Steve Sabol

Steve Sabol, president of Mount Laurel-based NFL Films, will undergo radiation and chemotherapy treatment after doctors discovered a tumor on the left side of his brain. NFL.com cited an NFL Films statement Friday about the 68-year-old Sabol, a Moorestown resident who was hospitalized March 5 in Kansas City, Mo., after suffering a seizure. "[Sabol] will begin treatments soon," the company's statement said. "Steve is in good spirits and is deeply appreciative of everyone's good wishes.

Steve Sabol knows something about not forgetting your roots. His father, Ed, founded NFL Films 30 years ago, and Steve now serves as its president. When approached to give some support to New Jersey's 19th annual North-South All-Star Football Classic, Sabol couldn't resist. "Our company started with my father filming me in the fourth grade and filming every high school game I played in," said Sabol. "This is really a return to the roots of NFL Films. When we were approached about the opportunity to help out, I said, 'Absolutely.

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.

Ed Sabol's dream venture started out as a near disaster. A former overcoat salesman from the Main Line, he had turned his longtime love of football, theater and video into a new family business: making NFL championship games into movies. Sabol, then 48, had brought his son, Steve, home from college in Colorado and headed to Yankee Stadium for the 1962 NFL championship game, between the Giants and Packers. They had eight cameras and a handful of men in their 20s to help film. But, as Steve Sabol recalls, it was the second coldest day of his life, after the famed Ice Bowl a few years later.

Sure it was Ed Sabol who created NFL Films and son Steve who helped make it such an iconic American institution that yesterday Pennsylvania stuck a historic marker outside its original Center City headquarters. But if not for Pete Rozelle, Jerry Wolman and Fritzy Siegel, that football might never have gotten rolling. Wolman, the onetime Eagles owner, gave the fledgling enterprise its first home. Rozelle, the league's longtime commissioner, insisted it remain in Philadelphia.

Sixteen years after they founded and built NFL Films into the nation's premier film producer of professional football, Ed and Steve Sabol were ready to move - again. The father-and-son team had started the business with four employees in a tiny office at Penn Towers in Philadelphia in 1962, and by 1978 had turned it into an 85-person operation in a three-story building at 13th and Vine Streets that they had outgrown. Ideally, they wanted to be in the suburbs, and it eventually came down to a choice between Valley Forge and Mount Laurel.

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.

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.

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.

A hypothetical question about reality as it is known in the NFL: If a player allegedly hits another player in a football stadium on a Sunday afternoon in broad daylight, but the fracas is not recorded by NFL Films, does that mean the alleged assault never happened? The NFL said yesterday that it had reached no decision on whether Eagles defensive back Andre Waters would be fined, suspended, pilloried, spanked or cleared of accusations that he attacked Eric Martin of the New Orleans Saints after a game on Oct. 13 at Veterans Stadium.

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.

Steve Sabol, president of Mount Laurel-based NFL Films, will undergo radiation and chemotherapy treatment after doctors discovered a tumor on the left side of his brain. NFL.com cited an NFL Films statement Friday about the 68-year-old Sabol, a Moorestown resident who was hospitalized March 5 in Kansas City, Mo., after suffering a seizure. "[Sabol] will begin treatments soon," the company's statement said. "Steve is in good spirits and is deeply appreciative of everyone's good wishes.

NFL Films president Steve Sabol will undergo radiation and chemotherapy treatment after doctors discovered a tumor on the left side of his brain. NFL.com cites an NFL Films statement yesterday about the 68-year-old Sabol, who was hospitalized March 5 in Kansas City, Mo., after suffering a seizure. "[Sabol] will begin treatments soon," the company's statement said. "Steve is in good spirits and is deeply appreciative of everyone's good wishes. " Sabol has worked with NFL Films since 1964.

Ed Sabol's dream venture started out as a near disaster. A former overcoat salesman from the Main Line, he had turned his longtime love of football, theater and video into a new family business: making NFL championship games into movies. Sabol, then 48, had brought his son, Steve, home from college in Colorado and headed to Yankee Stadium for the 1962 NFL championship game, between the Giants and Packers. They had eight cameras and a handful of men in their 20s to help film. But, as Steve Sabol recalls, it was the second coldest day of his life, after the famed Ice Bowl a few years later.

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.

Richard deFrenes helped make possible the first handheld cameras to show both Rocky Balboa and Ron Jaworski getting the punk beat out of them, then triumphing. "Dick was the Thomas Edison of NFL Films," Steve Sabol, the firm's president, said in a statement yesterday, marking Mr. deFrenes' passing. "He was a brilliant engineer, a tireless technician, and an ingenious inventor. " Mr. deFrenes, 78, who died of lung cancer Sunday at his home in Schwenksville, was director of camera technology when he retired in 1996 after almost 22 years with NFL Films in Mount Laurel.

Sure it was Ed Sabol who created NFL Films and son Steve who helped make it such an iconic American institution that yesterday Pennsylvania stuck a historic marker outside its original Center City headquarters. But if not for Pete Rozelle, Jerry Wolman and Fritzy Siegel, that football might never have gotten rolling. Wolman, the onetime Eagles owner, gave the fledgling enterprise its first home. Rozelle, the league's longtime commissioner, insisted it remain in Philadelphia.

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.

For the 40th time in 42 years, the NFL is going to stage a Super Bowl without the Philadelphia Eagles. No sense in detailing the sorry history of the two times the Eagles did make it to the league's grandest and gaudiest game, because it would just add to the depression so many of you are already feeling about this football season. There has, however, been one Philadelphia presence at all 41 Super Bowls, and he'll be here in the desert again tonight at University of Phoenix Stadium when the New England Patriots attempt to complete their quest for perfection against the New York Giants.