Keidel: Ed Sabol Made The NFL The Visceral, Unforgettable Experience It Is
By Jason Keidel
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Before you had to watch Shark Tank to find fragments of the American Dream, a coat salesman bought a camera and decided to record some football.
The incredibly facile idea flowered into the titan we call NFL Films. And its progenitor, Ed Sabol, died this week, taking with him millions of young souls and the gratitude of our nation. As hyperbolic as it might sound, Sabol is as responsible for the explosion of pro football as the forward pass.
It's an interesting symmetry to see that, within a month, we lost Sabol and Tony Verna, the man who invented instant replay. We would not see footnall the same way without the latter, and we would not worship it without the former.
Sabol lit the NFL fuse with his fusion of prose, promotion, and prophecy. It's not embellishing to say that Sabol did more to propagate pro football than Pete Rozelle. Sabol sprinkled faerie dust on a dynasty; his hymns and philharmonic sounds turned a fledgling sport into an essential part of boyhood dreams.
Long before millennials, or whatever you call the shards of the bursting dot com bubble, we had a dearth of decent viewing options. We had our Sunday sermon, our altered altar of athletics. In the 1970s, we in the five boroughs and beyond were forced to endure the Jets and Giants at their respective nadir. The Giants had "The Fumble," and the Jets were toiling in the post-Namath malaise, which is why so many NYC sons born in the late-'60s didn't become Big Blue or Gang Green devotees. Instead, many of us feasted on the buffet of football powers that hatched after the NFL/AFL merger.
So we salivated for Monday Night Football, an essential slice of Americana, with Howard Cosell bloviating and dandy Don Meredith adding his campy, Texas twang, singing his slurry, "turn out the lights," football epitaph at the two minute warning.
Then on Thursday we gawked at the cable haven called "Inside the NFL," led by Len Dawson and Nick Buoniconti -- a hybrid of the twin-gifts Verna and Sabol gave us, a 60-minute cornucopia of commentary and highlights. It was literally all we had until the next Sunday feast.
Now it sounds as archaic as the line plunge. But we had very little football plasma to pour into our NFL IV. We hung on every syllable of that syllabus. Street & Smith was our de facto football bible, along with the games and George Micheal's 15-minute synopsis every Sunday night. Maybe a Jerry Girard or Warner Wolf snippet at the end of the evening news. But that was it. ESPN was a media foal, far from becoming the behemoth we know today.
The late-'70s was like living in the Flinstones epoch of pro football. No one had handlers, publicists, or Facebook. No one tweeted their daily bowel movements. NFL players didn't make millions. They had myriad side hustles, like commercials, speaking engagements or football camps.
I was so eager for face time I begged my father to send me to the "Offense/Defense" football camp in Massachusetts in the summer of 1979. Depending on the week you went, you might find Jack Ham, Jack Lambert, Mel Blount, or Tony Dorsett. You'd never find that confluence of timing and talent today.
But nearly all the promotion and propaganda that propelled the league came from one man, Ed Sabol, all spawned by the elegant arm of NFL Films. To wit, there is no NFL as we know it without Sabol. The machine was seamlessly assumed by his son, Steve, who sadly died before his old man. But Ed Sabol was the grand puppeteer, without whom we may not have the $10 billion-per-year colossus that is the NFL shield.
One of the reasons Mike Ditka is so ardent about reaching back and blessing the old NFL salt with health insurance and pensions is the almost unanimous sense that there are new players, coaches, and owners preening from a perch built by past icons. The brittle limbs, decayed skills, and rattled skulls of John Mackey and Mike Webster were profound and profoundly ugly.
NFL pioneers should be allowed to rest and die with dignity. Gene Upshaw showed a galling lack of regard and respect for the very men he played with, the grunts who grinded their way to the Hall of Fame. Yet all they got were gold jackets and a yearly stroll down memory lane. After their moment in the summer sun, folks like Webster literally lived in cars, toiled in appalling poverty, and slept under bridges. A shameful reality when you consider the coin at the league's disposal.
So when someone as regal as Ed Sabol passes away, it represents only one man's monolithic impact on the sport, but also the men he filmed. To paraphrase the fabulous John Facenda, the men who dueled in the howling wind and cold November mud.
Ed Sabol painted so many mosaics that he literally created the NFL soundtrack, a muddy mural of large men doing remarkable things with a football, a balletic portrait stamped on our psyche long before we were blinded by the blizzard of images, blogs, blowhards, and the Red Zone channel -- the quintessential binky for the ADD/MTV crowd that can't wait five minutes for the next touchdown dance. It's a brilliant product that is clearly a cousin of Sabol's brainchild.
And while football has never been so popular, you could quite reasonably argue that the 1970s was the golden era of the NFL. You had the dueling dynasties in Dallas and Pittsburgh, yearly, bloody AFC battles between the Steelers, Raiders, and Dolphins. And aside from the microscopic sports sections back then, we had to rely on Sabol's incredible vision and direction.
Football wasn't grandfathered into our consciousness the way baseball was. It wasn't a game of stats and backs of trading cards. The box score told you very little about the actual game. No numbers framed the visceral, violent theme of football, the scabbed underbelly of a splendid athletic aesthetic. It's become an orchestra of barbarism that somehow appeals to grunts and geeks alike, an amalgam of math and mayhem, the only sport that can prosper under the hard, iconic hand of Lombardi and the laconic genius of Bill Walsh.
The death of Ed Sabol summons an anthem for pro football. The autumn wind is indeed a Pirate, a Raider, a splash of Sunday adrenaline. Now we endure every frigid fall and the icy coffin of winter because of the NFL. And no man made the sport more palatable or pleasurable than Ed Sabol.
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel
