Icons: The Voice of God

JACK FACENDA LIVES in a cabin now, on a Pocono mountainside. The cabin’s interior is a monument to a career spent in public service, full of artifacts from tribal societies around the world; Jack worked in the Peace Corps.

“That’s a blowpipe from Borneo,” he says happily, pointing to a weapon on the wall. Leaping across the pine boards of his cabin, with his pipe clamped in his teeth and a long white beard, Jack resembles a lively old wood-elf. “The people I worked with were head-hunting tribes. They were pretty primitive.”

Jack devoted himself to “fighting hunger, disease, poverty,” as the Peace Corps says, and then spent a career in the program’s administration. Now, the 68-year-old son devotes himself to preserving his father’s legacy. “These go back to the 1930s, ’40s,” he says, displaying stacks of photos and letters and articles. They’re papers the elder Facenda had tossed into his damp basement, and that Jack rescued after his father died. They’ve since become his obsession, arranged chronologically, indexed, cross-­referenced, placed under plastic and protected. Jack picks up a particular photo and holds it at arm’s length. He murmurs to himself. “Well, that tie was 1974. … ”

He bounds down wooden stairs to his basement, where he throws open the door and reveals a miniature personal museum, a shrine to his father’s memory that makes his collection upstairs look like a mere hobby. There’s his dad in a photo with Frank Sinatra. Lucille Ball. President Eisenhower. Meritorious medals. A game ball from the 1977 Super Bowl. And box after box of scripts, contracts, thank-you letters and more. But none of the papers capture John Facenda’s real gift: the voice.

Jack puts on a tape. There’s a blast of trumpets, followed by the rumble of Facenda’s throat: “It is a rare game. The men who play it make it so.”

That’s the ghost of Jack’s father, the one that speaks to him now and again, urging him to protect the legacy. The first time it spoke, during the phone call to the Hall of Fame, everything turned out fine: The Hall invited Jack and his children to accept the honor on his father’s behalf.

The next spectral call came through his television, a couple of years ago. Jack suddenly heard his father exhorting him to — to what? To buy a can of Campbell’s Chunky Chili. Great for tailgate parties.

Jack stared at the television. How could this be? His father had been dead nearly two decades, and yet here he was, selling soup. It turned out the Campbell’s commercial had called for narration by a John Facenda sound-alike. Jack sued, and Campbell’s settled for an undisclosed amount of money.

Jack dislikes legal wrangling with companies that try to usurp his dad’s voice, but “Money is the only thing they understand,” he says, whacking his pipe on a table with increasing emphasis. “That’s not the way my father would have done it, and I’d prefer a handshake and a man-to-man understanding.”

Then, several months after the Campbell’s settlement, Jack heard it again: his father on television, this time in a program about the making of Madden ’06, a video game produced by EA Sports, which partners with the NFL.

Jack felt angry at the league, on his father’s behalf. “His contract said they could use [his voice] however they wanted, but it couldn’t be used to endorse a commercial product,” Jack says. To do so, he felt, was to undermine his father’s integrity, and to take advantage: to use the enormous credibility of John Facenda’s voice to give the video game credibility, authenticity, realism. The NFL, in effect, had asked his father to climb the icy radio tower without reimbursing him for his torn gloves.

It turned out to be a very expensive pair. Reports say EA Sports paid the NFL more than $300 million for exclusive video-game rights for five years. “Now you’re talking big bucks,” Jack says, waving his pipe. “You don’t need to put my dad’s voice in there just for the hell of it.”

The Sabols’ NFL Films headquarters, a new 200,000-square-foot structure, stands about 25 minutes east of Philadelphia, in Mount Laurel. But the Sabols declined to speak on the subject of Facenda, deferring to the NFL’s spokesman in New York, who said, “We regret there is a difference of opinion.”

Almost half a century ago, John Facenda and Ed Sabol shook hands at the San Marco on swinging City Avenue. But now the “Golden Mile” is a traffic nightmare, men don’t wear hats, and the San Marco has become the world’s classiest KFC. And the two sons — Jack and Steve — don’t have the bond their fathers forged. Thinking about it, Jack whacks his pipe again on the table.

“Young Steve is a whole different guy,” he says. “He thinks the whole success of NFL Films is because they wrote all the scripts for my father. It wouldn’t be anything if they didn’t write the scripts. … Yeah, my father was there, but it was really their scripts.”

In July of last year, Jack Facenda’s attorney filed suit against the NFL and NFL Films in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. “I’m going to go fight it,” Jack says. “I guess a hundred years ago you’d go down and slap Steve across the face and challenge him to a duel. … Now, what options do I have?”

Steve Sabol’s success — the success of NFL Films — stands on the work of both his father and Jack’s. He has acknowledged as much: “There will never be another voice like his,” Sabol said of Facenda back in 1984. “Somebody once said he could make the coin toss sound like Armageddon.”

But now, Jack says, Sabol has downplayed Facenda’s role. In the NFL’s court filings in response to Jack’s suit, the league refers to Facenda simply as “one of the narrators.”

Larry Kane, Facenda’s broadcast successor, speaks bluntly. “To say the name John Facenda is irrelevant to the NFL is to say Jim Brown and Vince Lombardi had no impact either. And that’s bullshit,” he says, pausing to reload. “And John Madden himself should be ashamed to be associated with this. Ashamed.”

In May, a judge ruled that Jack Facenda can seek damages for the NFL’s use of his father’s voice; the league plans to appeal. Jack promises to press on as well, with the NFL and with anyone else he feels threatens his father’s legacy. He’ll keep filing the old audio tapes, and organizing the photos.

“Time is ticking. My kids aren’t going to know as much about who this person was in these photos,” he says. He smokes his pipe a bit, then adds, “My father did good work. I will defend that.”