Nfl Films

NFL FILMS president Steve Sabol is, by nature, an optimist. A glass-half-full, everything's-going-to-be-all-right guy. So, it hardly was surprising that when the National Football League started its own television network 8 years ago and brought in a former ESPN/ABC Sports suit - Steve Bornstein - to run it, and another former ESPN/ABC Sports suit - Howard Katz - to be chief operating officer of NFL Films, Sabol thought it would be a great thing...

Overhead, on two giant TV monitors, images of Super Bowl XXI flickered in the darkness of the editing room. There went New York Giants running back Joe Morris, cutting left, then right. Just below, watching Morris' every move, two film and sound editors perched before one of the most sophisticated audio boards money can buy, silently sliding control buttons. And about 35 feet away, tucked in a soundproof recording booth, Pat Summerall, CBS's premier football play-by-play man, glanced down at his script.

Florence football players will always be part of The Pit. Now, The Pit will be part of NFL Films lore. Florence will be part of Sunday morning's NFL Films Presents -Traditions, a show on different high school traditions across the country that will air on Channel 29 at 10:30. The Florence segment runs about seven minutes, and shows different scenes of the tiny town shot during Thanksgiving week. The interviews show the pride that the players, coaches and fans have for their team and town.

Arthur Spieller, 79, of Broomall, who won six Emmy awards as a cameraman for NFL Films and who filmed every one of the first 31 Super Bowls, died of heart failure Sept. 19 at home. The first title game was in 1967 between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs in a matchup that was called, at the time, the NFL-AFL World Championship Game. The next season, Mr. Spieller worked the NFL Championship game that was to become known as the Ice Bowl. The game - in Green Bay, Wis., between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys - was played in temperatures that reached 15 degrees below zero.

The Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema has a well-deserved reputation for searching out worthwhile movies from every corner of the globe. This year the organizers looked in the end zone. One of the highlights among the festival's dizzying array of movies is a salute to NFL Films, the Mount Laurel-based company that began 30 years ago with one hand-held 16mm camera and now flourishes as a dominant sports-media conglomerate. It has, of course, long been acknowledged that NFL Films and the many pioneering and innovative techniques it developed to put the viewer in the action on the field and catch the emotions on the sidelines played a key role in pro football's rise to its current popularity: Just compare the modest hoopla that surrounded the first Super Bowl with the extravagant January spectacle it has become.

The sadness wasn't confined to the offices of Citizens Bank Park or the world of baseball yesterday. News of Harry Kalas' death also hit home and hit hard across the river at the NFL Films home office in Mount Laurel. Steve Sabol, the president of the company founded by his father, Ed, in 1962, left work in the early afternoon only to return when he learned that Kalas had collapsed and died a few hours before the start of the Phillies' game against the Washington Nationals.

ASK FRANNIE Donnellon who Ed Sabol is, and she does not know. Ask her about growing up with two big brothers, and this is the story she starts with: She was Jerry Kramer in the mud and the snow, one of us jumping over her to score while the other mimicked a Dallas Cowboys defender. She was Jerry Kramer when the folks went out for the night and the living room transformed into Lambeau Field. Sometimes she got to be Leroy Kelly, or Gale Sayers, but only when Ed's art called for two defenders to collapse upon the running back, making him fumble, or disappear.

Steve Sabol, the executive vice president of NFL Films, recalls that the company's selection of the late John Facenda to become its "voice" back in 1964 was not a very popular one. "A lot of people around the league wanted a sportscaster instead," said Sabol. "You know, a Chris Schenkel or a Curt Gowdy, who were both big at the time and associated with the sport. But we wanted something different. As a kid growing up in Philadelphia, Facenda (then the anchor for the top-rated WCAU TV news)

Using audiovisual technology in corporate meetings will be the topic when Hal Lipman, executive director of sales for NFL Films, addresses the Marketing, Advertising and Communications Club at 12:30 p.m. June 21 in the Homestead Restaurant on Dresher Road in Horsham. A new technique called Wavefront 3D Animation, as well as other techniques for improving meetings, will be discussed by Lipman. Lunch is $17 for members and $22 for nonmembers. Membership in the group is $50 annually.

The news that NFL players are paid for being able to deliver hits capable of hurting an opponent isn't much of a revelation when you get down to it. That's the nature of the game. Hard hits are celebrated, and just as the NHL and NASCAR owe some popularity to the promise of potential violence at any moment, the NFL puts away a lot of dough because its players smack each other around with great frequency. The league has no problem licensing video games in which the mayhem is taken to cartoonish levels, and has never been bothered by the slavering mythology that NFL Films built around the exploits of guys like Ray Nitschke, Dick Butkus, and Mike Singletary, who were all nice enough when they weren't dismembering opponents.

This time next year, Kaiwan Lewis hopes to be suiting up for the University of South Carolina in Southeastern Conference clashes before 70,000-plus spectators and national television audiences. First, he has to play the game of his life on a little field nestled in a residential neighborhood. Like many players who will participate in Saturday's showdown between Holy Spirit, the No. 1 team in The Inquirer Top 10, and No. 2 St. Joseph, Lewis will soon move on to bigger things.

Here is a look at the new Hall of Fame members: Ed Sabol, founder/president/chairman of NFL Films. 1964-1995. The man behind the idea of NFL Films, he was an aspiring filmmaker, who at age 45 hatched idea of forming Blair Productions, a film company that incorporated unique creative angles inspired by his background in drama. Deion Sanders, cornerback/kick returner/punt returner: 1989-1993 Atlanta Falcons, 1994 San Francisco 49ers, 1995-99 Dallas Cowboys, 2000 Washington Redskins, 2004-05 Baltimore Ravens.

CANTON, Ohio - His words were few. His impact, as usual, was immeasurable. Ed Sabol was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame on a muggy Saturday night in Canton during ceremonies at Fawcett Stadium. The 94-year-old who created NFL Films in Philadelphia is bound to a wheelchair much of the time and hampered by the normal physical ailments brought on by age. But they have not touched his wits. "I dreamed a dream. The impossible dream. I dreamed the impossible dream, and I'm living it right this minute," said Sabol, who spoke for less than three minutes on a night fellow enshrinee Shannon Sharpe spoke for 26. Sabol then added, "I said that twice because at my age your memory starts to go a little bit. " His son and successor as NFL Films president, Steve Sabol, presented the elder Sabol in a video segment.

Ed Sabol's inexplicably long journey to Canton, Ohio, moved - appropriately enough for the man who introduced the technique to the visual lexicon of sports - in slow motion. For decades, as hundreds of those he helped transform into sporting icons were fast-tracked into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the Philadelphian who founded and fostered NFL Films was ignored. But on Saturday, in what figures to be the most well-documented induction ceremony ever at the football-shaped shrine, Sabol, 94, will finally receive the ultimate honor from the game he, as much as any single figure, turned into an American phenomenon.

THREE Blind Mice - that's what we should call our crime-fighting trio of Mayor Nutter, Police Commissioner Ramsey and Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Everett Gillison, who said officials would use community outreach to encourage people to help address youth issues, including violence, along with stepped up police presence. Wake up and let's go directly to the root of the problem. It shouldn't and wouldn't be the "community's" problem if parents who let their kids run the streets like savages were charged with accessory to felonies and made accountable for their lazy or nonexistent parenting.

NFL FILMS president Steve Sabol is, by nature, an optimist. A glass-half-full, everything's-going-to-be-all-right guy. So, it hardly was surprising that when the National Football League started its own television network 8 years ago and brought in a former ESPN/ABC Sports suit - Steve Bornstein - to run it, and another former ESPN/ABC Sports suit - Howard Katz - to be chief operating officer of NFL Films, Sabol thought it would be a great thing...

SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ. - The good part about being 95 years old is it beats the alternative, which is not being 95. Last November, though, Ed Sabol wasn't so sure about that. Pneumonia had put the NFL Films founder in a hospital bed for nearly a month, and his will to live was running on empty. "He turned to me around Thanksgiving and said, 'Why should I live? I'm going to be in a wheelchair,' " his daughter Blair said. "I said, 'Well, there's nothing wrong with needing a wheelchair at 95.' " But Sabol viewed a wheelchair as the final indignity of growing old. A former champion swimmer, he moved to the Arizona desert 20 years ago to spend his retirement playing golf and flying his plane, and now he can do neither.