RIP Steve Sabol

Dreams. We all to live the dream. We strive to hold dream jobs. Who actually gets to live a dream? Who actually gets to see their desires and ambitions and their subconscious play out in front of them?

I can think of one man who lived out his dream, and we just lost him- Steve Sabol.

Steve Sabol was the co-founder of NFL films. NFL Films is the reason why The National Football League stopped being a sport and became a national obsession.

Steve and his dad Ed Sabol created NFL films because they just wanted to document their favorite sport. So the Sabol boys filmed the big games. The real magic started on a -16 degree day in January in Wisconsin. Two football teams simply played a game on a frozen field.

Or at least, that's what the game would have been to lesser filmmakers. They turned it into a historical event.


Lambeau Field in Green Bay became a hallowed shrine: the mythical Frozen Tundra, as bleak and barren as the icy fields of Jotunheim. I can't watch the footage of that game without grabbing a blanket. Hell, I can't hear the phrase Ice Bowl without sneering and thinking Bart Starr is a warrior. An actual warrior; in reality, he's a man who played football in the 60s. That's what Steve Sabol did.

As the 60s progressed, the NFL gave the rights to its old broadcasts to the Sabols, as a posterity measure. But what it became was a guarantee that no game would go unforgotten or un-embellished. 

When Steve took over in the 70s, he had the brilliant idea to implement slow motion when filming games. Moments occurring in seconds of real time were minutes of glory when Steve got his hands on them:



 In the 90s, the NFL wanted to improve its appeal on TV, so it took a page from NFL Films and added slow motion replays to telecasts. This was the first step in making the NFL America's favorite TV show. It's the only sport I know that is more fun to watch on TV than it is live. And Steve opened the flood gates, and his vision for how the sport should look became the norm.

I would spend my summers as a boy watching Steve's work, dreaming of becoming an NFL player. If you've ever met me, I have neither the mentality nor the fast-twitch muscle to be a professional athlete. But, Steve made these people my heroes. And not just role model heroes, my warriors from epic poetry. The way Steve and the NFL Films crew captured these men captured not only my imagination, but their greatest moments.
Moments of joy:

Determination:

And the six thousand different emotions present in this still of Kellen Winslow:

I bet Greek children remembered Odysseus the way I remembered Joe Montana.


As an adult I think back and realize that Joe Montana was probably nothing more than another imbecilic jock that went to Notre Dame. But I just can think these thoughts, as true as they are. I could barely even type them just now; I dare I badmouth Montana, he threw the pass that became THE CATCH. And I know there was one man who made me believe the myths about these men, who made me a fan.

And I loved and respected Steve because that's all he was, a fan. He was a huge football fan that got to watch football all day. Need proof?


Steve wrote a hugely nerdy poem about the Oakland Raiders. If you know anything about the Oakland Raiders, they're the most sociopathic meatheads in a sport composed of sociopathic meatheads. He wrote a poem about them.
And then matched it to his footage of the Raiders.

And the Raiders adopted it as their team poem. Yes, Steve got the football team into poetry. By just being a nerd.

I was moved to hear that Steve Sabol died this week. But NFL Films will live on. The moments on film will live on. The struggles, the emotions, the myths, they live on. The men he made gods will live on. The sport will live on, and the love of the sport will live on. So in a way, he never leaves us. Rest in Peace Sabol.

Television National Convention

Maybe it's living most of my life in a swing-state, maybe it's growing up in a "Fox News is actually both fair and balanced" household, maybe it's just my paradoxical enthusiasm for apathy, but I get so bored in election years. The Conventions, now that they no longer serve the purpose of nominating anyone, they are now a TV special. I guess that works, because I love event TV. And no one in the recent years has been better at huge TV moments than Breaking Bad.

As much as I have been known to publicly declare my love for the direwolves and the ponies, when it comes to the summer season, I'm all about the rise and (mostly) fall of Walter White.

And that is why, as long as politics are TV, TV should be politics; and I'm nominating Walter White and Jesse Pinkman for President and Vice President. Bitch.

Now that would be a convention for the ages!

The TV party nominates Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. All the other fictional characters show up to watch the speeches. The crowd goes wild with their chant, "I AM THE ONE WHO KNOCKS", which is a better slogan than "WE BUILT IT".

See, I'd be more comfortable with Mitt Romney if he told me he was the danger.

The wife of the candidate is one of the first keynote speakers; Skyler White had a speech planned, but it became a spontaneous freakout:



Theon Greyjoy, delegate from the Iron Islands, will come through out of nowhere on why this election is do or die:



Will MacAvoy's speech was supposed to be inspiring, but quickly goes off the rails. However, it becomes profound very quickly, and we're all the better for it:



The first huge speech is Vice President nominee Pinkman, who, as always, gives a scene stealer of a speech,this time, about whats next for America

 ...and proceeds to get his mic cut due to profanity


Abed Nadir from Community is the Ron Paul of TV; huge grassroots (cult) following, but too weird to speak at the convention. So of course, they pic the Rand Paul of TV, Jeff Winger, who always gives a rousing speech:



...but eventually just gets weird himself, and he just makes you want Abed/Ron.



Don Draper is the Chris Christie of this convention: the dude the overwhelming majority of the convention wants to be the nominee but won't run for "personal reasons", gives a classic.



Clint Eastwood may have spoken to an empty chair...

But Ron Swanson points a sawed-off shotgun to it:



and we all listen as he demands more bacon and eggs on the platform:



And because we need a former President to speak, deep into the convention, former President Jed Bartlet, gives an impassioned speech

Before the big dog steps up to bat: Walter White.

As his speech starts, he stumbles a bit:



But then he recovers, assuring us we have nothing to fear...


but fear itself. And Walter White is fear. Walter White is the Danger. Walter White...is the one who knocks




Now that's a ticket I can get behind.