Many Thanks Steve

65 toss power trap; 65 toss power trap.  That might pop right open.” ~ Hank Stram

The Autumn wind is a pirate
Blustering in from sea
With a rollicking song he sweeps along
Swaggering boisterously.
His face is weatherbeaten
He wears a hooded sash
With a silver hat about his head
And a bristling black mustache
He growls as he storms the country
A villain big and bold
And the trees all shake and quiver and quake
As he robs them of their gold.
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 ~ Steve Sabol

A fellow passed away last week; many did actually; thousands; tens of thousands I suppose.  But this one particular fellow had been with me for many years.  He had something of an impact on my life.  He wasn’t a relative or an educator, a mentor or a minister.  I never even knew the man and in fact for many years didn’t even know his name.  It was beginning in the mid-sixties that I became familiar with his work and then I followed it religiously.  I was what?  Eleven?  Twelve maybe.  His work brought an hour of enjoyment to my Saturday afternoons and altered my taste in sports.  It wouldn’t be a reach to say that his work helped to alter an entire nation’s taste in sports.  The man was Steve Sabol and he died last Tuesday of brain cancer.

Steve Sabol in the archives

Oh that football highlight guy, you say.  To leave it at that would be a gross understatement.  Sabol, along with his father Ed started NFL Films when Ed bought the rights to film the 1962 NFL Championship Game for $4000.00; meager by today’s standards.  It was the premier episode of what Salon.com would dub, "the greatest in-house P.R. machine in pro sports history . . . an outfit that could make even a tedious stalemate seem as momentous as the battle for the Alamo.” The Sabols would go on to launch This Week in the NFL, a show carrying the highlights of the previous Sunday’s contests and The NFL Game of the Week which focused on one of those games. 

It was the mid-sixties and if there was any royalty in America it was baseball; the undisputed king of sport.  Like the rest of America, I was a baseball guy.  Football was starting to make some rumblings and basketball was a penniless backwater; a game that sportswriter Frank Deford described as “bush”; as was tennis.  Hockey was skating on the perimeter of being an accepted sport but it was still frowned on as one of the quasi-sports; a sort of kissing cousin to roller derby and big time wrestling. 

And then NFL Films changed the way Americans would look at and feel about football.  Using close ups, super slow motion and the orchestrated music of composer Sam Spence this militaristic, complex and often confusing game with the myriad of rules and variety of formations was made, if not more understandable, then certainly more dramatic.  The NFL Game of the Week presented a game as a sort of athletic opera; a multi-part spectacle set to music.  The show’s stock in trade was to feature close ups of players; dirty, sweaty, bloodied faces, fatigued, gasping for breath, gnarled, cutup hands in grimy uniforms; the look of modern day gladiators enclosed in plastic armor; wild, gesticulating coaches; fans in the throes of tension and of course the signature flight of a tight spiral in super slow motion. 

The two shows were aired back to back on Saturday afternoons during the football season.  I spent those autumn and winter afternoons absorbed in each half hour program, listening to the commentary of hosts Pat Summerall and Tom Brookshier and the narration of John Facenda who rhapsodized in his booming signature baritone dubbed “the voice of God”.  I was a Los Angeles Rams fan in those days and I would wait in anticipation to see the highlights of the previous week’s Rams' victory or dread having to watch their loss in gut wrenching slow motion harboring a desperate hope that by some celestial miracle the Rams would win in the highlight show.  At the very least I hoped to hear Summerall or “Brooky” throw the Rams a little bone of praise for their showing.  At the end of the show I would switch off the TV, take an imaginary handoff, make a cut for the hallway and sprint (in super slow motion of course) down the hall to my room; fake right, quick spin move left (again in slow motion) into my room and then dive over the imaginary tackler onto my bed.  I never could get the hang of doing the dive in slow motion.  My run for glory was always accompanied in my head by one of Spence’s dramatic themes.     

A popular feature was the miking of players and coaches.  Commonplace today, in those early days it was like listening in on a secret club, complete with its own mysterious language; play calls composed of cryptic codes of words and numbers.  They meant nothing to us laymen but to the players they were the secret ciphers of battle; “blue slot, 32, X, G-O”; “blue right slot, fake draw, 9 – O – 8, 51, G-O reverse.”  We flinched, awestruck at the violent sounds of grunting players and smacking pads and helmets.  This was sports like we’d never seen or heard before.  I still remember Dallas Quarterback Don Meredith’s calm banter to his players in the huddle and then later hollering, “Dad gum it! Dad gum it!” after throwing an errant pass.

The Green Bay Sweep

Some of the shows produced moments that became timeless.  Vince Lombardi screaming to nobody in particular, “What the hell’s going on out here?  Everybody grabbin’ out there.  Nobody tackling.  Grab, grab, grab!”  The famous Green Bay Sweep filmed from field level, barreling at the viewer, slowed to accentuate its precision and power; a sort of behemoth ballet.  The feature on the Oakland Raiders, titled the Autumn Wind; the voice of John Facenda reverberating the poem written by Sabol and featured in this post’s epigraph.  Spence’s Autumn Wind theme became the team’s anthem.    Spence’s music has spanned five generations of football fans.  These are anthems that under any other circumstances would be ridiculed as overdone and insignificant but for their ties to Sabol’s films.  And so fathers and sons share knowing looks when they hear one of Spence’s tunes.    

Mr. Official, let me ask you something

And then there was Hank Stram.  Anybody who watched football in 1970 remembers Hank Stram miked for Super Bowl IV; natty in his Kansas City Chiefs blazer, strutting back and forth on the sidelines, whooping and hollering and badgering the refs; "Mr. Official let me ask you something.  How can six of you miss a play like that?  All six of you."  And then there was the enduring scene when Stram implores his team to “keep matriculating the ball down the field boys.”  Forty two years later when their team is driving, fans who weren’t even born in 1970 can be heard exhorting, “Just keep matriculating down the field boys.” 

The Sabols’ work left an indelible imprint on American culture.  It helped to make football captivating to the masses.  Baseball soon had to settle for a back seat.  When Hank Stram strutted the sidelines at Super Bowl IV in Tulane Stadium the estimated U.S. viewership was 44.3 million and a 30 second commercial cost a sponsor 78,000 dollars.  Years later Super Bowl Sunday has become a quasi-holiday. Last February the estimated viewership for Super Bowl XLVI was 168.8 million and a 30 second commercial commanded 3.5 million dollars.  I’ll just take the memories.  Thank you Mister Sabol.  

 To those who read my farewell post, now deleted.  After some emails asking that I soldier on and the death of Steve Sabol which spawned in me an irresistible urge to comment on; the blog is back.  New look, new attitude.