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...

NFL Films president Steve Sabol, who has a tumor on the left side of his brain, has told his staff that he is calm, collected, and determined. "The doctors told me to make progress. I just have to 'move the chains' and keep making first downs (Merril Hoge will be happy with my game plan.)," Sabol wrote this week in an e-mail to the NFL Films staff. Hoge is an NFL analyst for ESPN. NFL Films shared an excerpt of Sabol's letter with The Inquirer. "Thank you all for your support and encouragement," Sabol wrote.

If a filmmaker had only two weeks to edit his film following principal photography, he would probably need enough tranquilizers to calm an elephant. Steve Sabol will be facing just such a dilemma late tonight. By then Super Bowl XXI will be history. And Sabol, executive vice president and co-founder of NFL Films, a subsidiary of the National Football League, will have 10 to 15 days to turn out the company's "instant movie" - the year-end review of the champion team. The tradition began last year with NFL Films' salute to the Chicago Bears.

Steve Sabol, an art history major and football star in college who combined those two passions to help transform the family business, NFL Films, into a modern mythmaking marvel, died Tuesday at 69. Mr. Sabol had been battling brain cancer since 2011. An inoperable tumor had been discovered just days after his father, Ed, the NFL Films founder, was elected to Pro Football's Hall of Fame. A lifelong Philadelphia-area resident who never lost his accent or his boyish idealism, Mr. Sabol forever changed the way Americans view their sports.

Steve Sabol, 69, an art history major and football star in college who combined those two passions to help transform the family business, NFL Films, into a modern mythmaking marvel, died Tuesday, Sept. 18. He had been battling brain cancer since 2011. An inoperable tumor had been discovered just days after his father, Ed, the NFL Films founder, was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. A lifelong Philadelphia-area resident who never lost his accent or his boyish idealism, Mr. Sabol forever changed the way Americans view their sports.

About a month ago, the president of NFL Films came upon a painting of a feisty old sea captain at the Wyeth museum in Chadds Ford. Under it, the inscription read, "Take a good look at me for when I'm gone you'll not see the likes of me again. " He immediately thought of Mo Kellman. "He was a great cameraman," Steve Sabol, the NFL Films president, wrote Kellman's family recently, as death drew nearer. "No one filmed a football game better before him, nor has anyone done better since.

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.

Bill Carroll looked dangerous. Pacing and muttering frantically, the 31-year-old Philadelphia native weaved in and out of the cameras, microphones and reporters gathering in a Hyatt Regency ballroom yesterday afternoon. "The autumn wind is a pirate," Carroll said over and over, raising and lowering the octave of his theatrical voice and altering the emphasis each time he repeated the line. "The autumn wind is a pirate. " At one point, the preoccupied Carroll walked into a closed door.

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.

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.