never quite recovered from it.
3. Marty Schottenheimer. One of the great sound bite coaches of all time — he’s the man behind the already mentioned, “Focus and Finish.” There’s “One play at a time for as long as it takes.” And, my personal favorite, “There’s a gleam, men. There’s a gleam. … Go get the gleam.” Whatever the hell that means.
4. Art Donovan. I was having a discussion with someone — who are the funniest athletes in the history of sports? That’s probably a whole other post. I think Bob Uecker would have a real shot at being No. 1. Bill Lee: Hilarious. Casey Stengel. Charles Barkley. I’ll come up with a list to discuss. But it’s possible that Artie Donovan is the funniest of them all. Then again, part of it is the delivery. Donovan can read a Denny’s menu and I’d be on the floor laughing. Especially when he said “Moon over my hammy.”
5. Ken Stabler. It has always shocked me that the Snake is not in the Hall of Fame. Then I look at his numbers — 194 touchdowns, 222 interceptions, only played in four Pro Bowl and made All-Pro once — and I think: “Meh.” The thing is, NFL Films made Stabler seem larger than life. The Holy Roller.* The sea of hands. The Ghost to the Post. Stabler was a throwback, a wild-off-the field quarterback who on the field was a rock of steadiness in the final two minutes. Read that last sentence in the voice of Facenda, by the way. I think Stabler belongs in the Hall of Fame … but I get that from NFL Films.
*Bill King’s famous call: “Stabler back … here comes the rush … he sidesteps. The ball is flipped forward. It’s loose. A wild scramble. Two seconds on the clock. Casper grabbling the ball. It is ruled a fumble. Casper has recovered in the end zone! The Oakland Raiders have scored … on the most zany, unbelievable, absolutely impossible dream of a play. Madden is on the field. He wants to know if it’s real. They said yes, get your big butt out of here. He does! There’s nothing real in the world anymore.”
My favorite part of that call — the “He does!”
* * *
Sabol talked a little bit about some of those things that have made NFL Films legendary.
The slow motion shot of the spiral. The most iconic shot at NFL Films is probably the one of the spiral pass hanging in the air for what seems like weeks. Sabol says that shot — like so many of the things that worked at NFL Films — came out of luck and happenstance. The Sabols were watching an AFL Championship Game film — that was the competition — and they weren’t especially impressed with it. But one shot caught their eye — some cameraman was able to follow a ball in mid-air. It wasn’t that great a shot because it was at regular speed, but Steve was awed. “I remember saying, ‘That’s an unbelievable shot.’”
The shot was taken by an old Navy guy with ridiculously steady hands named Ernie Ernst. So, Sabol hired Ernst and told him to get that shot again and again. And when they slowed it down, slowed it way down … magic.
“That’s what we call the Jesus Christ shot,” Sabol says. “Because it makes you go, ‘Jesus Christ, who shot that?’ It’s a signature shot for our films, and it’s something that’s very, very hard to do.”
Ernst incidentally — or perhaps not incidentally — is also the only cameraman who followed the ball all the way into Franco Harris’ arms during the Immaculate Reception.
John Facenda. You probably already know this but Facenda — the Voice of God whose deep voice defined NFL Films — knew almost nothing about football. And the owners wanted no part of him.
“The owners said to us, ‘Why don’t you use Jack Whitaker or Curt Gowdy or Chris Schenkel. These were the big sportscasters then. And my father said, ‘No, wait, we’re trying to show Pro Football in a whole new way. We’re trying to show Pro Football the way Hollywood would. We don’t want a sportscaster. This is the guy we want.”
Ed Sabol was a natural salesman. And even though the NFL owners were a famously conservative bunch, he convinced them to let NFL Films use Facenda.
Steve: “I remember when we were making ‘They Call It Pro Football,’ which was our Citizen Kane. The first line is ‘It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.’ Well, we had John read it. And as soon as he read that line, that one line, I remember looking at Dad, and our eyes met. And we both just knew that this was something really great. John was a unique talent.
“But it is true that he didn’t know much about football. My Dad told the owners: ‘He doesn’t HAVE to know about football because Steve is writing it.’ But people never quite got that. I used to kid John: ‘I’m working so hard writing these lines and everybody thinks you’re just ad-libbing them.’”
The early years. When NFL Films first began, Steve Sabol would take the film — and he would usually take along a couple of NFL players like Frank Gifford or Del Shofner or Alex Webster — and they would go to a Kiwanis Club in Reading or an Optimists Club in Pottstown or a Rotary Club in Binghamton. And they would show the movie — usually on a bed sheet or a blank wall — and then answer a few questions. That’s what NFL Films was for a few years.
“I remember when we had our first premier,” Sabol says. This was 1962 before the operation was called NFL Films. It was “Blair Motion Pictures” — named after Blair Sabol — and Steve had come back from college to help out. They had filmed the championship game between the Green Bay Packers and New York Giants — and they had absolutely no idea how to promote this thing. That game was lousy, and it was on a cold miserable day — Ed Sabol would say that it was the second most miserable day of his life behind only the day he stormed the beach on D-Day. They called the film: “The Longest Day.”
“It wasn’t a great film,” Steve says. “We were still learning then.”
They decided to show the film at Toots Shor, the famous bar in New York where sportswriters were likely to be hanging out anyway.
“All of a sudden, halfway through, the image disappears. And there’s this sickening crash. I look up; someone had tripped on the cord and there was the projector and film laying in crab meat and shrimp sauce. You could not have thought of a worse disaster. Dad’s cursing, I’m trying to clean it up with a wet towel, we’re screwed.
“And then Pete Rozelle stands up. And Pete starts taking questions. There were some players there — Gifford, Pat Summerall — and they join in. They’re holding press conference while I’m desperately trying to get the film back up. Some of the writers left, but some of them stayed and they saw the rest of the movie. And the ones that stayed gave us pretty good reviews.”
On Ed Sabol and the first incarnation of NFL Films. “My Dad hated his job,” Steve says. “He sold overcoats, but he wanted to make movies. He had a failed career working with the Ritz Brothers — there were like the Marx Brothers only a tier below. I always have a picture in my mind of him in a straw hat.
“But as a wedding present he got an old windup movie camera. And so everything I did as his only son, he would film. Pony rides. Haircuts. He filmed everything. He especially loved filming my football games. I was pretty good, and so he would film every games. He would film from the end zone. He would shoot slow motion. Nobody was doing that stuff in those days.
“And I remember we used to invite all the kids on the team over to watch the games. We would put out ginger cookies. And everybody would watch themselves play. My Dad would put in a John Philip Sousa march in the background go to with the film. It was really neat, and you can see the direct connection to NFL Films.
“In fact, when my father bid $5,000 for the 1962 Championship Game, that was a huge amount. It was double the bid the year before. Pete Rozelle was flabbergasted. Who was this guy who was willing to spend so much money on what seemed like relatively worthless rights to the NFL Championship Game? And, Rozelle got a little concerned. He asked my father what experience he had shooting football. And my Dad said — this is absolutely true — that his experience was filming his 14-year-old son.”
* * *
Five of my favorite Steve Sabol/John Facenda lines:
1. “Lombardi. A certain magic still lingers in the very name.”
2. “The autumn wind is a Raider
Pillaging just for fun
He’ll knock you round and upside down
And laugh when he’s conquered and won.”*
*This is from Steve Sabol’s poem “The Autumn Wind is a Raider.”
3. “Do you feel the force of the wind? The slash of the rain? Go face them and fight them. Be savage again!”
4. On defensive linemen: “It’s one ton of muscle with a one track mind.”
5. “The third quarter was dying. And so were the Colts.”
* * *
After all this time, it turns out that Steve Sabol is an artist after all. He is having an art gallery opening here in Miami Wednesday night. I’m no art critic, of course — can’t even claim I would know art if I saw it — but I like the Sabol stuff because it’s interesting and weird and nostalgic. It blends football and advertising and America … which I think was the magic of NFL Films too.
You know: I love the Ice Bowl film. That’s the film that featured the NFL Championship Game between Green Bay and Dallas when the field was frozen solid* and the temperature was minus-15. I love it because NFL Films turned such a disastrously cold day — a day, you could argue, clearly NOT meant for football — into legend. You could feel the cold rushing through the television set. You could feel the despair of the players trying to get any footing. You could feel the hopelessness everyone felt and yet they went on because winning and losing still mattered.
*You probably know this: Sabol insists Facenda never actually said the words “The Frozen Tundra of Lambeau Field.” Not only that, but Facenda was not the narrator for the original Ice Bowl film.
To me two of the most arresting shots from The Ice Bowl film — beyond the great shots of Bob Hayes running routes with his hands stuffed in his pockets — had nothing to do with football. One was of the Green Bay cheerleaders, layered in clothes, frozen solid, trying still to go on. And the other was of a single fan pulling out a flask, drinking from it, and then looking at the camera as if to say: “Ain’t life funny?” There’s that humanity again. Sure NFL Films is propaganda — sweeping music, military references, some overwrought words. But I love it still. Because of the humanity.
One of my editors at Sports Illustrated called me up before I wrote the Sabol essay and said that something struck him. He had been watching a history channel documentary on the battle at Stalingrad. I guess he’s something of a student of Stalingrad. And as he watched it, it occurred to him: This is NFL Films! The icy ground is Lambeau. The voice is Facenda. The music is emotional. The narration is poetic.
And ever since then, I have thought about how often I see something on television or in movies or just in daily life that was inspired, at least a little bit, by NFL Films and Steve Sabol. I think it happens all the time.
“I think we looked at the game like a Cubist painter,” Sabol says. “We wanted every angle. We wanted different perspectives. I think we were studying the game the way Picasso studied a bowl of fruit.”
And Sabol stopped — he wondered if he was sounding immodest. Cubist painters? Picasso? Well, it’s how he felt. And Sabol knew that it would have sounded even better if John Facenda had said it.
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I’ve always loved those old NFL films. The way they turn old games into works of art has endeared me to the history of football in a way unlike any other sport. I can get way to interested in games that occurred way before I was born.
That was a great read, I never knew how NFL Films got started.
Circle me, Voice of God
Circle me, John Facenda!
It is funny how NFL films really has glorified the smashmouth style of football, to the point where that is how people view football (as Tom Verducci pointed out in a column on SI yesterday). I wonder now if that really was football or if it was an NFL films self-fulfilling prophecy.
long comment alert:
NFL Films holds a special place in my heart. When I was in college, in the mid 90s’, it seemed that NFL films shows would loop from the hours of about 1am to 4am on ESPN2. Well as many of you can probably attest that nothing productive is ever accomplished between those hours. They’re often filled with weed hazed, beer laced conversations, all over the background music of some 70’s classic rock soundtrack like Led Zeppelin 4 or The Doors Soft Parade.
One night, when NFL Films was exploring the travails of the 1960’s era Chicago Bears, we had the tv on mute while Pink Floyd’s album Meddle was on the stereo. In a moment of unexpected brilliance and jaw dropping synchronicity, the first track on the album “One of These Days (Im Going to Cut You Into Little Pieces)” synched up with what was occurring on the screen. The crescendo of the music linking up with Gale Sayers breaking through the line on the way to a huge touchdown. The crash of the cymbals as Dick Butkus destroyed a running back coming through the hole. My four roommates and I sat there in stunned silence watching the brutality and grace of football with the perfect soundtrack of Pink Floyd. It was unexplainable to anyone that wasn’t in the room at that time (but Im doing it here anyway).
I would just like to thank Steve and Ed Sabol, along with Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Richard Wright and David Gilmour for providing me a moment with my best friends we continue to talk about 15 years later.
And a must own for any NFL Films/NFL fan is Autumn Thunder: 40 Years of NFL Films Music by Sam Spence.
Sorry for the long comment, Joe.
Great article. However, in reference to Ed Sabol’s service: Patton commanded the 3rd Army, not the 4th, and neither of those two units took part in D-Day (the 1st Army did).
There was no 4th Army that stormed the beaches of D-Day. Patton’s army was the 3rd.
Sounds like a case of putting Granny Rice-style drama and color (not to mention hyperbole) back into writing about sports, though Sabol couldn’t use the Four Horseman image– one had left the backfield to to become a wideout. It was out of style so long it seemed fresh again.
Joe, you’ve written a lot of posts here. I’ve read almost all of them, and enjoy them like no other. But this…this is art. What a great post.
Perfectly timed piece for Super Bowl week, Joe. And I find it funny that two readers beat me to calling out the inaccurate Patton reference.
I would just add in all this the soundtracks of NFL films written by Sam Spence from the 60’s to the 80’s. Like Joe, I’m in my early 40’s, and that music was the soundtrack of my childhood. I was so grateful when NFL Films released the Autumn Thunder CD set several years ago. I’ve had it on in my car constantly the last week or two.
I only wish now that NFL Network would devote air time to the old NFL Films shows of the 70s and 80s. When they and ESPN used to show then some years ago, I loved to stumble across an old “NFL Game of the Week” from 1977 or “NFL Review and Preview” from 1982. Something’s gotta fill the overnight hours — how about that?
“He was born…Earl…Christian…Campbell.”
hulu.com put up a huge NFL section this week – it has all the Hard Knocks, tons of classic games, super bowls, and super bowl documentaries. It’s effing awesome!
Peyton Manning should be on the list of funny people
I’ve always admired how NFL films can romanticize even the worst football. I’d happen to start watching in the middle of one of one of their “individual team season” productions, see all kinds of good plays and slo-mo touchdown passes and sacks and so on by the profiled team, and think “wow, that team must have been pretty good.”
Then, at the end, the voiceover says something like “…but the Colts finished four and twelve that year, rendering it the season that could have been”.
Cracks me up every time.
FAVORITE MARTY QUOTE” Grab an oar men! Let’s row!
My brother and I still say “forearm shiver” all the time. Loved that stuff then and now.
Possum Trot, Kentucky (not Mississippi) is a real place. I used to drive through it all the time.
Without a doubt, the NFL Films ability to make the game of professional football so extraordinarily beautiful but also violent and artful made the popularity of ‘The League” a no-brainer by the late ’60s. I was just a youngster then but I loved to watch the long slow spirals or a lengthy flight of a massive punt or kickoff. The background music and voice-overs were great too but it was the visuals that hooked me.
In the mid to late ’70s I remember a piece they did with the background music from the group Pablo Cruise “Zero to Sixty in Five” showing running backs and returners on some awesome runs. It must have made quite an impression on me because I’m re-living that thought some 30-35 years later!
Oh, and I still scream out every once in a while, “What the hell’s going on out there!?” ala Lombardi when the situation warrants….More fun!
This weekend NFL Network showed the NFL Films film of Super Bowl X. On the same day MLB Network showed the highlight film of the 1975 World Series (“Super Series!”). Thanks to brutally cold weather in NY, I watched both.
The difference was staggering. Remember, these events took place within four months of each other and the films were produced by each league’s in-house production arm.
The NFL Films product was a masterpiece, including the classic slo-mo footage of Lynn Swann’s famous tumbling catch.
The MLB film was, uh, not a masterpiece. Weak Joe Garagiola narration, cheeseball music, ridiculous ball-meeting-bat sound effects.
There are a lot of reasons why the NFL is hands-down the most valuable property in television and why the NFL has by most measures surpassed baseball as the national pastime. NFL Films is right up there with the biggest of those reasons. You watch those two productions side-by-side; they’re not from the same planet.
Favorite NFL Films line, appropriate for this week: “All eyes are focused on one glittering goal: the chance to play and win in the Super Bowl.” Geaux Saints!
Who are these Green Back Packers of which you speak?
Favorite Stram quote: “Just keep matriculatin’ the ball down the field, boys.”
“A high punt made Stram wonder if the ball had helium in it.”
That comment was actually about a Joe Kapp pass that was intercepted by one of the Chiefs. The comment right after it on the film is something like “they don’t throw balls like that in our league” and Stram says “That’s right.”
Three random connections.
1) Sam Spence? The music under the films? Curious about that.
2) Dave Chapelle’s “everything is better in slow-mo” skit
3) “There’s a gleam” was either before the 86 or 87 AFC championship game. Still waiting for that gleam.
I was born three months after Super Bowl IV, so my memories of Hank Stram with the Chiefs are somewhat limited… But, a quick question regarding Stram:
Is it true that he had the Chiefs bench moved to the side opposite the tunnel to their locker room because it there were more opportunities to be on TV, or because the angles were better, or something?
I was told growing up that Stram did that out of vanity… It caused a bit of a problem since some members of each team would cross paths at the end of halves and games, which would have been avoided if Hank would have left the Chiefs bench ten feet from the tunnel down to the locker room…
Just curious if anyone has a story behind that… Thanks…
The thing that always got me in slow-mo was not the spirals as much as it was the RB’s shoulder pads heaving up and down. Something about that always looked so powerful.
Wow, a Bill King day. First Ray Ratto of the SF Chronicle wrote about King today. Then the unexpected rush of seeing King’s “Holy Roller” call here. I almost fell off the chair when Joe says his favorite part of the call is, “He does!” Me too — that detail always amazes me– the literal description of Madden getting his big butt off the field, followed by the amazement of “There’s nothing real in the world anymore.”
You can hear it for youself here:
http://www.bayarearadio.org/sports/raiders/raiders-chargers_sept-10-1978.shtml
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Facenda told my mom she had a cute nose.
He’s also a legend in Philly for narrarating a chrismas show (show still exists, his voice was replaced by Julie Andrews)
Love NFL films. Regarding Stabler’s career numbers, they fare better than Broadway Joe’s.
On the official website of Kansas City, MO, there is a section on the history of the city. Legend has it that when they were deciding on a name for what eventually became Kansas City, a few of the other names suggested were Port Fonda, Rabbitville, and Possum Trot.
http://ww4.kcmo.org/kcmo.nsf/web/kchistory?opendocument
I used to watch NFL films before I ever watched an actual NFL game.
I can’t believe this exchange from John McKay didn’t make it here: (copied to get the correct quote from wikipedia)
Following yet another Tampa Bay Buccanneer loss in their early seasons, he was asked what he thought of his team’s execution. He replied “I’m in favor of it.”
When I think of NFL Films, this comes immediately to mind. This cracked me up for days.
Man, is the web amazing or what? Pos mentions NFL Films, it leads to a Bill King quote – and then someone just posts the call in question, available to the whole world, complete with station identification and adverts.
I love the 21st century.
@KM: Right on! Ratto’s piece on Bill King was wonderful, and I wrote to Ratto and told him so. King definitely belongs in a national Hall of Fame for some sport – he did them all in the Bay area, and with incredible talent and style – but he’s just not well known enough outside of the Bay area to get the necessary attention.
(I wonder whatever happened to that old LTD when Bill King died.)
The best part of this article for me is having a Joe Posnanski article in the front of my SI every week…
Need a better back page column but so glad to have Joe in there.
And my favorite part of that clip? Fast forward to 7:50 or so: Monty Steckles says of the Chargers: “Their backs are up against it, I tell ya. No matter how this thing goes, San Diego is gonna be drained. The Raiders will be drained I think more physically, they’ve had a tough row to hoe, I think the other team, the Chargers, have been up more mentally.”
He finishes with the best line ever. “It’s just an observation, it doesn’t have to be true.”
I wish more color guys would say stuff like that on the air. I am still cracking up over that line.
Off topic: currently there are 11 votes for the new poll. 55% colts win big, 36% colts close, leaving 1% saints win big and 0% saints close. Let’s see if the voting results of the first 11 votes have any strong influence on the rest.
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I think SI should add pages to it’s magazine rather than edit the length of Joe’s articles.
“Craig Morton found Jesus in his heart and Moses in the end zone.”
Hello! You play to win the game!
How can you omit that?
Wonderful piece, Joe. I saw the banner and I thought, eh, well I’ll see what he has to say. I had really forgotten how large NFL films loom – I could hear John Facenda’s voice in my head as I was reading. I always wondered as a kid, “why do games on TV seem so dull compared to this? This is fantastic!”
A great tribute – thank you.
Wiki states his full name is John Thomas Ralph Augustine James Facenda. Catchy, no?
Stalingrad. What a fascinating piece of history. What a colossal blunder by the Third Reich. I’ve read about everything I can get my hands on and it still fascinates me. Your editor, I’m thinking he’s one smart cookie.
I always loved the Facenda films, the slow-mo, the “what do you do with a drunken sailor” music playing underneath.
But I also alway HATED references to sports as war and athletes as warriors.
I am on base in Baghdad. There’s a difference, and a profound one, between sports and war. These days, I find it more than a little insulting when that comparison is made.
Paul Zimmermann wrote a short comment just a couple of years ago about why he wouldn’t vote for Stabler. He says Stabler’s statistics took a dive when he arrived in Houston, and implicitly accused him of throwing games. He also says that Stabler is far too friendly with a whole bunch of Dixie mafia characters down home, corrupt sheriffs and the like.
I love the quotes about Bill Pellington and Mike Curtis of the Baltimore Colts from Alex Hawkins…
Re: Pellington…
“I couldn’t call Bill a friend of mine because I was scared to death of him.”
Re: Curtis…
“He would just get beside himself on the day of a game”
great read. Sabol should be in the Hall for his unique and extremely important contribution to the game. Sadly, it is hard under the current format for that to happen. He would have to compete with modern finalists like Smith and Rice and Chris Carter and Shannon Sharpe, and how do you compare what he did to their careers? It’s like apples and elephants.
I wish they would change it so that a “contributor/coach/owner” committee put forth candidates like the veteran’s committee does, but then the “contributors” and “veterans” compete against each other for 1-2 spots. This would both allow contributors like Sabol to have a chance, and equally importantly, it might cause the Veteran’s committee to put forth better candidates, and not just their sources and friends and hometown heroes, lest they go several years where the contributors are selected over the veterans. Right now, the veteran’s picks are pretty much rubber stamped and a lot of recent ones have been very questionable, including this year’s.
@Perry: you beat me to it — also my favorite NFL Films quote! Stram was a piece of work.
@Joe P: great read — thanx!
Great, great read. It is an interesting question, the degree to which Steve Sabol and NFL Films have shaped what a fair number of people my age (42) and older think football ought to be: hard-nosed and, whenever possible, played under awful conditions on grass or dirt (and I’m a Cowboys fan). I will watch a snow game _ any snow game, even if it’s just a few flakes with a remote possibility for more _ any time I notice one on TV.
I’d also be curious to know how Sabol settled on a replacement for John Facenda and whether most viewers feel differently about NFL Films with that (in my view view) unlucky guy, whoever he is, trying to fill Facenda’s shoes.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by pr9000: great essay by @JPosnanski on NFL Films. http://bit.ly/9Qsshh...
I’m from Canada and I never watched the NFL growing up, the only sports that were ever on the 2 channels that we had in middle of nowhere Saskatchewan, were Hockey and CFL. I subscribed to SI when I was about 13 and not only did that magazine open up the sports world to me, they sent me a free video which was called ‘Super Sunday’. It was NFL films summary/highlights of the first 30 superbowls. I must’ve watched that video 50 times, it was amazing, and it got me started caring about the NFL, it wasn’t till college that I really started watching, so its amazing to people that I know all the details of the early superbowls. Most memorable of all those highlights for me, lyn swann’s catch, and the ‘65 toss power trap”.
“The only thing that matters is the 6 inches between your backbone and your breastbone” I have a tape KCFX made in either 95 or 97 that’s some goofy inspirational song, but the main part of it is a bunch of PBP calls and Marty quotes from NFL Films…I still dig that tape out a couple times a year. (Well, that and a recording of the last 5 minutes or so of the 93 playoff win against the Oilers)
Thanks for a great article. But, if I were your editor, I would have cut the reference to “Red Right 88.” Purely personal, you understand. Curse you Mike Davis. And curse you Brian Sipe! Next time, throw it into Lake Erie and let Cockroft do his thing!!!
In every sport that we like, we do have our own desired players and beloved teams that we prove so much. .We examine all their sport and cheer them on when they get a tally. We also tend to shout motivational cheers when they play awfully. We even buy posters, auburn mugs, t-shirts jerseys and other stuffs containing the players names and the name of the bunch that we dearest so much. This is how most of the sports fans espousal their well-loved sports icons and teams.Sports fans most specifically buy jerseys in blanket..Wholesale NFL jersey are in deed very salable to most of the football fans not only in the United States of America but in the entire world, as well. Buying general NFL jerseys is very advantageous because this is one way of receiving these jerseys in a cheaper prices. This way, fans may be able to buy as many jerseys as they can.
…………………thanks Joe, BTW the Star isn’t the same without ya
Joe, who’s editing your blog posts before you put them to the virtual page? Whitlock?
Come’on man, there’s way too many typos or wrong words used here.
Not the stellar writing I’m used to reading from your fingertips.
Grammar: “caught there eye” should of course be their. Then “thinks your just ad-libbing them” should be “you’re”. “I always a picture” needs the word have in there. “He is have an art gallery opening here in Miami” should be having, not have. A couple of these are you quoting others, so maybe they’re not your fault, but four errors is about the worst technical writing I’ve seen from you.
Or maybe it’s just that I seem to be immune to propaganda. In fact, it turns me off. I see propaganda, stuff designed to manipulate me, and I rail against the designer. So I never much liked NFL Films. TWIB was much better for me. They showed the baseball and let the greatness of the plays speak for themselves. I guess that’s why I love Vin Scully, the neutral field announcer, so much.
Radar at 36: I like Bill King. But he’s WAYYYY too much of a homer for me to think he’s great. He is pretty good at spotting little details that make or break plays, which is why I like him. But far too often the evidence of my eyes contradicts the evidence of my ears when I hear him complain about a call.