Steve Sabol, 1942-2012

There was a time when gods and heroes walked among us, and the poets told us of their legends.  As Science and Reason began to replace the gods and heroes, and Industry made men mere extensions of machines, the gods and heroes disappeared.   It is not coincidence, really, that the rise of organized sports culture coincided with the Industrial Revolution and the urbanization of society.  (In America, the population nearly tripled as the 19th turned to the 20th century, due to immigration to the big cities of New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco.)  Men still needed an arena to prove their strength.  "We live in softer times," Theodore Roosevelt once said. 

Sports have long been understood as a locus of myth-making in the 20th century.  An entire field of sociology is devoted to sport and its meaning, its rituals, its power (economic, cultural, gender discourses, race discourses, etc.).   As a scholar of media, I can articulate those social discourses in any number of ways; indeed I'm preparing to present a narrative-mythic analysis of one sporting ritual at a conference taking place next week.  Even though I can take a look at sports with a more detached view of the academic, I still acknowledge the role consuming sports media has in my life, and its influence on my childhood.  (My doctoral thesis was on the media coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder trial.)

This week, the President of NFL Films, Steve Sabol, died of brain cancer at age 69.  His father Ed, who is in his 90's, founded NFL Films in 1962, and it remained a family business for the next fifty years, with Steve helping create one of the most successful partnerships between a media company and sports organization in history.   NFL Films was for the NFL what Homer was to Odysseus.  

NFL Films preserved football games weekly, producing a regular series for many years in syndication highlighting the previous week's best moments.  In the days before ESPN, NFL Films told the story -- and not in that snarky ironic fashion that SportsCenter anchors can get away with because their recaps are so quick and immediate.   NFL Films productions were quality affairs, shot always of real film, not videotape.   (And that's why they have lasted so well; as I mentioned in a recent blog post, film is the preferred archival medium, not digital.)  The great short films of each Super Bowl, narrated for nearly twenty years by John Facenda, aka the Voice of God, presented epic tales of men against men, in a remarkable arrange of camera angles and positions.  These were as perfectly edited as any Hollywood production, as real as any great British documentary.   Sabol was a great film-maker -- it just so happened that he filmed football games.  He did this combining the poetry of slow-motion footage with crisp voice-over narration and the real sounds of the combatants on and off the field.

This is not to say Sabol took himself too seriously.  His weekly series in the 1980's, which he co-hosted with Harry Kalas, often found them doing silly stuff, especially at Halloween.   (Kalas, more famous for being a baseball announcer for the Philadelphia Phillies, began an association with NFL Films in 1975,  with Facenda mentoring him on the voiceovers. Sabol said that where Facenda was the Voice of God, Kalas was the Voice of the People, and I think he had it right.)  

Sabol continued to expand NFL Films, creating the reality series Hard Knocks for HBO.  He never stopped trying to tell stories of the game he loved, and you can see the enjoyment he had in all those films of graceful catches, punishing hits, and the eyes of the warriors on the sidelines, breath steaming from their faces, caught in a moment of reflection.  

As most guys my age will tell you, watching Sabol's films fueled our own fantasies.  Why did we suddenly play our games on the street or in the backyard in slo-mo? NFL Films.  Why did we narrate our own plays in our best imitation of Facenda?  NFL Films.   The action of a Sabol film carried the beauty of a John Woo shootout.  It was ballet; it was opera; yet it was real.   Watch any Super Bowl film.   I don't care if you don't like football.  Better that you not; perhaps you too will be drawn in by the tale Sabol tells for you. 

The first sentence of Sabol's wikipedia entry says that he was a film-maker.  Not an executive, not a broadcaster: a film-maker.   Okay, cinephiles, be snobs.  Go back to Antonioni.   I'll take Hank Stram telling his coaches that the Minnesota Vikings can't stop his team's screen pass attack, calling for the big play known as 65 Toss Power Trap.   Or John Riggins' bouncing off Don McNeal to deal the final death blow to the Miami Dolphins.  Or Joe Namath walking out of the Orange Bowl waving his index finger to the crowd, having backed up his guarantee.  The world lost a poet Monday.   RIP Steve Sabol.