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Icons: The Voice of God
By Matthew Teague
ED SABOL SOLD overcoats in Philadelphia, in 1962. But he had a feeling about football.
Sabol knew two things: The head-cracking sport was poised to overtake baseball as America’s most popular pastime. And he knew he liked filming his son Steve’s high-school football games with the 16mm camera someone had given him.
So Sabol, armed with those two ideas, contacted Pete Rozelle, the NFL’s commissioner. Sabol, the overcoat salesman, offered him $3,000 for the right to film the 1962 championship game between the New York Giants and Green Bay Packers. Rozelle accepted.
For the next couple of years, Sabol shot games and compiled footage. Then, in 1965, after the legendary meeting at the San Marco, Sabol and Facenda made They Call It Pro Football, likely the most influential football film of all time. In it, Facenda’s voice thunders in from some great height: “It starts with a whistle, and ends with a gun. … ”
Those words forever changed the trajectory of pro football. “The rise of the NFL, and the legend, the sense of creative violence, was thanks to John Facenda,” says Larry Kane, another legendary Philadelphia newscaster, who took over the market when Facenda left. “He turned it into a poetic venture.”
The early NFL Films lifted football from Rust Belt sandlots to a higher, more heroic place. Bodies crashed; men grunted under the strain of each play, then taunted each other afterward. Timpani boomed. Cameras showed close-ups of players’ faces: the swollen eye, the newly crooked nose. The players seemed to operate in a world where time stretched and collapsed, where slow motion lent them the grace and lightness of ballet dancers, before their great planetary weight brought them crashing down, furrowing the earth.
It worked. It all seemed so incongruous, so removed from the mere game that little boys played on a million acres’ worth of front yards across America. It made football epic. And over all this, marshaling all this — this largeness — loomed the voice of John Facenda. Who else could narrate the immortal deeds of men like Jim Brown, Johnny Unitas and Mean Joe Greene?
The Voice of God, indeed.
Sabol knew two things: The head-cracking sport was poised to overtake baseball as America’s most popular pastime. And he knew he liked filming his son Steve’s high-school football games with the 16mm camera someone had given him.
So Sabol, armed with those two ideas, contacted Pete Rozelle, the NFL’s commissioner. Sabol, the overcoat salesman, offered him $3,000 for the right to film the 1962 championship game between the New York Giants and Green Bay Packers. Rozelle accepted.
For the next couple of years, Sabol shot games and compiled footage. Then, in 1965, after the legendary meeting at the San Marco, Sabol and Facenda made They Call It Pro Football, likely the most influential football film of all time. In it, Facenda’s voice thunders in from some great height: “It starts with a whistle, and ends with a gun. … ”
Those words forever changed the trajectory of pro football. “The rise of the NFL, and the legend, the sense of creative violence, was thanks to John Facenda,” says Larry Kane, another legendary Philadelphia newscaster, who took over the market when Facenda left. “He turned it into a poetic venture.”
The early NFL Films lifted football from Rust Belt sandlots to a higher, more heroic place. Bodies crashed; men grunted under the strain of each play, then taunted each other afterward. Timpani boomed. Cameras showed close-ups of players’ faces: the swollen eye, the newly crooked nose. The players seemed to operate in a world where time stretched and collapsed, where slow motion lent them the grace and lightness of ballet dancers, before their great planetary weight brought them crashing down, furrowing the earth.
It worked. It all seemed so incongruous, so removed from the mere game that little boys played on a million acres’ worth of front yards across America. It made football epic. And over all this, marshaling all this — this largeness — loomed the voice of John Facenda. Who else could narrate the immortal deeds of men like Jim Brown, Johnny Unitas and Mean Joe Greene?
The Voice of God, indeed.
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