Goodbye Steve Sabol

R.I.P.

Yesterday I spent some time wandering through You Tube trying in my own way to pay tribute to Steve Sabol, the pioneer in NFL Films who died a couple days ago.  He really had an impact on my life and more than any other dynamic made me a football fan.  I know we’ve lost something in today’s coverage of the NFL where every minute detail is analyzed to death and we spend more time listening to semi-coherent talking heads than we do admiring the actual highlights themselves.  When I was a young boy I was totally captivated by the weekly NFL films highlights which raised each game to some sort of epic confrontation between mythic super heroes.  The slow motion capturing of the war in the trenches accompanied by haunting music and the incomparable voice of John Facenda elevated these films and the games they showed to something more than just an athletic match.  The writing was superb and the scoring of these films was an escape each week into a heroic battle of superhuman intensity.  It wasn’t just a football field, it was the frozen tundra (unfortunately now a catch phrase).  Sabol created a generation of football fanatics that cherished the game and not the senseless statistics of some parlor fad like Fantasy Football.  I remember, as a young man, being severely lonely during my first assignment in the military in Germany and going each week to the movies because they always showed a twenty minute NFL Films highlight show before the movie – it made home seem a little closer.  I miss the way Sabol used to make the game something more and think in his heart of hearts he was a little shamed to see what the coverage has evolved to.  I just wanted to say thanks to someone who made a difference in my life.  Thank you Steve for making the mundane world seem a tad more epic, not a bad thing, and something we could all use a little more of.  


From A Time When Giants Walked the Earth
At Least That's What NFL Films Showed