Ed Sabol, NFL Films Founder, Dies at 98
Ed Sabol, whose vision that football could become riveting cinema gave birth to NFL Films, which marshaled exquisite photography, rhapsodic music and poetry to elevate pro football to the realm of myth, died on Monday at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 98.
The N.F.L. announced his death on its website. His son, Steve Sabol, a creative force behind NFL Films, died of brain cancer in 2012 at 69.
Ed Sabol played a significant role in making professional football America’s No. 1 spectator sport, in part by borrowing from Hollywood. He deployed multiple cameras, zoomed in for raw close-up shots — of a linebacker’s bloody knuckles, for example — employed unexpected angles, added slow motion for dramatic effect, and put microphones on players, coaches and officials, capturing exhortations and the thuds and grunts of a violent game.
Along the way, he named the Dallas Cowboys America’s Team and invented the sports blooper genre.
The company became a moneymaker, with annual revenue exceeding $50 million. And it became the principal repository for the history of football on film, its library reaching back 100 years.
For NFL Films, every game is an epic clash on a battlefield with moments of pristine beauty, as when the ball spirals into the hands of a receiver, typically in slow motion, often to stirring, martial orchestral music. Completing the spectacle for many years was the rolling, august narration of John Facenda, a former television news anchorman who was called the Voice of God. Facenda died in 1984.
Art Modell, the owner who moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, said Mr. Sabol “sold the beauty of the game.” Sports Illustrated called NFL Films “perhaps the most effective propaganda organ in the history of corporate America.”
NFL Films even influenced the Hollywood movies it strove to emulate. The director Sam Peckinpah said he had come up with the idea for the classic slow-motion gunfight in his 1969 movie “The Wild Bunch” after watching a Super Bowl highlight film.
Big Ed, as Mr. Sabol was known, was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in August 2011. During the years he led NFL Films, it was awarded 52 Emmys. He received a lifetime achievement Emmy a decade ago.
It all began with a midlife crisis. Mr. Sabol was 40 and hated his job at his father-in-law’s overcoat company. So he retired in 1956 with the idea of reinventing himself. He learned to fly, traveled the world, built a new house. He became fascinated with the 16-millimeter movie camera he had received as a wedding present years earlier and became highly skilled using it.
He flew his new Cessna to the Bahamas and filmed with one hand while piloting with the other. Bahamian officials bought the footage to use for tourism promotions.
Sabol particularly enjoyed filming his son’s high school football practices and games, going so far as to have a rickety, 25-foot tower built near the field. He started thinking about expanding the hobby. He studied how newsreels were put together. He spoke to Dan Endy, who worked for a Philadelphia company that made black-and-white films of N.F.L. games.
Filled with ideas about adding color film, music and more cameras, the two took the bold step of bidding for film rights to the 1962 N.F.L. championship game. They won it, paying $12,000.
Mr. Sabol then had to convince Pete Rozelle, the N.F.L. commissioner, hat his experience filming high school games had prepared him for the job. Using all his coat-selling charm, he did.
The game pitted the Green Bay Packers against the Giants at Yankee Stadium in 15-degree weather with winds gusting to 30 miles per hour. Mr. Sabol started bonfires in a dugout to thaw out his cameras.
They titled the film “Pro Football’s Longest Day,” and Mr. Rozelle called it the best football film he had ever seen. Mr. Sabol and Mr. Endy showed it at schools and clubs and to scout troops and made $2,000 on it.
Steve Sabol had helped out on the first film while on vacation from college. He joined the company full time as a cinematographer in 1964, and his father credited him with being the creative spark who came up “with all the good ideas.” Ed put the deals together as president until 1987, when Steve, who had the titles of creative director and co-founder, succeeded him, with Ed remaining as chairman.
Within three years after the Packers-Giants title game, the Sabols had established a brisk business selling the league films. They soon persuaded the N.F.L. to buy the company, originally named Blair Motion Pictures, after Ed Sabol’s daughter. The deal called for the Sabols to run what was now called NFL Films.
They were the “perfect father-and-son team,” Steve Sabol told The New York Times in 2000.
“My father, he was the most important, because he knew business and loved schmoozing with people, while he let me try all these things with the films,” he said.
Their most important early film was “They Call It Pro Football” (1967), which used all the cinematic devices that would soon become familiar. “It starts with a whistle, and ends with a gun,” Mr. Facenda intoned. “Sixty minutes of close-in action from kickoff to touchdown. This is pro football. The sport of our time.”
In 1970, football pickings on television were slim by today’s standards, so the appearance of NFL Films productions like “This Week in Pro Football” and “The NFL Game of the Week” was heartily welcomed. Sometimes home games were blacked out before 1973, so halftime highlights (also produced by NFL Films) on “Monday Night Foo tball” were the only way many fans could see their teams in action from the previous week.
The proliferation of cable outlets further lifted the profile of NFL Films. From its inception in 1979, ESPN began showing NFL Film clips regularly. HBO followed suit. After the NFL Network made its debut in 2003, NFL Films produced most of its footage. Each year it processes about 800 miles of film into 2,000 hours of programming, the company says. It films every NFL game.
Its archive at its 200,000-square-foot headquarters in Mount Laurel, N.J., holds the only visual record of much of pro football of the 1960s and ’70s, when network videotape was generally not preserved.
George Halas, the storied owner and coach of the Chicago Bears, once told Mr. Sabol, “You guys are the keepers of the flame.”
Edwin Milton Sabol was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 11, 1916, and grew up there. He was a champion high school swimmer at Blair Academy in New Jersey and at Ohio State University. He was named an alternate on the 1936 United States Olympic team in Berlin but did not go because he refused to swim in a pool built by Hitler. He dropped out of college after two years and spent a year and a half as a rifleman in Europe in World War II.
He married Audrey Siegel, a sculptor and collector of avant-garde art, in 1940. The artists Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein would join them for dinner. She survives him, along with their daughter, Blair Sabol, a journalist; and a grandson.
After leaving college, Mr. Sabol worked as a comic in a vaudeville act and appeared briefly in a Broadway play. In later years Steve Sabol often played straight man to his father, as when he said in a 2004 interview with CBS: “Dad always used to say, ‘Tell me a fact, and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth, and I’ll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever.’ ”
“That’s pretty good,” Ed said, laughing. “I’m glad I said that.”
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