This file photo from Sept. 26, 2000 shows NFL Films President Steve Sabol at his desk with an old 16mm movie camera. Sabol died Tuesday of brain cancer. He was 69. Photo: Daniel Hulshizer/Associated Press
Steve Sabol considered football more than a sport. He considered it an art, and we're the better for it.
Sabol, who died of brain cancer today at the age of 69, was the visionary creative genius behind NFL Films. As such, he helped boost football's popularity even as he fundamentally changed how we watched the game. NFL Films elevated televised sports by incorporating what The New York Times called "cinematic ingenuity, martial metaphors and symphonic music."
Those are the tools of a storyteller, and Sabol was a damn fine one. His father, Ed, founded NFL Films in 1962, but Steve Sabol set the tone and direction as producer, director and writer. He created most of the visuals — a ball spiraling slowly through the air, players colliding violently on the field, all set to a booming voiceover by John "The Voice of God" Facenda — that came to define the NFL. And he pioneered many of the tricks, from super slo-mo to mic'd coaches to the blooper reel, now ubiquitous in sports films.
"We see the game as art as much as sport," Sabol told The Associated Press last year before his father was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. "That helped us nurture not only the game's traditions but to develop its mythology: America's Team, The Catch, The Frozen Tundra."
Sabol's vision helped fuel professional football's popularity. According to the Times, football was the fourth most popular spectator sport behind baseball, college football and boxing in 1960. By the end of the decade, it was tops in TV ratings and revenues.
"Steve was an incredible visionary," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement. "He spent 50 years at the NFL and changed the way we see pro football. So when you're watching the games this week, it's worth remembering just how much Steve contributed to the way we think, see, and love our game."
Wired took a look inside NFL Films back in 2007 as the company was pushing its exhaustive archive — some 10,000 reels of film — into the digital era. Enjoy:
Glen Kolanco asks me to name a favorite moment in the history of professional football. I tell him, and he taps a few keys on a dual-monitor PC flanked by sports memorabilia. Seconds later a gorgeous slow-motion video of Chicago Bears wide receiver Devin Hester's opening kickoff return for a touchdown in Super Bowl XLI fills one whole screen. The clip is labeled "oh god!"
Kolanco summons up another MPEG clip tagged "oh god!" San Diego Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers drops back, ducks behind a lineman, and fires a pass. The camera tracks the ball as it drifts across the starry sky and drops sharply into the arms of receiver Malcolm Floyd in the end zone. It's seven seconds of everything that is perfect about football…
Continue reading "NFL Films' Exhaustive Archive Is Rushing Into the Digital Age"…
Chuck Squatriglia 19 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/FVWf9e4H2kc/
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