Pro Football Hall of Fame: Ed Sabol's NFL Took On a Life Of Its Own

Before Ed Sabol started documenting it, pro football was archived as newsreel footage, shown in two-minute increments in the movie houses across America.

It was filmed in black and white, always from the same high angle with the camera perched at the 50-yard line.

The images were sterile, the music usually a cheesy version of some college fight song.

During the 1940s and 50s, nothing was compelling about pro football on film. You’d find more drama looking at a fish tank.

Until, that is, a 46-year-old Jewish man from New Jersey came along with 16 millimeter camera. The man was owner of Blair Motion Pictures, a company named after his alma mater, Blair Academy.

Ed Sabol and his camera landed a whopper of a contract in 1962: filming every play of the ’62 NFL Championship Game at Yankee Stadium in New York, pitting the Green Bay Packers against the New York Giants.

Two years later, Blair Motion Pictures became NFL Films.

And just like that, the NFL became more than a league; it was mise-en-scène, played out in slow-motion with close-ups and reaction shots. And in living color—the blood was red.

After cashing checks from the league, Sabol bought more equipment so that every game every Sunday could be documented.

One of his first cameramen was his son, Steve, who was 22 when he began filming.

Sabol’s NFL Films brought the league to life, and his company began producing mini-documentaries and team highlight films.

But as enthralling as the images of Sabol’s NFL were on celluloid, the drama doubled when Sabol brought in a former Philadelphia newsman named John Facenda to voice the pictures in his trademark stentorian baritone. The two men met in a tavern. It was Lana Turner being discovered at that malt shop—sort of.

How did it happen? In 1965, Facenda was at RDA Club tavern, near Philadelphia, watching some NFL Films footage on the TV. I’m not making this up.

Like a bug to a porch light, Facenda was drawn to the slow-motion images adorning the TV screen.

Here’s Facenda, telling the story:

“I started to rhapsodize about how beautiful it was. Ed Sabol, the man who founded NFL Films, happened to be at the bar. He came up to me and asked, 'If I give you a script, could you repeat what you just did?' I said I would try.”

Facenda was hired on the spot, and he would remain the voice of NFL Films until his death in 1984.

Sabol had his images. He had his voice. All he needed was the music. Afterall, running beneath every great film is a gripping soundtrack.

What’s a thriller without the music building to a crescendo, warning the heroine to LOOK OUT!!—if she could only hear the strings and horns of doom?

Sabol knew that his NFL was richly documented but was also aware that signature music would be the pièce de resistance.

Enter Sam Spence.

Spence was a former music instructor at USC. In 1966, Sabol brought him into the fold to score some NFL Films documentaries and shorts.

The combination of Spence’s music cues with Facenda’s “Voice of God,” as it had been nicknamed, was the best thing to hit film since emulsion.

The tunes Spence composed aren’t known by name, but they have given football fans goose bumps for over 40 years.

They do have titles, of course.

“West Side Rumble.”

“Ramblin’ Man from Gramblin’.”

“Salute to Courage.”

Head over to YouTube, type the above in the search box, and it’s impossible not to visualize Joe Namath throwing a perfect spiral to Don Maynard or Dick Butkus slamming an unsuspecting runner three yards behind the line of scrimmage.

The NFL before and after Ed Sabol is like a caterpillar before and after pupal transformation.

Steve Sabol gradually took over his father’s business and became synonymous, facially, with NFL Films.

We marveled at the images, listened delightfully to Facenda’s voice and Spence’s scores, but the films needed to be introduced once they began being shown on television.

Steve Sabol became the face of NFL Films, the last piece of the puzzle.

The younger Sabol, with his handsome face and in his Philadelphian dialect, became the Rod Serling of sports films. He was there to usher us in and out of each segment, teasing us with what we were about to see.

Ed Sabol is still around, thank goodness. He’s 94 years old.

I say thank goodness because only last week did the powers that be deem him worthy of induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

You heard me—it took them nearly 50 years after he fed his first footage into his 16 mm camera to put Ed Sabol into the Hall of Fame.

This is more overdue than a cure for the common cold.

Ed Sabol doesn’t just belong in the Hall of Fame, he should have his own wing. This is like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame realizing it hadn’t yet inducted the electric guitar.

But, at least he’s in. At least Ed Sabol—God willing—will be live and in person when it comes time to call his name in Canton this summer.

They flirted with doing this posthumously, and that would have been a disgrace.

Ed Sabol, and his son Steve rescued the league from black-and-white conformity, whisking it into a world of color and drama.

The Sabols breathed life into the National Football League with their expert photography, gripping music, and the “Voice of God” telling the stories.

Steve Sabol once put everything his dad started into perspective.

"The only other human endeavor more thoroughly captured on 16-mm film than the National Football League is World War II,” Ed’s kid said.

Those Hall of Fame voters have bad clock management. They damn near let the time run out on Ed Sabol, who was powerless to stop it.

I wonder if he’ll walk up to the podium in slow motion.